Scott James

“Tonight I would like to explain my platform, ‘Equality before the Law,’” Sarria wrote in a campaign speech when he was running for city supervisor. In 1961, he was the first openly gay person to run for public office in the United States.

Sarria did not win, but like so many involved in the initial battles for LGBTQ rights, he was a minority-group member and defied gender conventions — he worked as a drag queen at a local nightclub.

Transgender people, drag queens, blacks and Hispanics played outsized roles during many of the earliest milestones of the gay rights movement. Today, however, these same groups have been denied many of the benefits of the revolution they sparked.

They led the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969, Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco in 1966, and Cooper Do-nuts in Los Angeles in 1959.

They also fronted early legal battles.

Maxine Perkins, a transgender woman, risked spending most of her life in prison in North Carolina in 1961 when she fought laws against homosexuality. And Donna Burkett and Manonia Evans, African-American women, defiantly asked for a license to marry in Milwaukee in 1971, and when they were denied they took the case to court.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” said Joshua Burford, historian and co-founder of the “Invisible Histories Project,” an organization that is compiling and preserving LGBTQ history in the South.

Many early skirmishes were “led by queer people of color,” Burford said. “They had already been marginalized to such a degree, and the fact that they were trans or gay at the time just added another level to which they could be discriminated against. They fought back. They had been pushed and pushed and pushed into such a corner.”

“They are always on the front line,” said Susan Stryker, professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona. “They are the ones who are being who they are, no matter what. They are catching all the homophobia, all the transphobia that are being directed at queer folks.”

Some were on those front lines because they could not pass as straight.

“The idea of choosing to come out is a luxury for some people,” said Mason Funk, founder of the Outwords Archive, an effort to collect videotaped interviews with LGBTQ pioneers. Excerpts from the interviews were first published in May in “The Book of Pride.”

The LGBTQ community owes “a huge debt of gratitude to the ones who really didn’t have that much of a choice, who were out there taking the beatings, and taking the verbal abuse,” Funk said. “They paved the way.”

But experts point out that even though transgender people and LGBTQ racial minorities were often vanguards for equal rights, these same groups have lagged behind in gains.

For example, researchers say that while gay and bisexual men have experienced the same rates of poverty as heterosexual men, same-sex couples of color and transgender people have been three and four times more likely to live in poverty than their white and straight counterparts, citing U.S. census numbers and other research.

Transgender people and gay and lesbian minorities also experience higher levels of HIV and sexual violence, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Transgender Survey.

It has even been a struggle for equity within the larger LGBTQ community.

“This is not universal because the gay and lesbian community and feminism are broad, diverse. But some of the people who have been absolutely the worst on trans issues have been some cisgender gay men and some cisgender feminists and lesbians,” said Stryker, referring to those whose gender corresponds with their birth sex.

After Stonewall, Stryker said, the tactics of many in the gay rights movement eventually shifted from rebellion to seeking acceptance.

“It’s predicated on being a man or woman like other men and women,” Stryker said. “The trans question is the one, like, ‘No, I’m not that.’ The trans question kicks that foundation out from under the main thrust of the gay and lesbian movement from the early 1970s forward.”

Perhaps the most divisive example of this rift involved the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would have banned workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people. The bill passed in the House of Representatives in 2007, but only after eliminating protections for transgender people.

ENDA failed in the Senate, but there continues to be bitterness from some in the transgender community toward supporters of the bill, including the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ rights organization.

Tina White, a board member, is part of the organization’s new leadership that has worked to be more inclusive and move past the controversy, but it still stings. White said she was recently confronted by a transgender activist who blamed the Campaign for a continued lack of jobs and equality.

“‘We’re still living in horrible, deplorable conditions, and we hold that group accountable,’” White quoted the woman as saying. “It wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear, but it was a very fair answer,” White said.

White is hopeful for greater equality and opportunities, and she said she believes change will happen because of the views of those who were not born when early LGBTQ pioneers took their stands.

“Teens and people in their 20s — they have such a different outlook,” White said, noting that many in America’s latest generations do not seem to be biased against minorities or those in the LGBTQ community. “They’re opening up a whole new conversation.”

Queer people of color led the LGBTQ charge, but were denied the rewards

The words of José Sarria, typed with handwritten edits on aging paper, are enshrined behind glass at the GLBT Historical Society Museum in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood.

Los Angeles, May 1959

Cooper Donuts, on a seedy stretch of Main Street in Los Angeles, was one of the few places that welcomed gay street hustlers, drag queens and transgender people.

The local police, however, were not so kind.

“They interrogate you, fingerprint you without booking you: An illegal LA cop-tactic to scare you from hanging around,” wrote author John Rechy, a regular at the shop, in his 1963 novel “City at Night.”

In May 1959 two police officers conducted their latest roundup at the shop, which included Rechy, and the crowd revolted and pelted the officers with coffee, doughnuts, trash and utensils.

They “fled into their car, called backups, and soon the street was bustling with disobedience. Gay people danced about the cars,” Rechy later said.

