Pride Timeline

Contemporary Pride Timeline

The rights movement for gays, lesbians, bi and trans people has a long history that spans centuries and covers the globe. Here are just a few interesting points from contemporary times to represent the changes clseen in the last century. Stay tuned for more, including a timeline that stretches back millennia to the GLBT figures who marked their times.

2009 — Iceland elects the world's first openly-homosexual head of state, Johanna Siguroardottir.
2005 — André Boisclair is chosen leader of the Parti Québécois (Quebec, Canada), becoming the first openly homosexual man elected as the leader of a major political party in North America. The following year, the International Conference on LGBT Human Rights is held in Montreal, Quebec.
2001 — The Netherlands becomes the first country to legalize same-sex marriage. The following year, openly gay Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn is assassinated by Volkert van der Graaf.
1997 — South Africa becomes the first country to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in its constitution. In 1981, Norway was the first country in the world to enact a law to prevent discrimination against homosexuals.
1991 — The red ribbon is first used as a symbol of the campaign against HIV/AIDS.
1989 — Denmark becomes the first country in the world to enact registered partnership laws (like a civil union) for same-sex couples, with most of the same rights as marriage (excluding the right to adoption and the right to marriage in a church).
1988 — Sweden becomes the first country to pass laws protecting homosexuals regarding social services, taxes and inheritances.
1982 — The first Gay Games is held in San Francisco, attracting 1,600 participants.
1978 — The rainbow flag is first used as a symbol of homosexual pride
1977 — The province of Quebec (in Canada) becomes the first jurisdiction larger than a city or county in the world to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in the public and private sectors. In 1982, Wisconsin becomes the first state in the U.S. to ban discrimination against homosexuals.
1973 — The American Psychiatric Association removes homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II). The decision is based largely on the research and advocacy of psychologist Evelyn Hooker who, in 1957, published a study showing that homosexual men are as well adjusted as non-homosexual men.
1969 — The Stonewall riots occur in New York. Police try to raid and arrest gays and lesbians for solicitation at the mafia-run gay bar The Stonewall Inn, but butch lesbians and drag queens fight back, chanting "Gay Power!" which becomes the rallying cry at marches and parades in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It took another 10 years before a homosexual rights march occurs in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital. However, these parades now take place annually all over the world, usually on the last Saturday in June.
1964 — The book "Homosexual Behavior Among Males" by Wainwright Churchill breaks ground as a scientific study approaching homosexuality as a fact of life and introduces the term “homoerotophobia," a possible precursor to "homophobia."
1957 — The word "transsexual" is coined by U.S. physician Harry Benjamin.
1952 — Christine Jorgensen becomes the first person to have sex reassignment surgery, in this case, male to female, creating a world-wide sensation. Twenty years later, in 1972, Sweden becomes the first country in the world to allow transsexuals to legally change their sex, with the government providing free hormone therapy.
1950 — The first sustained American homosexual group, the Mattachine Society, is founded in Los Angeles by Harry Hay. Over the years, the group does a number of actions in the fight for gay rights, including a "Sip-In" at Julius Bar in New York City to challenge a New York State Liquor Authority law prohibiting serving alcohol to gays. This event serves as a catalyst for additional gay clubs to open, namely the Stonewall Inn.
1945 — Upon liberation of Nazi concentration camps by Allied forces, those interned for homosexuality are not freed, but required to serve out the full term of their sentences under Paragraph 175, a provision of the German Criminal Code that made sexual acts between males illegal.
1941 — Transsexuality was first used in reference to homosexuality and bisexuality.
1933 — In Germany, the National Socialist German Workers Party bans homosexual groups and sends homosexuals to concentration camps where countless were killed along with Jews and other groups of people. Similar to Jews who are ordered to wear yellow star patched on their clothing so they are marked in public, homosexuals are forced to wear a pink triangle on their sleeve.
1927 — The Pansy Craze, a period in the late 1920s and early 1930s in which gay clubs and performers (known as pansy performers) experienced a surge in underground popularity in the United States, begins.
1926 — The New York Times is the first major publication to use the word homosexuality.
1920 — The word Gay is used for the first time in reference to homosexual in the underground.
1913 — The word faggot is first used in print in reference to gays in a vocabulary of criminal slang published in Portland, Oregon: "All the fagots [sic] (sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight." Ten years later, the short form "fag" is first used in print in reference to gays in Nels Anderson's The Hobo: "Fairies or Fags are men or boys who exploit sex for profit."
1903 — In New York on February 21, 1903, New York police conducted the first United States recorded raid on a gay bathhouse, the Ariston Hotel Baths. 26 men were arrested and 12 brought to trial on sodomy charges; 7 men received sentences ranging from 4 to 20 years in prison.

