LGBTQ+ Pride Month

Jackie Shane was an American soul and rhythm and blues singer, who was most prominent in the local music scene of Toronto in the 1960s. Considered to be a pioneer transgender performer, she was a contributor to the Toronto Sound and is best known for the single ‘Any Other Way’. She soon became the lead vocalist for The Motley Crew, and relocated to Toronto with them in late 1961 before having a successful music career of her own. In 1967, the band and Jackie recorded a live LP together by which time she was often performing as a woman, not just hair and make-up, but in pantsuits and even dresses. Throughout her active musical career and for many years thereafter, Shane was written about by nearly all sources as a man who performed in ambiguous clothing that strongly suggested femininity. The few sources that actually sought out her own words on the matter of her own gender identification were more ambiguous but she appeared to simply dodge questions about her gender altogether.

Sylvia Rivera was a Latina American gay liberation and transgender rights activist significant in the LGBTQ+ history of New York City and of the US as a whole. Rivera, who identified as a drag queen, was a founding member of both the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. With her close friend Marsha P. Johnson, Rivera co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, LGBTQ+ youth and trans women.

Freddie Mercury is regarded as one of the greatest singers in the history of pop music and was known for his flamboyant stage persona as the frontman of Queen and his four-octave vocal range. While some claimed he hid his sexual orientation from the public, others claimed he was ‘openly gay’. Some have said he identified as bisexual. Freddie was diagnosed with HIV in April 1987. Mercury confirmed he had contracted the virus in 1991, the day before he died at the age of 45. Freddie’s legacy was immortalized in the Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, with Rami Malek portraying the music legend.

Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918) was one of the leading poets of the First World War whose work was characterized by his anger at the cruelty and waste of war, which he experienced during service on the Western Front. Many of the members of this literary circle were gay and it is now recognized that Owen himself was gay, and his writing incorporates many homoerotic elements. His work, and the work of poets like him, have helped readers everywhere better see, understand, and empathize with the LGBTQ+ experience. It has also helped readers find and celebrate their own pride.

Oscar Wilde was one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for homosexuality and imprisonment at the height of his fame. In 2017, Wilde was pardoned for homosexual acts under the Policing and Crime Act 2017. The Act is known informally as the Alan Turing law. 

In his teen years, American novelist James Baldwin began to feel smothered for being both African-American and gay in a racist and homophobic America. Baldwin escaped to France where he wrote essays critiquing race, sexuality and class structures. He brought to light the challenges and complexities black and LGBTQ+ people had to face at the time. His influence endures. Baldwin’s insights on race and sexuality have been widely quoted within the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Comedian, actress, and activist, Ellen DeGeneres is an advocate for a number of causes, including supporting orphans, disadvantaged children, gay and lesbian rights, women’s rights, abuse victims and those suffering from AIDS and HIV. After coming out as gay in 1997, DeGeneres became an advocate for the gay rights movement. In 2016, DeGeneres was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama for her actions to bring to light the issue of gay rights.

Source: https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/directory/ellen-degeneres/

Democrat Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin is the first lesbian and first out member of the LGBTQ+ community to be elected to the U.S. Senate. As her state’s junior senator, Baldwin has fast become one the most vocal advocates for sensible gun control in the upper chamber of Congress. Recently, Sen. Baldwin has called for a national LGBTQ+ Equality Day.

Sally Ride (1951 – 2012), the United States’ first woman in space, has lived a life committed to science, education and inclusion. While she only “came out” publicly as a member of the LGBTQ community in her obituary, written by Tam O’Shaughnessy, Ride’s surviving partner of 27 years, Ride is still the first and only acknowledged LGBTQ astronaut. Today, Ride’s legacy and life story continue to inspire, as she has set a leading example, conquering what before seemed truly impossible.

One of the nation’s first openly gay elected officials, Harvey Milk was the standard-bearer of what during his time was called the gay liberation movement. Before he was assassinated in 1978, Milk helped stave off a conservative backlash against LGBTQ+ equality in the form of the so-called Briggs Initiative, which would have barred gay people from teaching in California’s public schools. Although it took Milk three tries before he won a seat at the table of power for himself and, at least symbolically, for untold millions of other LGBTQ+ folks, since Milk’s victory, hundreds of LGBTQIA+ candidates have been elected across the nation.

RuPaul Andre Charles (born November 17, 1960), known mononymously as RuPaul, is an American drag queen, television judge, musician, and model. Best known for producing, hosting, and judging the reality competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race, he[a] has received several accolades, including 11 Primetime Emmy Awards, three GLAAD Media Awards, a Critics’ Choice Television Award, two Billboard Music Awards, and a Tony Award nomination.

While it would take decades for the cold and largely specious term “transsexual” to be replaced by “transgender,” for many if not most gender-nonconforming people, Christine Jorgensen brought a likable, relatable, intelligent, and kind face and voice — not to mention a generous portion of elegance and style — to the previously hidden reality that gender is anything but a binary issue

Barbara Gittings (1932 – 2007) was a prominent American activist for LGBT equality. She is credited with leading the successful movement to change the psychiatric and psychological professions’ view of homosexuality as a mental pathology. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association revoked its designation of homosexuality as a disorder.