Historians consider Cooper Donuts to be the first LGBTQ uprising in modern history, but Rechy said anyone who was openly gay back then was in rebellion, “many at the time risking years of imprisonment.” Both homosexuality and cross dressing were illegal.

“Each act of protest bolsters the next one pushing for equal rights — and respect,” Rechy said in an email.

Charlotte, North Carolina, December 1961

The Charlotte Observer described Maxine Doyle Perkins as a “public nuisance” — a “hopeless homosexual” born a male named Max who dressed female.

In 1961, Perkins was charged with having sex with a man. She wore a dress to court and was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.

Two years later her conviction was overturned for lack of a fair trial.

In a landmark ruling, Judge James Braxton Craven of U.S. District Court questioned the severity of North Carolina’s laws, which he noted were based on statutes from the court of King Henry VIII in 1533.

“Are homosexuals twice as dangerous to society as second-degree murderers — as indicated by the maximum punishment for each offense?” Craven asked.

The judge also thought prison was not much of a punishment for Perkins, adding that being confined with so many men “is a little like throwing Br’er Rabbit into the brier patch.”

The ruling received news media coverage, including from Time magazine, and in 1965 state lawmakers reduced jail sentences for homosexuality to between four months and 10 years.

At a new trialPerkins dressed as a man and was acquitted.

Columbus, Ohio, October 1964

Just giving a party for gay people in Columbus in 1964 was against the law.

So it was an act of defiance when David Zimmer, Orn Huntington and others organized what would become an annual Halloween drag ball.

“Businesses with a known gay clientele were usually subject to police harassment or raids, sometimes under the auspices of health code violations or permit violations,” said Eric Feingold, history curator at the Ohio History Connection, the state’s historical society.

Invitation-only guests called a pay phone for the ball’s location and were locked inside the event in order to keep the police out, creating a rare safe space for the area’s LGBTQ community.

Eventually the ball became a showcase for drag culture and fundraiser during the AIDS epidemic. Today Columbus hosts one of the largest Pride celebrations in the Midwest.

Philadelphia, July 1965

One of the earliest organized public demonstrations for gay rights took place at the cradle of American democracy, Independence Hall, on July 4, 1965.

Gay men and lesbians, in suits and ties and dresses, politely marched with signs reading, “Homosexuals Ask For Equality Before the Law.”

“The gay community really had a bad public image at that time,” said John James, one of the nearly 40 marchers. The formal attire communicated respectability, but the risks to demonstrators were enormous.

“I had asked not to be photographed,” James said. Being publicly identified as a homosexual could mean being fired.

This was no idle threat. In 1953 President Dwight Eisenhower banned homosexuals from working in the federal government.

Even scientists, like astronomer Frank Kameny, were fired when their orientation became known. James had just begun his career at the National Institutes of Health as a computer programmer.

A news photographer had indeed taken a picture. However, it was not widely circulated, and James’ career continued unhindered.

Decades later James became the publisher of “AIDS Treatment News,” a vital news source during the epidemic, a future that could have been threatened had he been outed in 1965.

New York City, April 1966

It was the unwritten law of the New York State Liquor Authority in the 1960s that homosexuals were inherently “disorderly,” and to serve them alcohol meant a bar could lose its liquor license.

“Restaurant and bar owners were afraid of being closed by the police, because if you had the gay people in it, the cops would come and close it. So they put signs up saying, ‘If you’re gay, don’t come here,’” Dick Leitsch said in a videotaped interview with the LGBTQ history bank Outwords Archive before his death last year. In April 1966, Leitsch was president of the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organization.

Inspired by sit-ins by black protesters at segregated lunch counters in the South, Leitsch and his Mattachine colleagues conducted a “sip-in” at Julius’ bar in Greenwich Village.

“We had heard that Julius’ refused to serve gays. So we went in, we sat down and said, ‘We’re homosexuals.’ And the waiter said, ‘I can’t serve you.’ And there was a photographer. He got a picture of him, and that’s how we got that famous picture,” Leitsch said.

The “sip-in” received attention as one of the earliest acts of LGBTQ civil disobedience, including an article on the front page of The New York Times with the headline “3 Deviates Invite Exclusion by Bars.” After the publicity the liquor authority relented.

San Francisco, August 1966

A policeman’s manhandling was the final straw on a hot summer night at Gene Compton’s cafeteria.

The diner was a beloved retreat for drag queens, transgender people and gay denizens of the area’s tough Tenderloin neighborhood, where many subsisted on drugs and prostitution and were routinely arrested on charges of cross dressing.

Tensions had been building for weeks following a protest for rights. So when the police conducted a raid, and an officer grabbed one of the women, she threw her coffee in his face.

The diner erupted in violence. As many as 60 patrons pummeled the police with anything they could throw. Windows were smashed, fighting seeped into the streets, a police car was destroyed and a newsstand set ablaze.

Compton’s is considered one of the first acts of “militant queer resistance,” Susan Stryker, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona, said in her 2005 documentary “Screaming Queens,” which brought details of the riot to light.

The incident is also considered the historical start of the transgender rights movement, but it did not spread or gain notoriety.

