2010: The Supreme Court of the United States rules in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez that public universities may refuse to recognize student organizations with discriminatory membership policies.
Source: http://www.thelavendereffect.org/2013/06/28/june-28-in-lgbtq-history/
1970: Christopher Street Liberation Day marks the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots in NYC with the first Gay Rights Parade in U.S. History. Simultaneous marches take place in Los Angeles and Chicago.
Source: http://www.thelavendereffect.org/2013/06/28/june-28-in-lgbtq-history/
1969: Late night and into the early morning hours the next day, patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village fight back during a police raid, sparking three days of riots and the modern gay pride movement.
Source: http://www.thelavendereffect.org/2013/06/28/june-28-in-lgbtq-history/
1934: In Germany, approximately 300 Nazi Party members are arrested and murdered in a purge ordered by Adolf Hitler that comes to be known as the Night of the Long Knives. The most prominent victim of the purge is SA (Brown Shirts) chief Ernst Rohm, a gay man whom Hitler accuses of having formed a subversive “homosexual clique.” One year later to the day, the government enacts new, stricter legislation against male same-sex eroticism, partly formalizing the ongoing Nazi persecution of gay men.
Source: http://www.thelavendereffect.org/2013/06/28/june-28-in-lgbtq-history/
2010: Chief of the Defense Force of Australia Angus Houston issues an order lifting the ban on transgender personnel.
Source: http://www.thelavendereffect.org/2013/09/13/september-13-in-lgbtq-history/
1997: The newly crowned Miss America, Kate Shindle, vows to dedicate her term to youth HIV prevention. When schools rein her in, she later tells Poz magazine, “Sometimes I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall.”
Source: http://www.thelavendereffect.org/2013/09/13/september-13-in-lgbtq-history/
1996: In the U.S. Congress, a bill that would ban employment discrimination against lesbians and gay men is defeated by one vote.
Source: http://www.thelavendereffect.org/2013/09/13/september-13-in-lgbtq-history/
1977: Soap premieres on ABC with then unknown Billy Crystal playing Jodie Dallas, one of TV’s first prominent and sympathetic gay characters.
Source: http://www.thelavendereffect.org/2013/09/13/september-13-in-lgbtq-history/
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2011, South Africa – A resolution submitted by South Africa requesting a study on discrimination and sexual orientation (A/HRC/17/L.9/Rev.1) passed, 23 to 19 with 3 abstentions, in the United Nations Human Rights Council. This is the first time that any United Nations body approved a resolution affirming the rights of LGBT people.
Source: https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-17-3/
2008 – All-American University of Missouri diver Greg DeStephen comes out on Gay.com. In May of his sophomore year, DeStephen read a story on Gay.com about Maryland-Baltimore County swimmer Fred Deal announcing he was gay. DeStephen sent the website an email that he liked the Deal story and that he was a gay diver himself. The site responded asking if it could tell his story — the gay All-American diver in the heartland.
Source: https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-17-3/
2006 – An estimated 2.4 million people took to the streets of Sao Paulo to celebrate the Brazilian city’s 10th annual Gay Pride parade. The record attendance, the largest in the world, was 1.8 million.
Source: https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-17-3/
1981 – Sen. Roger Jepson (R-IA) introduced the Family Protection Act in Congress. It specified that anyone who was homosexual or openly supportive of homosexuals could not receive student aid, social security, or veterans benefits; and regulated what public school textbooks could say about human sexuality. It never passed, and Jepson lost his bid for re-election when it was revealed he had a membership at a brothel.
Source: https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-17-3/
1977 – Vice President Walter Mondale angrily leaves a San Francisco Democratic fund-raising event when his speech on human rights in South America was interrupted by a man who demanded to know when he would speak in favor of gay rights.
Members of the newly formed San Francisco Gay Democratic Club held up signs demanding a statement on human rights in the United States. The club was created by Harvey Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978).
Source: https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-17-3/
1968 – The documentary The Queen is released. It’s about a behind-the-scenes drag queen competition in New York City, directed by Frank Simon.
Source: https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-17-3/
1959 – On this date a London court awarded pianist Liberace (May 16, 1919 – February 4, 1987) $22,400 in damages against the London Daily Mirror for implying that the flamboyant entertainer was a homosexual. Throughout his life, Liberace publicly denied he was gay. In Britain at the time, where he was popular enough to enjoy sell-out tours and be mobbed wherever he went, homosexuality was illegal. He was gay and died due to complications from AIDS.
Source: https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-17-3/
1943 – Barry Manilow (born June 17, 1943) is born. He is an American singer-songwriter, arranger, musician, and producer with a career that has spanned over 50 years. He is best known for a long string of hit recordings such as “Mandy“, “Can’t Smile Without You“, and “Copacabana (At the Copa).”
Before Manilow’s well-known association with Bette Midler began at the Continental Baths in New York City in 1971, he recorded four tracks as Featherbed, leading a group of session musicians produced by Tony Orlando. As Manilow accompanied artists on the piano for auditions and performances in the first two years of the 1970s, Midler caught his act in 1971 and chose the young arranger to assist her with the production of both her debut and sophomore releases The Divine Miss M (1972) and Bette Midler (1973), as well as act as her musical director on the eventual tour mounted for the former. Manilow worked with Midler from 1971 to 1975.
In 1978, Manilow began a relationship with TV executive Garry Kief, who soon became his manager, and the two married in 2014, after same-sex marriage became legal in California. They kept the relationship and his sexual orientation secret until the marriage made headlines in 2015. Manilow officially came out as gay in April 2017, telling People that he had kept his sexual orientation quiet out of concern that it would disappoint his largely female fan base, but when his fans learned of the marriage, they were supportive.
