The Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, was an early national gay rights organization in the United States, preceded by several covert and open organizations, such as Chicago's Society for Human Rights. Communist and labor activist Harry Hay formed the group with a collection of male friends in Los Angeles to protect and improve the rights of gay men. Branches formed in other cities, and by 1961 the Society had splintered into regional groups.
Leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities that involve leather garments, such as leather jackets, vests, boots, chaps, harnesses, or other items. Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures. Many participants associate leather culture with BDSM practices and its many subcultures. For some, black leather clothing is an erotic fashion that expresses heightened masculinity or the appropriation of sexual power; love of motorcycles, motorcycle clubs and independence; and/or engagement in sexual kink or leather fetishism.
Harvey Bernard Milk was an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk was born and raised in New York, where he acknowledged his homosexuality as an adolescent, but chose to pursue sexual relationships with secrecy and discretion well into his adult years. His experience in the counterculture of the 1960s caused him to shed many of his conservative views about individual freedom and the expression of sexuality.
Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was the name of several gay liberation groups, the first of which was formed in New York City in 1969, immediately after the Stonewall riots. Similar organizations also formed in the UK, Australia and Canada. The GLF provided a voice for the newly-out and newly radicalized gay community, and a meeting place for a number of activists who would go on to form other groups, such as the Gay Activists Alliance, Gay Youth New York, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in the US. In the UK and Canada, activists also developed a platform for gay liberation and demonstrated for gay rights. Activists from both the US and UK groups would later go on to found or be active in groups including ACT UP, the Lesbian Avengers, Queer Nation, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and Stonewall.
The Duboce Triangle is a neighborhood of San Francisco, California, located below Buena Vista Park and between the neighborhoods of the Castro/Eureka Valley, the Mission District, and the Lower Haight.
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.
This is a list of notable events in the history of LGBT rights that took place in the 1960s.
The GLBT Historical Society maintains an extensive collection of archival materials, artifacts and graphic arts relating to the history of LGBT people in the United States, with a focus on the LGBT communities of San Francisco and Northern California.
Dyke is a slang term, used as a noun meaning lesbian. It originated as a homophobic slur for masculine, butch, or androgynous girls or women. Pejorative use of the word still exists, but the term dyke has been reappropriated by many lesbians to imply assertiveness and toughness.
The history of LGBT residents in California, which includes centuries prior to the 20th, has become increasingly visible recently with the successes of the LGBT rights movement. In spite of the strong development of early LGBT villages in the state, pro-LGBT activists in California have campaigned against nearly 170 years of especially harsh prosecutions and punishments toward gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people.
The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in San Francisco is one of the largest and most prominent LGBT communities in the United States, and is one of the most important in the history of American LGBT rights and activism alongside New York City. The city itself has been described as "the original 'gay-friendly city'". LGBT culture is also active within companies that are based in Silicon Valley, which is located within the southern San Francisco Bay Area.
Rikki Streicher (1922–1994) was an American activist and community leader in San Francisco's LGBTQ movement. In the 1960s, she had an active leadership role in the Society for Individual Rights, an organization that promoted equal rights for gays and lesbians. In 1966, she opened and ran Maud's, a year prior to the San Francisco’s Summer of Love; it stayed open for 23 years, at that time the longest continuously running lesbian-owned lesbian bar in the country. She opened a second bar, Amelia’s, in 1978 in the city’s Mission district, with both venues serving as makeshift community centers for lesbians who had very few accepting socializing options. In the early 1980s, she was a co-founder of the international Gay Olympics, later called Gay Games, she helped to create the Federation of Gay Games and served on the board of directors. In 1994, she received the Dr. Tom Waddell Award for her contribution to Gay Athletics.
Maud's was a lesbian bar at 937 Cole Street in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury District which opened in 1966 and closed in 1989. At the time of its closing, which was captured in the film, Last Call at Maud's, it was claimed to be the oldest lesbian bar in the United States. Its history, documented in the film and other media, spanned almost a quarter-century of LGBT events.
Peg's Place was a San Francisco lesbian bar (1950s–1988) and the site of an assault in 1979 by off-duty members of the San Francisco vice squad, an event which drew national attention to other incidents of anti-gay violence and police harassment of the LGBT community and helped propel an unsuccessful citywide proposition to ban the city's vice squad altogether. Historians have written about the incident when describing the tension that existed between the police and the LGBT community during the late 1970s.
A lesbian bar is a drinking establishment that caters exclusively or predominantly to lesbian women. While often conflated, the lesbian bar has a history distinct from that of the gay bar.
The Tay-Bush Inn raid was a police raid on an all-night, one-room café in San Francisco, California around 3 a.m. on September 14, 1961. There 103 LGBT patrons were arrested. It is considered a pivotal event in the history of LGBT rights in San Francisco. It was the largest raid on a gay bar in this city, and received the most press coverage. The arrested were described in the press as mostly white and middle class men.
The Lesbian Mothers Union (LMU), later known as Lesbian Mothers and Friends, was created by Del Martin and Pat Norman, along with other activists, in an effort to combat the legal persecution and separation from society that lesbian mothers face. Lesbian mothers were in desperate need of support, and the Lesbian Mothers Union offered assistance to those residing in the San Francisco Bay area.
Beverly Hickok, sometimes written as Bev Hickock, was an American librarian, founder and head of the Transportation Library at the University of California, Berkeley. She was also a prominent early member of gay rights and lesbian community organizations in the San Francisco area.
The Tin Angel was a lesbian nightclub, live music venue, and restaurant in operation from 1953 to 1961, on the Embarcadero at 981 Embarcadero in San Francisco, California, U.S. The venue and its founder were credited as "spearheading the 'Jazz on the Waterfront' movement" in the 1950s. In 1958, the club ownership changed and it was renamed On-The-Levee, before its closure in July 1961.
Miss Smith's Tea Room was a gay and lesbian bar in operation from 1954 to 1960 in the North Beach neighborhood at 1353 Grant Avenue in San Francisco, California, U.S.. It was a lesbian pickup spot, known for its Wednesday poetry nights and was a hangout for Beat poets. It is considered a pioneering gay bar, and had historically faced legal issues in order to maintain operations.
