The Stonewall riots, also known as the Stonewall uprising, Stonewall rebellion, or simply Stonewall, were a series of spontaneous protests by members of the gay community in response to a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Patrons of the Stonewall, other Village lesbian and gay bars, and neighborhood street people fought back when the police became violent. The riots are widely considered the watershed event that transformed the gay liberation movement and the twentieth-century fight for LGBT rights in the United States.
West Hollywood is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Incorporated in 1984, it is home to the Sunset Strip. As of the 2020 U.S. Census, its population was 35,757.
ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries is the oldest existing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) organization in the United States and one of the largest repositories of LGBT materials in the world. Located in Los Angeles, California, ONE Archives has been a part of the University of Southern California Libraries since 2010. ONE Archives' collections contain over two million items including periodicals; books; film, video and audio recordings; photographs; artworks; ephemera, such as clothing, costumes, and buttons; organizational records; and personal papers. ONE Archives also operates a small gallery and museum space devoted to LGBT art and history in West Hollywood, California. Use of the collections is free during regular business hours.
Morris Kight was an American gay rights pioneer and peace activist. He is considered one of the original founders of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement in the United States.
The NYC Pride March is an annual event celebrating the LGBTQ community in New York City. The largest pride parade in North America and among the largest pride events in the world, the NYC Pride March attracts tens of thousands of participants and millions of sidewalk spectators each June. The parade route through Lower Manhattan traverses south on Fifth Avenue, through Greenwich Village, passing the Stonewall National Monument, site of the June 1969 riots that launched the modern movement for LGBTQ+ rights.
This is a list of notable events in the history of LGBT rights that took place in the 1960s.
Actress Judy Garland (1922–1969) is widely considered as a gay icon. The Advocate has called Garland "The Elvis of homosexuals". The reasons frequently given for her standing as an icon among gay men are admiration of her ability as a performer, the way her personal struggles seemed to mirror those of gay men in America during the height of her fame, and her value as a camp figure. Garland's role as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz is particularly known for contributing to this status. In the 1960s, when a reporter asked how she felt about having a large gay following, Garland replied, "I couldn't care less. I sing to people!"
Halloween in the Castro was an annual Halloween celebration held in The Castro district of San Francisco, first held in the 1940s as a neighborhood costume contest. By the late 1970s, it had shifted from a children's event to a gay pride celebration that continued to grow into a massive annual street party in the 2000s.
Save Our Children, Inc. was an American political coalition formed in 1977 in Miami, Florida, to overturn a recently legislated county ordinance that banned discrimination in areas of housing, employment, and public accommodation based on sexual orientation. The coalition was publicly headed by celebrity singer Anita Bryant, who claimed the ordinance discriminated against her right to teach her children biblical morality because the ordinance specifically required parochial Christian schools, like the one her children attended, to hire openly homosexual teachers. It was a well-organized campaign that initiated a bitter political fight between gay activists and Christian fundamentalists. When the repeal of the ordinance went to a vote, it attracted the largest response of any special election in Dade County's history, passing by a more than 2-to-1 margin. In response to this vote, a group of gay and lesbian community members formed Pride South Florida, now known as Pride Fort Lauderdale, an organization whose mission was to fight for the rights of the gay and lesbian community in South Florida.
Valerie Terrigno is a former mayor of West Hollywood, California. She was elected to the city council in 1984 and became mayor not long after. She was the first lesbian mayor of an incorporated municipality in the United States.
A zap is a form of political direct action that came into use in the 1970s in the United States. Popularized by the early gay liberation group Gay Activists Alliance, a zap was a raucous public demonstration designed to embarrass a public figure or celebrity while calling the attention of both gays and straights to issues of gay rights.
Albert L. Gordon, was an American attorney who become an advocate for gay rights through legal challenges in the 1970s and 1980s to laws that criminalized certain homosexual practices. He had become a lawyer late in life and was a heterosexual who actively supported gay legal causes after his son came out.
The Patch was an LGBT bar formerly located at 610 W. Pacific Coast Highway in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Wilmington, California. The Patch, along with the Black Cat Tavern, played a pivotal role in the gay rights movement, when, in August 1968, it was one of the first sites where there was open resistance to the constant police harassment of gay establishments and meeting places in Southern California.
Bar Rescue is an American reality television series that airs on Paramount Network. It stars Jon Taffer, a long-time food and beverage industry consultant specializing in nightclubs, bars and pubs. Taffer offers his professional expertise, renovations and equipment to desperately failing bars, in an effort to save them from closing.
Ivy Bottini was an American activist for women's and LGBT rights, and a visual artist.
Irwin Held was an American restaurateur, known for being a longtime owner of Barney's Beanery, a famous West Hollywood "beer-and-burger" restaurant, holding the establishment from 1970 to 1999. Held was born in The Bronx, New York in 1925, and following service in the Marines, he moved to Los Angeles in 1950. He took ownership of Barney's Beanery in 1970, two years after the death of its founder John Anthony. Held faced picketing and protest over his continued display of a sign over the bar that read “Fagots Stay Out”, purportedly posted by Anthony following a police raid of the restaurant's bathrooms in the 1940s. The introduction of an anti-discrimination ordinance in 1985 finally forced the reluctant Held to remove the sign under threat of fine. The restaurant was also famous for attracting rock musicians and stars including Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. Held sold the restaurant in 1999, and died in 2013 of natural causes, survived by two daughters, a son and four grandchildren.
Jonathan Peter Taffer is an American entrepreneur and television personality. He is best known for hosting the reality series Bar Rescue on Paramount Network and Face the Truth on CBS with Vivica A. Fox. He is also largely credited with conceptualizing NFL Sunday Ticket.
The Lesbian Tide (1971-1980) was a lesbian periodical published in the United States by the Los Angeles chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis. It was the first lesbian periodical in the US to reach a national audience and the first US magazine to use the word "lesbian" in the title.