Pre 20th Century Pride Timeline

1892 — The words "bisexual" and "heterosexual" are first used in their current senses in Charles Gilbert Chaddock's translation of Kraft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis.
1870 — Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania is published, possibly the first American novel about a homosexual relationship.
1869 — The term "homosexuality" appears in print for the first time in a German-Hungarian pamphlet written by Karl-Maria Kertbeny (1824–1882).
1867 — On August 29, 1867, Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs became the first self-proclaimed homosexual to speak out publicly for homosexual rights when he pleaded at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich for a resolution urging the repeal of anti-homosexual laws.
1830 — The term "asexual" is used for the first time in biology.
1791 — The French Revolution occurs. The country adopts a new penal code that no longer criminalizes sodomy, making France the first west European country to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting adults. Prussia, Luxembourg, Tuscany and others follow suit. Then, in 1810, the Napoleonic code eliminates all penalties for sodomy throughout the European Empire. Brazil, Japan, Mexico and a long list of other countries around the world decriminalize homosexuality during the next 100 years. This list does not include England or America.
1785 — Jeremy Bentham becomes one of the first people to argue for the decriminalization of sodomy in England.
1649 — The first known conviction for lesbian activity in North America occurs. Sarah White Norman is charged with "lewd behavior each with other upon a bed" with Mary Vincent Hammon in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Hammon was under 16 and not prosecuted.
1540-1700 — More than 1,600 people are prosecuted for sodomy.
1476 — Leonardo Da Vinci is charged with sodomy. No verdict is rendered at his trial.
1327 — The deposed King Edward II of England dies allegedly by forcing a red-hot poker through his rectum. Edward II had a history of conflict with the nobility, who repeatedly banished his former lover Piers Gaveston, the Earl of Cornwall.
6th century - 17th century — Homosexuality becomes illegal throughout Europe, with punishments including castration, mutilation, hair shearing, amputation, being whipped or stoned, confiscation of property, banishment, fasting, excommunication and being burned alive. Mutilation and execution were also used as punishments for women caught in same-sex acts.
589 — Spain is converted to Catholicism, leading to laws being changed that allowed for the persecution of gays and Jews.
529 — Christian emperor Justinian I blames homosexuals for famines, earthquakes and pestilence.
313
— Emperor Constantine declares the Roman Empire as Christian. In 342, the first law against homosexual marriage was promulgated by the Christian emperors Constantius II and Constans. Then in 390, Christian emperors Valentinian II, Theodosius I and Arcadius declared homosexual sex to be illegal and those who were guilty of it were condemned to be burned alive in front of the public. However, they continue to collect taxes on male prostitution.
1st Century BCE — The Roman Empire is a time in which art and literature depict homosexual love in a positive light. Like the Greeks, the Romans celebrated love and sex amongst men. The first recorded same-sex marriages occur during this period and homosexual prostitution was taxed. However, like the Greeks, passivity and effeminacy were not tolerated, and an adult male freeborn Roman could lose their citizen status if caught performing fellatio or being penetrated. For more than 200 years, various Roman Emperors marry men in legal, public ceremonies.
326 BCE — Gay/bisexual military leader Alexander the Great completes conquest of most of the then known Western world, converting millions of people to the gay-friendly Hellenistic culture and launching the Hellenistic Age.
385 BCE — Plato's Symposium is published. Plato argues that love between males is the highest form and that sex with women is lustful and only for means of reproduction. Only with men, can the Greek male reach their full intellectual potential. Thirty-five years later, Plato publishes Laws, in which he takes a drastically different approach than in Symposium. Here homosexuality is critiqued as being lustful and wrong for society because it does not further the species and may lead to irresponsible citizenry.
425-388 BCE — A series of satires published by Aristophanes ridicule the effeminate man, the transvestite, and adult males who enjoyed the passive sexual role. This provides evidence that although Greek culture was accepting of homosexuality, they did not accept effeminate males. Effeminacy in men was publicly ridiculed.
600 BCE — Sappho of Lesbos writes her famous love poems to young women, providing the eventual inspiration for the word lesbian. Much of Sappho's work was later destroyed by Christians.