The Stonewall riots, also known as the Stonewall uprising, Stonewall rebellion, or simply Stonewall, were a series of protests by members of the LGBTQ 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, trans activists and unhoused LGBT individuals 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.
The Daughters of Bilitis, also called the DOB or the Daughters, was the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the United States. The organization, formed in San Francisco in 1955, was initially conceived as a secret social club, an alternative to lesbian bars, which were subject to raids and police harassment.
A gay bar is a drinking establishment that caters to an exclusively or predominantly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ+) clientele; the term gay is used as a broadly inclusive concept for LGBTQ+ communities.
The Lesbian Avengers were founded in 1992 in New York City, the direct action group was formed with the intent to create an organization that focuses on lesbian issues and visibility through humorous and untraditional activism. The group was founded by six individuals: Ana Maria Simo, Anne Maguire, Anne-Christine D'Adesky, Marie Honan, Maxine Wolfe, and Sarah Schulman.
The Advocate is an American LGBT magazine, printed bi-monthly and available by subscription. The Advocate brand also includes a website. Both magazine and website have an editorial focus on news, politics, opinion, and arts and entertainment of interest to lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender (LGBT) people. The magazine, established in 1967, is the oldest and largest LGBT publication in the United States and the only surviving one of its kind that was founded before the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan, an uprising that was a major milestone in the LGBT rights movement. On June 9, 2022, Pride Media was acquired by Equal Entertainment LLC.
The gay liberation movement was a social and political movement of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s in the Western world, that urged lesbians and gay men to engage in radical direct action, and to counter societal shame with gay pride. In the feminist spirit of the personal being political, the most basic form of activism was an emphasis on coming out to family, friends, and colleagues, and living life as an openly lesbian or gay person.
The Feminists was a second-wave radical feminist group active in New York City from 1968 to 1973.
Barbara Gittings was a prominent American activist for LGBT equality. She organized the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) from 1958 to 1963, edited the national DOB magazine The Ladder from 1963 to 1966, and worked closely with Frank Kameny in the 1960s on the first picket lines that brought attention to the ban on employment of gay people by the largest employer in the US at that time: the United States government. Her early experiences with trying to learn more about lesbianism fueled her lifetime work with libraries. In the 1970s, Gittings was most involved in the American Library Association, especially its gay caucus, the first such in a professional organization, in order to promote positive literature about homosexuality in libraries. She was a part of the movement to get the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality as a mental illness in 1972. Her self-described life mission was to tear away the "shroud of invisibility" related to homosexuality, which had theretofore been associated with crime and mental illness.
Edythe D. Eyde better known by her pen name Lisa Ben, was an American editor, author, active fantasy-fiction fan and fanzine contributor, and songwriter. She created the first known lesbian publication in North America, Vice Versa. Ben produced the magazine for a year and distributed it locally in Los Angeles, California, in the late 1940s. She was also active in lesbian bars as a musician in the years following her involvement with Vice Versa. Eyde has been recognized as a pioneer in the LGBT movement.
Vice Versa (1947–1948), subtitled "America's Gayest Magazine", is the earliest known U.S. periodical published especially for lesbians. Its mission was to express lesbian emotion within the bounds of good taste.
The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide is a bimonthly, nationally distributed magazine of history, culture, and politics for LGBT people and their allies who are interested in the gamut of social, scientific, and cultural issues raised by same-sex sexuality. Library Journal described it as "the journal of record for LGBT issues."
Clark Philip Polak was an American businessman, publisher, journalist, and LGBT activist.
New York has a long history of LGBT community building, activism, and culture which extends to the early history of the city.
Les Mouches fantastiques was a Canadian underground magazine published between 1918 and 1920. Based in Montreal, Quebec, it is the first known LGBT-themed publication in Canadian and North American history.
The following is a timeline of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) journalism history.
Lavender Woman was a lesbian periodical produced in Chicago, Illinois, from 1971 to 1976. The name Lavender Woman comes from the color lavender's prominence as a representation of homosexuality, starting in the 1950s and 1960s. It is believed that the color became a symbol due to it being a product of mixing baby blue and pink. Lavender truly hit the spotlight as a symbol of homosexuality empowerment in 1969 when lavender sashes and armbands were distributed during a "gay power" march in New York.
The Lesbian Bar Project is a campaign created by Erica Rose and Elina Street to "celebrate, support, and preserve the remaining lesbian bars in the US." The project launched on October 28, 2020 with a PSA video narrated by Lea DeLaria that announced a 30-day fundraising campaign to support what were thought to be the last 15 lesbian bars left in the country, many of which were financially threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic. A second phase followed in June 2021 in connection with Pride Month, including the release of a short documentary, and a three-part docuseries was released on National Coming Out Day 2022.
Henrietta Hudson, originally named Henrietta Hudson Bar & Girl, is a queer restaurant and lounge in Manhattan's West Village neighborhood. It operated as a lesbian bar from 1991 to 2014. Until it rebranded in 2021, it was one of three remaining lesbian bars in New York City. Henrietta Hudson's location is the original location of the Cubbyhole bar, which had the distinction of being lesbian-owned and managed.
Cubbyhole, sometimes written as Cubby Hole or Cubby, in Manhattan's West Village, is one of New York City's three remaining lesbian bars as of 2022.
