Gay Rights Movement Timeline

Swann was arrested in police raids numerous times, including on April 12, 1888, in the first documented case of arrests for female impersonation in the United States.

Image source: Anna Haining Bates

The society was founded in 1897 by George Cecil Ives, one of the earliest gay rights campaigners, who had been working since meeting Oscar Wilde in 1892 for the end of oppression of homosexuals, what he called the 'Cause'.

Image source: George Cecil Ives

The earliest known LGBTQ rights organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, was founded in Berlin in 1897 by Magnus Hirschfeld to campaign publicly against 'Paragraph 175', which made sex between men illegal.

Image source: Scientific-Humanitarian Committee

Anna Rüling, delivering a public speech in 1904 at the request of Magnus Hirschfeld, became the first female Uranian activist, marking women's entry into the sexual reform movement.

Image source: Anna Rüling

Henry Gerber's Society for Human Rights, formed in Chicago in 1924, was a better-documented early American group explicitly advancing homosexual rights; it was quickly suppressed.

Image source: Society for Human Rights

The gains made in Germany were drastically reversed with the rise of Nazism, and Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexology, formed in 1919, along with its library, was destroyed in 1933.

Image source: Institut für Sexualwissenschaft

The transgender rights journal Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress published two issues in 1952, an early transgender publication in the United States.

Image source: Virginia Prince

A 1965 gay march held in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, according to some historians, marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.

Image source: Annual Reminder

In San Francisco, the LGBTQ youth organization Vanguard, formed by Adrian Ravarour, protested for equal rights during April–July 1966, followed by the August 1966 Compton's riot, where transgender street prostitutes rioted against police harassment at Gene Compton's Cafeteria in the Tenderloin.

Image source: Compton's Cafeteria riot

In 1967 Columbia University officially recognized a gay student group, making it the first college in the United States to officially recognize such a group. That year, the Sexual Freedom League in San Francisco, facilitated by Margo Rila and Frank Esposito, also began as one of the earliest bisexual organizations.

Image source: Columbia University

In 1969, Lee Brewster and Bunny Eisenhower formed the Queens Liberation Front (QLF), partially in protest of the treatment of drag queens at the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March.

Image source: Queens Liberation Front

The Stonewall riots of 1969 erupted when gay men, lesbians, drag queens and transgender women at a bar in New York City resisted a police raid. This new radicalism inspired the Gay Liberation movement, with Paul Goodman publishing 'The Politics of Being Queer' and the GLF's 'A Gay Manifesto' setting out its aims.

Image source: Stonewall riots

In the United Kingdom, the GLF held its first meeting in the basement of the London School of Economics on October 13, 1970. By 1971 it was recognized as a political movement in the national press, holding weekly meetings of 200 to 300 people, and disrupted the opening of the 1971 Festival of Light.

Image source: Gay Liberation Front

In 1972 a Quaker group, the Committee of Friends on Bisexuality, issued the 'Ithaca Statement on Bisexuality' supporting bisexuals—possibly the first public declaration of the bisexual movement and certainly the first statement on bisexuality issued by an American religious assembly, appearing in the Friends Journal and The Advocate.

Image source: Bisexuality in the United States

In 1976 the San Francisco Bisexual Center opened, becoming a key hub for bisexual activism and community support in the United States.

Image source: San Francisco Pride

In 1979, a number of people in Sweden called in sick with a case of being homosexual, protesting homosexuality being classified as an illness.

Image source: LGBT rights in Sweden

This era saw a resurgence of militancy with direct action groups like AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), formed in 1987, as well as its offshoots Queer Nation (1990) and the Lesbian Avengers (1992).

Image source: ACT UP

The 1990s saw a rapid push of the transgender movement. In the English-speaking world, Leslie Feinberg published Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come in 1992.

Image source: Leslie Feinberg

On June 24, 1994, the first Gay Pride march in Asia was celebrated in the Philippines, expanding pride celebrations beyond the Western world.

Image source: Metro Manila Pride March

In 1972, Sweden became the first country in the world to allow people who were transsexual by legislation to surgically change their sex and provide free hormone replacement therapy.

In 1974, Maureen Colquhoun came out as the first lesbian Member of Parliament for the Labour Party in the UK.

Image source: Maureen Colquhoun

In May 1974 the American Psychiatric Association, after years of pressure from activists, changed the wording concerning homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from a 'mental disorder' to a 'sexual orientation disturbance', removing gay people from automatic classification as mentally ill.

In 1977, former Miss America contestant and orange juice spokesperson Anita Bryant began the 'Save Our Children' campaign in Dade County, Florida, which proved to be a major setback in the Gay Liberation movement.

Image source: Save Our Children

In 1977, Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay man in California elected to public office. He was assassinated by former city supervisor Dan White in 1978.

Image source: Harvey Milk

In Canada, the coming into effect of Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1985 saw Canadian gays and lesbians move from liberation strategies to litigious strategies in pursuing equality rights.

Image source: Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Another setback in the United States occurred in 1986, when the US Supreme Court upheld a Georgia anti-sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick, a decision later overturned by Lawrence v. Texas in 2003.

In 2003, in the case Lawrence v. Texas, the US Supreme Court overturned Bowers v. Hardwick and invalidated sodomy laws throughout the United States.

From November 6 to 9, 2006, the Yogyakarta Principles on application of international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity were adopted by an international meeting of 29 specialists in Yogyakarta, convened by the International Commission of Jurists and the International Service for Human Rights.

Image source: Yogyakarta Principles

The UN declaration on sexual orientation and gender identity gathered 66 signatures in the United Nations General Assembly on December 13, 2008.

Image source: LGBTQI+ rights at the United Nations

The 1993 'Don't ask, don't tell' law, forbidding homosexual people from serving openly in the United States military, was repealed in 2010.

Image source: Don't ask, don't tell

In 2012, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity issued a regulation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in federally-assisted housing programs.

Image source: Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity

On September 6, 2018, consensual gay sex was legalized in India by their Supreme Court, striking down a colonial-era law criminalizing sodomy that dated back roughly 150 years.

Image source: Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India

In June 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act could protect gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination.

Image source: Bostock v. Clayton County

The Netherlands was the first country to allow same-sex marriage in 2001, followed by Belgium in 2003 and Spain and Canada in 2005.

South Africa became the first African nation to legalize same-sex marriage in 2006, and remains currently the only African nation where same-sex marriage is legal.

On October 22, 2009, the assembly of the Church of Sweden voted strongly in favour of giving its blessing to homosexual couples, including use of the term marriage ('matrimony').

Image source: Church of Sweden

Iceland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage through a unanimous vote: 49–0, on June 11, 2010.

On June 26, 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the US Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was legal nationwide, a landmark victory for the marriage equality movement.

Between September 12 and November 7, 2017, Australia held a national survey on same-sex marriage; 61.6% of respondents supported legally recognizing same-sex marriage nationwide.

Image source: Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey

In 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to allow same-sex marriage, following the Philippines' first pride march in 1994 and decades of regional activism.