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.
Luiz Roberto de Barros Mott or Luiz Mott in São Paulo, is an anthropologist and a gay rights activist in Brazil.
The Lavender Scare was a moral panic about homosexual people in the United States government which led to their mass dismissal from government service during the mid-20th century. It contributed to and paralleled the anti-communist campaign which is known as McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare. Gay men and lesbians were said to be national security risks and communist sympathizers, which led to the call to remove them from state employment. It was thought that gay people were more susceptible to being manipulated, which could pose a threat to the country. Lesbians were at less risk of persecution than gay men, but some lesbians were interrogated or lost their jobs.
Homophobia encompasses a range of negative attitudes and feelings toward homosexuality or people who identify or are perceived as being lesbian, gay or bisexual. It has been defined as contempt, prejudice, aversion, hatred, or antipathy, may be based on irrational fear and may sometimes be attributed to religious beliefs. Homophobia is observable in critical and hostile behavior such as discrimination and violence on the basis of sexual orientations that are non-heterosexual.
Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'.
Homosexuality is sexual attraction, romantic attraction, or sexual behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" exclusively to people of the same sex or gender. It "also refers to a person's sense of identity based on those attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community of others who share those attractions."
John Eastburn Boswell was an American historian and a full professor at Yale University. Many of Boswell's studies focused on the issue of religion and homosexuality, specifically Christianity and homosexuality. Much of his work addressed the history of marginalized groups, particularly in the context of religion and sexuality.
Lillian Faderman is an American historian whose books on lesbian history and LGBT history have earned critical praise and awards. The New York Times named three of her books on its "Notable Books of the Year" list. In addition, The Guardian named her book, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, one of the Top 10 Books of Radical History. She was a professor of English at California State University, Fresno, which bestowed her emeritus status, and a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She retired from academe in 2007. Faderman has been referred to as "the mother of lesbian history" for her groundbreaking research and writings on lesbian culture, literature, and history.
Ritch C. Savin-Williams is professor emeritus of developmental psychology at Cornell University who specializes in gay, lesbian, and bisexual research involving adolescents.
Discrimination against lesbians, sometimes called lesbophobia, comprises various forms of prejudice and negativity towards lesbians as individuals, as couples, as a social group, or lesbianism in general. Based on the categories of sex, sexual orientation, identity, and gender expression, this negativity encompasses prejudice, discrimination, hatred, and abuse; with attitudes and feelings ranging from disdain to hostility. Lesbophobia is misogyny that intersects with homophobia, and vice versa. It is analogous to gayphobia.
The North American Man/Boy Love Association is a pedophilia and pederasty advocacy organization in the United States. It works to abolish age-of-consent laws criminalizing adult sexual involvement with minors and campaigns for the release of men who have been jailed for sexual contacts with minors that did not involve what it considers coercion.
Kevin Nadal is an author, activist, comedian, and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is a researcher and expert on the effects of microaggressions on racial/ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people.
Dede Oetomo is a campaigner for LGBT rights in Indonesia and an expert on gender issues in East Java. He pursued postgraduate studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Whilst there, he founded Lambda Indonesia, a gay support group and later set up Gaya Nusantara.
The demographics of sexual orientation and gender identity in the United States have been studied in the social sciences in recent decades. A 2023 Gallup poll concluded that 7.6% of adult Americans identified as LGBTQ+. A different survey in 2016, from the Williams Institute, estimated that 0.6% of U.S. adults identify as transgender. As of 2022, estimates for the total percentage of U.S. adults that are transgender or nonbinary range from 0.5% to 1.6%. Additionally, a Pew Research survey from 2022 found that approximately 5% of young adults in the U.S. say their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth.
Ilan H. Meyer is an American psychiatric epidemiologist, author, professor, and a senior scholar for public policy and sexual orientation law at the Williams Institute of UCLA. He has conducted extensive research on minority identities related to sexual orientation, gender, race and ethnicity, drawing conclusions on the impact of social stresses on their mental health. Meyer was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger (2010), the federal case that overturned California Proposition 8.
Racism is a concern for many in the Western lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBTQ) communities, with members of racial, ethnic, and national minorities reporting having faced discrimination from other LGBT people.
Jeanne Córdova was an American writer and supporter of the lesbian and gay rights movement, founder of The Lesbian Tide, and a founder of the West Coast LGBT movement. A former Catholic nun, Córdova was a second-wave feminist lesbian activist and self-described butch.
This is a timeline of notable events in the history of non-heterosexual conforming people of South Asian ancestry, who may identify as LGBTIQGNC, men who have sex with men, or related culturally-specific identities such as Hijra, Aravani, Thirunangaigal, Khwajasara, Kothi, Thirunambigal, Jogappa, Jogatha, or Shiva Shakti. The recorded history traces back at least two millennia.
Filipino American LGBT Studies is a field of studies that focus on the issues met by people at the intersection of Filipino American and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities.
The following is a timeline of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) history in the 20th century.
