20th Century

OR: The times they are a-changing. 

A lot of queer histories1 start and end with Stonewall: the police raid a seedy New York bar aiming to harass and arrest the queers they knew frequented it, but the queers fight back and now we have lesbians on Married at First Sight. That misses out a lot: not just from the centuries that preceded it (if only someone has written 6 chapters of a queer history blog, that would be so great), but from the time too. Police raids of queer spaces weren’t uncommon, The Stonewall Inn was raided about once a month, and this definitely wasn't the first time queers had fought back. In May 1959, a whole 10 years before, Los Angeles Police entered Cooper’s Do-Nuts attempting to arrest 2 drag queens and 2 sex workers. They were met with people throwing coffee cups, donuts and rubbish at police so the detainees could get away. Over in San Francisco, the transgender regulars of Compton’s Cafeteria had faced years of harassment from management and the police, and had been peacefully picketing for months by the time rioting broke out in August 1966. People were throwing coffee, dishes, furniture, breaking windows and fighting that spilled out onto the streets (Lourenco, 2019).

    Then why do we hold it with such reverence? Why did Historian and writer Marc Stein2 say that "No event in history, with perhaps the exception of the French Revolution, deserves more [than the Stonewall riots] to be considered a watershed.”? There is a lot to suggest that the events of Stonewall on the 28th June 1969 were different. Craige Rodwell said that when he saw the crowds that night he knew that “this was the spark we had been waiting for for years”, but that's easy to say in retrospect. Many accounts suggest it might have been at a significantly larger scale than the rest, but in a full out brawl at the end of a night out, accurately recalling how many people were there seems a lot to ask. So there must be more going on that makes this specific evening the one that has become such a key moment in collective memory, identity and history.  Elizabeth Armstong (2006) suggests it was due to Stonewall being the first event to “trigger a commemorative ritual”, as what we now instantly recognise to be pride parades started as an annual commemoration. In 1970 there were parades in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, after activists had to appeal to the Californian Supreme Court because the LAPD refused to grant the permit. Furthermore it was the first time, with enormous help from the civil rights movement, sexually progressive ideas from the Sumer of Love, the public loving an anti war protest, that queers had the visibility and safety to create such a significant commemoration. The fact that it was in New York City was key too3. The city’s political culture was important, along with how activists engaged with the mainstream media like the New York Times and Harper's Bazaar that would go on to cover the riots in the following days, and the protests themselves happening in a densely populated, pedestrian friendly area.  The Stonewall Inn was also run by the Mafia, that’s not really important or relevant, I just need more people to know that fact. 

Whichever riot or uprising you choose to stay “started” gay rights, there's always trans women, usually trans women of colour at the heart of it. Thanks, dolls. 

But where were all the Lesbians? Mostly writing magazines. In San Francisco in 1955 Rose Bamberger, a working class Filipina working in a brush factory wanted a space where queer  women could socialise, talk and dance away from the male heavy, rowdy bar scene. Eventually this group became Daughters of Bilitis, the name inspired by inspired by the Song of Bilitis, a collection of over a hundred erotic lesbian poems found in a tomb in Cyprus written by a lover of Sappho and translated into French by Pierre Louys in 1894, except none of that was real and he just wrote them all, the weird little perve. DOB’s membership was open to “all women over 21 who have a genuine interest in the problems of the female homophile and the related problems of other minorities”. Members received a copy of The Ladder, a nationally published periodical that discussed all the issues lesbians, or "variants" as they referred to themselves, had to deal with: how to tackle the taboo around their identity, issues accessing healthcare, lack of visibility in the historical record, how to raise children for a former heterosexual relationship and how many times can you rewatch the Glee season 5 performance of Toxic before it becomes an issue. Asking for a friend. Over the years, the vision of the daughters changed: Dal Martin and Phylis Lyon urged for more political activism that would improve law and challenge the public into tolerance and acceptance. This wasn't popular with the working class members of the group, inclusding Rose, who felt they did not have the stability or social standing to be able to risk acting on this vision (Library of Congress, 2025). 

