The LGBTQ community is a loosely defined grouping of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning individuals united by a common culture and social movements. These communities generally celebrate pride, diversity, individuality, and sexuality. LGBTQ activists and sociologists see LGBTQ community-building as a counterweight to heterosexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, sexualism, and conformist pressures that exist in the larger society. The term pride or sometimes gay pride expresses the LGBTQ community's identity and collective strength; pride parades provide both a prime example of the use and a demonstration of the general meaning of the term. The LGBTQ community is diverse in political affiliation. Not all people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender consider themselves part of the LGBTQ community.
LGBTQ slang, LGBTQ speak, queer slang, or gay slang is a set of English slang lexicon used predominantly among LGBTQ+ people. It has been used in various languages since the early 20th century as a means by which members of the LGBTQ+ community identify themselves and speak in code with brevity and speed to others. The acronym LGBT was popularized in the 1990s and stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender. It may refer to anyone who is non-heterosexual or non-cisgender, instead of exclusively to people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. To recognize this inclusion, a popular variant, LGBTQ, adds the letter Q for those who identify as queer or are questioning their sexual or gender identity.
LGBTQ culture is a culture shared by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals. It is sometimes referred to as queer culture, LGBT culture, and LGBTQIA culture, while the term gay culture may be used to mean either "LGBT culture" or homosexual culture specifically.
Founded in 1952, One Institute, is the oldest active LGBTQ+ organization in the United States, dedicated to telling LGBTQ+ history and stories through education, arts, and social justice programs. Since its inception, the organization has been headquartered in Los Angeles, California.
Over the course of its history, the LGBTQ community has adopted certain symbols for self-identification to demonstrate unity, pride, shared values, and allegiance to one another. These symbols communicate ideas, concepts, and identity both within their communities and to mainstream culture. The two symbols most recognized internationally are the pink triangle and the rainbow flag.
Stonewall National Museum and Archives is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization in Fort Lauderdale, Florida that promotes understanding through preserving, interpreting and sharing the culture of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their role in society. It owns and manages a library and archival collection and presents a series of public programs. SNMA has two small exhibition areas with changing exhibitions drawn primarily from its collections. Additionally, SNMA hosts a web-based LGBTQ timeline of American LGBTQ history, launched in 2021 and known as In Plain Sight. Although Stonewall's name is inspired by the Stonewall Inn where the 1969 Stonewall riots took place, the museum and archive has no direct connection with the New York location.
The GLBT Historical Society maintains an extensive collection of archival materials, artifacts and graphic arts relating to the history of LGBTQ people in the United States, with a focus on the LGBT communities of San Francisco and Northern California.
Lambda Archives of San Diego is a community archive in San Diego, California. Its mission is to collect, preserve, and share the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in San Diego, Northern Baja California, and the Imperial County region. Lambda Archives preserves varied items including ephemera, manuscripts, event memorabilia, photographs, textiles, and more. As of 2019, the collections include approximately 100,000 photographs; about 13,000 of those are digitized.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+(LGBTQ+)music is music that focuses on the experiences of gender and sexual minorities as a product of the broad gay liberation movement.
In the post-Stonewall era, the role of libraries in providing information and services to LGBTQ individuals has been a topic of discussion among library professionals. Libraries can often play an important role for LGBTQ individuals looking to find information about coming out, health, and family topics, as well as leisure reading. In the past 50 years, advocate organizations for LGBTQ content in libraries have emerged, and numerous theorists have discussed various aspects of LGBTQ library service including privacy concerns, programming, collection development considerations and librarian/staff education needs, as well as special services for juvenile and teen patrons.
Nia King is a mixed-race woman of Black/Lebanese/Hungarian descent, queer, art activist, multimedia journalist, podcaster, public speaker, and zine maker. She lives in Oakland, California. Within her podcast, "We Want the Airwaves," Nia interviews queer and trans artists about their lives and about their work. The title of her podcast was inspired from a Ramones song and played as a demand for media access and an insistence on the right for marginalized people to take up space.
