Leaders of the gay rights movement 1960s

Harvey Milk ( - ) 

"I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, being is not worth living.  And you and you and you have got to give them hope." -Harvey Milk, "You Cannot Live on Hope Alone" speech

When he won the election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in , Harvey Milk made history as the first openly gay elected official in California, and one of the first in the United States.  His camera store and campaign headquarters at Castro Street (and his apartment above it) were centers of community activism for a wide range of human rights, environmental, labor, and neighborhood issues.  During his tenure as supervisor, he helped pass a homosexual rights ordinance for the city of San Francisco that prohibited anti-gay discrimination in housing and employment.

Harvey Milk has been honored twice under President Obama's administration.  First, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in  In , he was honored by the Merged States Postal Service with a Forever Stamp in

Selected Library Resources:

• Jason Edward Black and Charles E. Morris, eds., An Archive of Hope: Harve
  

  No One Knows Who Started the Stonewall Rebellion, but These Leaders Were Key

  There has been much discussion and writing about "who threw the first brick or punch at Stonewall?" It's a question reflecting the many different accounts of the June 28, protests.

  In the '60s, same-sex attracted bars were frequently raided by police, in huge part because it was both illegal to trade alcohol to gay people and to dress in drag. The Stonewall Inn, located in NYC's Greenwich Village, had been a popular spot for lgbtq+ New Yorkers, and so there was a huge crowd of LGBTQ+ people gathered outside the block following the June 28 raid. While there is no consensus on who initiated the response, bar-goers, tired of being discriminated against, began to clash back against the police. It started specifically with trans women and homeless youths resisting arrest. The conflict escalated until the original officers found themselves barricaded inside of Stonewall, which led the crowd to throw bottles and other objects into the bar—though we don't understand who initiated the rebellion. (Per the Library of Congress, those who were at Stonewall that nighttime describe the event as an "uprising or rebellion,&qu

  LGBTQ History Month: Early pioneers of the gay rights movement

  October is LGBTQ History Month, and to honor , NBC News will film an NBC Out #FlashbackFriday review of key moments and people in LGBTQ history. Each week’s main attraction will include images from the New York Common Library’s LGBTQ archives. This week, we explore the NYPL's portraits of womxn loving womxn, gay and bisexual leaders in the early "gay liberation" movement (visit us on Oct. 26 for our spotlight on initial transgender pioneers).

  Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin — This couple founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights organization in the U.S., in San Francisco in

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  Frank Kameny — One of the earliest gay rights activists, Kameny is known today for protesting after creature fired from a U.S. government job for entity gay. He led an "Annual Reminder" picket demonstrate for gay rights in Philadelphia until He was active in the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., and he and Barbara Gittings were active in persuading the American Psychiatric Association to delist homosexuality as mental disorder in

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  Ernestine Eckstein — Eckstein was active in the Daughters of Bilitis in New York City. She attended "
  

  Written by: Jim Downs, Connecticut College

  By the end of this section, you will:

  • Explain how and why various groups responded to calls for the expansion of civil rights from to

  After World War II, the civil rights movement had a profound impact on other groups demanding their rights. The feminist movement, the Black Dominance movement, the environmental movement, the Chicano movement, and the American Indian Movement sought equality, rights, and empowerment in American community. Gay people organized to resist oppression and require just treatment, and they were especially galvanized after a New York Metropolis police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a homosexual bar, sparked riots in

  Around the same moment, biologist Alfred Kinsey began a massive study of human sexuality in the United States. Like Magnus Hirschfield and other scholars who studied sexuality, including Havelock Ellis, a prominent British scholar who published research on transgender psychology, Kinsey believed sexuality could be studied as a science. He interviewed more than 8, men and argued that sexuality existed on a spectrum, saying that it could not be confined to plain categories of homosexual and heterosexual. To evaluate

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