This love of magazines was clearly international. Over in the UK, in 1963 Cynthia Reid was moving to London after graduating from Cambridge University and having quite the messy breakup. She wanted a way to meet someone new so just casually set up the first known lesbian organisation in Britain. The Minority Research Group’s aim, aside from getting Cynthia a rebound, was to “free female homosexuality from the prurience, sensationalism and vulgar voyeurism with which it is associated in some minds” and “improving the public image of the Lesbian by familiarizing this fairly common condition”. They did this with social gatherings, creating a network of researchers and research materials, and publishing Arena Three, their own periodical that responded to requests for advice and information. Their hub was the Gateways Club, a small windowless bar down a steep staircase behind a green door, its walls covered in murals by local artists stained with cigarette smoke. It originally opened in 1931 when it was a key spot for the Chelsea Arts Club, but after becoming quite popular with the ladies who like other ladies, including my dad’s fifth favourite queer women of history Dusty Springfield, It was strictly women-only by 1967, and with a strict rule of no discussing politics (wikipedia, 2025). 

Into the 1970s the hopeful trudge of progress continued, this was the decade the pride flag, designed by Gilbert Baker although looking slightly different to now, was first flown.

Homosexuality was becoming decriminalised all over the world;. The Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry Federal Council became the first such body to claim that homosexuality was not an illness, and thanks to the advocacy and research of Eveylyn Hooker, the US soon followed suit. Medical and legal sex change became legal and possible, and queers’ rights to housing and employment were becoming protected. We were getting true government representation with Harvey Milk becoming the first openly gay elected official in the US, being appointed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. Robertson Davies4, wrote of this decade "the love that dare not speak its name, has become the love that won't shut up." (wikipedia, 2025)

Of course all of this wasn’t without backlash. Harvey Milk received multiple death threats, largely homophobically motivated, leading him to record a tape where he declared his successor and pleading that “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” A year into his term, Milk was shot dead while at work in City Hall. 

Then there’s former Miss Oklahoma, with moderate chart success from the 1950s, and spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission, Antia Bryant. In 1977 Dale County Florida’s lawmakers unanimously approved a bill that made discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation illegal5 and apparently this was the gays “asking for special privileges that violated the state law of Florida, not to mention God’s law,” so Bryant simply had to get involved, because the children were at risk now that homosexuals could be tearchers and therefore could and would inevitably molest your children and recruit them into the homosexual agenda. Her appearances on TV and radio debates shifted the bill and conversation around it away from being about discrimination in the work place, you know the thing it was actually about, and not even to be about protecting children, you know the thing she claimed it was about. It was now a religiously motivated, emotionally charged moral panic about the “appropriateness” of queerness. Tom Higgins, the guy who would later go on to coin the term “gay pride” (Ring, 2025) , threw a pie in her face on live TV, gay bars stopped selling orange juice, got Jane Fonda to boycott the drink totally, and invented their own Anita Cocktails, apple juice and vodka, to have instead of screwdrivers6; she was the punch line of jokes by Johnny Carson on his late night show (Wikipedia, 2025c); and in 1979 lesbians marching in the 1979 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade took inspiration from the slogan in her orange juice commercials “Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.", and made perhaps the greatest sign there ever has been: 

Yes I have this image on a t-shirt and I’m frankly astonished you don't too. 

And then we get to the ‘80s. In June 1981, Dr. Michael Gottlieb treated a cluster of young, previously healthy, young men in LA, all presenting with a rare form of pneumonia. Over in New York, dermatologist Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien, saw a cluster of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a rare form of skin cancer, in previously healthy, young, gay men. Both of these conditions are opportunistic infections, targeting people with weakened immune systems. 18 months later the CDC named and categorised Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDS, where the body had no cell mediated immunity, with no known cause. The next year, a retrovirus that caused these immune deficiencies was found, (HIV.gov, 2025) but even still by the end of the decade HIV/AIDS was the leading cause of death in men aged under 45 in New York City and 1,501 of the original 1,508 members of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus were dead. Heartbreak and grief had turned into desperation with bookshops being turned into blackmarket pharmacies importing treatments from overseas that hadn't been approved yet in the USA. National treasure Graham Norton recalls how while living in London in the 1980s that “people would vanish”. 