Sean Dorsey is a Canadian-American transgender and queer choreographer, dancer, writer and trans rights activist. He is widely recognized as the United States' first acclaimed transgender modern dance choreographer. Dorsey founded his San Francisco-based dance company Sean Dorsey Dance, which incorporates transgender and LGBTQ+ themes into all of their works. Dorsey is also the founder and artistic director of Fresh Meat Productions, a non-profit organization. Fresh Meat Productions creates and commissions new work, presents performing arts programs, conducts education and engagement, and advocates for justice and equity in the Arts. The organization hosts Fresh Meat Festival in San Francisco, an annual festival of transgender and queer performance.
The Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is an online resource based at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in collaboration with more than sixty international colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and private collections. It was established to enable researchers to locate and make use of transgender-related materials in digital and physical collections. It serves as a finding aid for archival materials and an online hub for born-digital materials and digitized historical materials. According to the archive's website: "In order to address these significant barriers to the accessibility of trans history, the DTA virtually merges disparate archival collections, digital materials, and independent projects with a single search engine. With rich primary source materials and powerful search tools, the DTA offers a generative point of entry into the fascinating and expansive world of trans history."
GenderFail is a publishing and programming initiative created by Be Oakley that seeks to encourage projects from an intersectional, queer perspective. Many projects are tied together by the slogan "Radical Softness as a Boundless Form of Resistance". The press is currently based out of Brooklyn, New York. In an April 16, 2020 article "Our Favorite New Yorkers on the Best Things in All Five Boroughs" in Conde Nast Traveler, curator Legacy Russell mentioned GenderFail as one of their favorite things in New York.
Queer community archives are a subset of the larger body of community archives, which are archives and personal collections maintained by community groups who desire to document their cultural heritage based on shared experiences, interests, and/or identities. As such, queer community archives are collections that exist to maintain the historical record of the LGBT community and broader queer community. The term queer community archives, also called gay and lesbian archives, refers to a diverse array of community projects, organizations, and public institutions that maintain these histories.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted inequities experienced by marginalized populations, and has had a significant impact on the LGBT community. Gay pride events were cancelled or postponed worldwide. More than 220 gay pride celebrations around the world were canceled or postponed in 2020, and in response a Global Pride event was hosted online. LGBTQ+ people also tend to be more likely to have pre-existing health conditions, such as asthma, HIV/AIDS, cancer, or obesity, that would worsen their chances of survival if they became infected with COVID-19. They are also more likely to smoke.
Queer Appalachia began as a zine founded by Gina Manone for the Appalachian region and the South at large, and transitioned into a larger project allegedly focusing collaboratively on mutual aid. Established in 2016 after the deaths of Bryn Kelly and Amanda Arkansassy Harris, Queer Appalachia distributes its art, writing, and other work through an Instagram account and a publication called Electric Dirt. According to the magazine Esquire, the collective "seeks to unify the queer people of Appalachia by capturing the variety of races, abilities, genders, religions, and addiction statuses of an area that is largely believed to be straight and white".
The Rainbow History Project, also known as RHP, is an American history project founded in Washington, D.C. in November 2000. Its purpose is to “collect, preserve, and promote an active knowledge of the history, arts, and culture of metropolitan Washington DC's diverse LGBTQ+ communities.” RHP's various activities include collecting oral histories, providing walking tours, hosting panel presentations, gathering archival materials, recognizing community pioneers, and research assistance.
Bryn Kelly (1980–2016) was an American writer, artist, performer, and community organizer. Kelly has shown work at New Museum and performed in conjunction with Visual AIDS and in Art in the Age of Aquarius at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was a member of the Femme Collective, participated in Baltimore's 2012 Femme Conference, and was a cofounder of Theater Transgression, a transgender multimedia performance collective. Her writing and writing performances have appeared in Original Plumbing, Manic D Press, the National Queer Arts Festival, PrettyQueer.com, and EOAGH, A Journal of the Arts, amongst others.