Source: https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-17-3/
1883, Finland – Mauritz Stiller (July 17, 1883 – November 16, 1928) is born. He was a gay Finnish-Swedish film director, best known for discovering Greta Garbo (18 September 1905 – 15 April 1990) and bringing her to America. Stiller had been a pioneer of the Swedish film industry, writing and directing many short films from 1912. When MGM invited him to Hollywood as a director, he arrived with his new discovery Greta Gustafsson, whose screen name Greta Garbo is believed to have been his suggestion.
Source: https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-17-3/
2006 – Mary Cheney (born March 14, 1969), lesbian daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, released her memoir My Turn in which she attempts to make sense of her inaction and silence during the Bush/Cheney administration and its anti-gay record. The book’s sales were miserable, prompting author Andrew Sullivan to write: “There are flops, almighty flops and then there are books by Mary Cheney.” Mary Cheney has been with her partner, Heather Poe, since 1992. Cheney is openly lesbian, has voiced support for same-sex marriage, and has been credited with encouraging her father’s approval of same-sex marriage, which he has publicly supported since leaving the vice presidency.
Source: https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-18-3/
1994 – The exhibition “Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall” opens at the New York Public Library. It is a history of New York’s lesbian and gay life. It is history told through unorthodox artifacts, beginning with a blue neon “Stonewall” sign and banks of public telephones at which visitors can hear oral recollections of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street, and of the nights in June 1969 when patrons battled the police rather than acquiesce to another raid.
Source: https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-18-3/
1992 – The soap opera One Life to Live airs the first openly gay teen character. Billy Douglas, a high school student, tells his best friend, Joey Buchanan, that he is gay.
Newcomer actor Ryan Phillippe played the role from April 1992 until May 1993.
The character is the first openly gay teenager featured in a television series, and Phillippe’s breakthrough role is considered groundbreaking in daytime television.
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https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-18-3/
.jpg/800px-Sally_Ride_(1984).jpg)
Sally Kristen Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was an American physicist and astronaut. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978 and became the first American woman in space in 1983. Ride was the third woman in space overall, after USSR cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova(1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982). Ride remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space, having done so at the age of 32.
After flying twice on the Orbiter Challenger, she left NASA in 1987. She worked for two years at Stanford University‘s Center for International Security and Arms Control, then at the University of California, San Diego, as a professor of physics, primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She served on the committees that investigated the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, the only person to participate in both.
Ride died of pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012. When she died, she was outted as a lesbian in her obituary.
Her partner of 27 years was Tam O’Shaughnessy, a professor emerita at San Diego State University and childhood friend, who met her when both were aspiring tennis players.
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She was an American writer and artist best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature. Barnes has been cited as an influence by writers as diverse as Truman Capote, William Goyen, Karen Blixen, John Hawkes, Bertha Harris, Dylan Thomas, David Foster Wallace, and Anaïs Nin.
Writer Bertha Harris described her work as “practically the only available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world” since Sappho.
Source:
https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-18-3/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djuna_Barnes
1981 – The McDonald Amendment passes the U.S. House of Representatives. The amendment would bar the Legal Service Corporation from assisting in any case which seeks to “promote, defend or protect” homosexuality.
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1977 - An anti-discrimination Law is passed by Miami-Dade County. The ordinance that would make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation passes by a vote of 5-3. Anita Bryant leads the successful effort to repeal it later that year.
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Jane Vance Rule (March 28, 1931 – November 27, 2007) was a Canadian writer of lesbian-themed novels and non-fiction.
Rule died at the age of 76 on November 28, 2007 at her home on Galiano Island due to complications from liver cancer, refusing any treatment that would take her from the island, opting instead for the care and support that could be provided by her niece, her partner, her many Galiano friends and neighbors.
The ashes of Jane Vance Rule were interred in the Galiano Island Cemetery next to those of her beloved Helen Hubbard Wolfe Sonthoff (1916-2000).
https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-18-3/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Rule
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Janis Lyn Joplin was an American rock singer and songwriter and one of the biggest female rock stars of her era. After releasing three albums, she died of an accidental heroin overdose at age 27. A fourth album, Pearl, was released in January, 1971, a little more than three months after her death. It reached number one on the charts.
Time magazine called Joplin “probably the most powerful singer to emerge from the white rock movement.
Janis was bisexual, having an ongoing romantic relationship with Peggy Caserta, who, like Janis, was an intravenous addict.
Joplin’s death in October 1970 at age 27 stunned her fans and shocked the music world, especially when coupled with the death just 16 days earlier of another rock icon, Jimi Hendrix, also at age 27.
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French poet Jean Cocteau (5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was his lover and mentor.
Hemingway wrote that Radiguet employed his sexuality to advance his career.
He wrote his first French masterpiece The Devil in the Flesh at the age of fifteen, his second novel Count d’Orgel’s Ball at nineteen, and died from typhoid at twenty.
Source:
https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-18-3/
1779 – On this date Thomas Jefferson prepares a draft of Virginia’s criminal statute, envisioning that the punishment for sodomy should be castration. Possibly earlier, in 1777, though the drafts and edits continued into 1800. Also, the proposed new sodomy law would have eliminated the death penalty and replaced it with castration for males and the boring of a hole through the nose of a woman. The proposal did not become law, but clearly showed that women were subject to prosecution under current legal thinking.
Sources:
https://ronnisanlo.com/today-in-lgbt-history-june-18-3/
https://www.glapn.org/sodomylaws/sensibilities/virginia.htm
Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 2, (Princeton: Princeton University, 1950), page 325.
A Collection of All Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia 1802, (Richmond: Pleasance and Price, 1803), page 179, ch. C [50], enacted Dec. 10, 1792.