“Compton’s and Stonewall had the same spark,” Stryker said. “It was state-sanctioned violence by the police against sexual and gender minorities. But there simply wasn’t enough tinder, so to speak, in 1966. Unlike Stonewall where you had the same spark and it turns into a conflagration.”

Huntington Park, California, October 1968

At the first service of the Metropolitan Community Church, the scripture featured long-suffering Job. Pastor Troy Perry knew the story all too well.

Perry had been a religious prodigy, preaching at 13. In an effort to combat his homosexuality, he married a minister’s daughter, had two sons and moved to a church in California.

When he could no longer hide that he was gay, Perry was excommunicated and divorced, and his wife took off with their children. Later, after a failed relationship, he slit his wrists in his bathtub.

Perry was saved by his roommate, and when he awoke in a nearby hospital he said he heard the voice of God say, “I love you, and I don’t have stepsons and daughters.”

“It dawned on me, after a few months, that if God loved me, God had to love other gay people,” Perry said.

So he started his own church — one that welcomed gays and lesbians and fought for progressive causes. The first service had 12 people in his living room.

Today the church is celebrating 50 years with more than 220 branches in 33 nations, but along the way it has endured harassment, arson and the slayings of eight clergy members.

“The end of Job’s story is that God gave him back more than he had ever owned,” Perry said.

Milwaukee, October 1971

Donna Burkett, then 25, and Manonia Evans, 21, knew they would be confronting the government when they walked into the Milwaukee County Clerk’s office.

The two African American women asked for a license to marry. When denied they began one of nation’s first battles for marriage equality.

“It is already a given right through the Constitution,” Burkett told local station WTMJ-TV in 1971.

The women took their case to court. They lost, and the harsh publicity surrounding the controversy (“Jet” magazine deridingly described who was the man and who was the woman in the relationship) helped break the couple apart.

Burkett, contacted by phone in May, said her actions were not heroic. “Why does anyone care about that? It was so long ago,” she said.

Five years ago the Milwaukee LGBT Community Center gave Burkett an award for her courage.

Houston, July 1975

Ray Hill was a teenager in 1958 in Houston when he came out as gay to his parents.

“They were afraid I might grow up to be a Republican,” Hill later said. “But if I was gay, they could handle that.”

His profession was another matter. Hill became a burglar and went to prison. When he was released in 1975 he noticed how many gays and lesbians in Texas lived in fear.

“They’re all in their closets. They’re all scared,” Hill told the Outwords Archive shortly before his death last year.

So Hill started the radio program “Wilde ’N’ Stein” (referring to Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein) on KPFT-FM, one of the nation’s earliest broadcasts for LGBTQ listeners. “What I had in mind was to build community with radio,” he said.

The conversation was not universally welcomed. Hill said he became “the guy that talks about being gay, and I open the phones.”

Later, he became the station’s manager and, as an openly gay man and an ex-convict, challenged the Federal Communications Commission’s provision that such positions could go only to people of “good moral character.” He also fought to reform the justice system.

“His legacy of unrepentant rabble-rousing made Texas a more welcome place for the underdog,” wrote journalist Renée Feltz in the “Texas Observer” at the time of Hill’s death.

Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1970s and 1981

Beginning in the 1970s dozens of groups of lesbians, determined to separate themselves from the male-dominated world, bought properties across rural America, often in the Bible Belt, and set up their own self-sufficient communities called “womyn’s lands.”

Diana Rivers founded the Ozark Land Holding Association in 1981, on 240 acres with a mountain and creek, near Fayetteville, built around the idea of “women living on land that we have control over,” Rivers said.

“We didn’t go out and advertise,” she said. “We didn’t go around the neighborhood saying, ‘This is a lesbian community moving in next to you.’”

But the women did not hide either.

They marched in the earliest Pride parades in Fayetteville. “I remember gay pride when 10 of us would go out walking down the street,” Rivers said, “hoping no one would throw a rock at us.”

Now thousands attend Fayetteville’s Pride celebrations and “the street is jammed with people cheering and waving and carrying on,” Rivers said.

And the locals appear to accept Rivers’ settlement, and some matter-of-factly call it “Dyke Mountain.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/us/stonewalls-across-us-lgbtq.html" id="4f99a64c-b357-300f-a7dd-1be8b0ebc7f4">The New York Times</a>.

What Was Your Stonewall? Pivotal LGBTQ Moments Across the U.S.

The uprising at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 inspired a movement, but there were other early milestones in the struggle for LGBTQ rights. Here are some examples:

What was your stonewall? Pivotal LGBTQ moments across the U.S.

Politics

Local

World

News

Celebrities

Music

Movies

Entertainment

Sports 

Fashion

Beauty & Health

Relationships & Weddings

Food & Travel

Lifestyle

Domestic

International 

Business

About

Highlights

Selection Criteria

Jury

Terms And Conditions

FAQs

Pulse Influencer Awards

Courses

Careers

Explore categories

Pulse Kenya is the most followed news and entertainment platform in Kenya. It informs and engages young Kenyans around the clock and provides updates by the hour.

Scott James

Articles written by the author

Queer people of color led the LGBTQ charge, but were denied the rewards

What was your stonewall? Pivotal LGBTQ moments across the U.S.