This changed a lot of things. Firstly, as my history and philosophy of science nerd brain is very exciting to talk about, in the world of epidemiology. The way we deal with science is inevitably wrapped up with how we deal with the world in general, our beliefs and values, and that is rarely more clear to see than in the religious and homophobic rhetoric around the spread of AIDS. Scientists, politicians, and the public had no idea what the root cause was but they were sure it was the gays fault. The head of the CDC even stated that this was “one of the few diseases where behaviour matters”, despite the fact that pretty much every disease ever is affected by behaviour, from the food we eat, to exercise, the jobs we do and the stress it gives us, but apparently none of those behaviours matter as much as being gay. When a causative virus was found, it was still gay sex’s fault with the catholic church saying condoms were not only immoral but not even effective.

The way we test drugs changed, with trials becoming faster, more patient focused and with more emphasis on combination therapies and new experimental treatments rather than existing, under performing treatments. And the relationships patients, and their loved ones, had with their condition and treatment changed: with no clear treatment agenda to deal with the “entire map of AIDS”, it was patients themselves writing this guidance, adjusting it for minority populations and communicating these findings.

I don’t think The Gays ™, have ever had any chill, but wathcing footage from the time that lack of chill is never more clear. They coalesced scientists like Iris Lang who was at the forefront of antiretroviral drug research,  news reports who had insight into how to effectively reach the wider public, lawyers who helped deal with the paperwork left behind and experimental playwrights who just couldn’t go to yet another funeral. (French, 2012)    

Similar to how we deal with the 1960s and Stonewall, there is a tendency for histories to go “in the 1980s the gays had AIDS, it was bad, moving on,” but, as you’ve probably noticed by now, over simplictic retellings of the past never really do any of it justice.

In my first draft of this chapter, it may surprise you to know I actually do write drafts for this it's not just a random stream of consciousness, I had a few hundred words here about how populations outside the queer community, notably haemophiliacs, were effected; how the epidemic continued into the twenty first century, not just in deaths, especially in developing countries, but the stigma it carries even with effective antiviral treatment that’s able to make HIV untransmissible. It was very interesting but it was all very technical and all very “ooh look at me I did a Philosophy of Science Degree” so I’ll save to for the potential spin off blog DISEASES WERE HERE: A kinda comprehensive history of illness from the plague to the tooth infection I have right now.

But my editing hasn't got rid of the fact that potentially the biggest disservice that overly simplistic narrative does, is in ignoring everything else the gays were getting up to in the 1980s. The slow trudge of political progress continued, eventhough laws banning homosexual activity weren’t strictly infocred they were officially being taken off the books all over the world. Building on the progress from the 1970s, more and more countries were legalising same sex adoption, granting queers legal protection from discrimination in housing and employment, and making gender affirming care in the form of hormones and surgeries, affordable and legal (Equaldex, 2025). In 1985 The UK labour government was the first in the UK to include gay and lesbian rights in their manifesto, because a bunch of miners made them. If that sentence doesn't make any sense to you it’s because you've never seen the, actually pretty historically accurate, 2013 film Pride. It’s a beautiful, heartfelt and hopeful retelling of the story of LGSM a group of gays lead by Mark Aston, the epitomy of a gay with no chill, that raised funds to support striking miners. I’m not kidding when I say if you’ve not seen it, stop literally whatever you’re doing, watch it right now, and thank me later. 

Just like we saw in the ‘60s, a surge of progress wasn't without backlash. Soon after Margaret Thatcher had won her third general election, having had enough of children “being taught they had an inalienable right to be gay”, she released the 1988 Local Government Act. When this bill wasn’t legislating the control of stray dogs, dog registration schemes, and abolishing tax on dog licences (seriously so much about this bill is about dogs), it contained its most famous section, Section 28. It stated that any local authority should not “intentionally promote homosexuality” or “promote the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” (Iglikowski-Broad, 2025) 

Much like we saw with op of the blog Anti Bryant over in Florida, the effect of this bill was not in the specific legality, but instead the social culture it created. Educators were self censoring themselves, their lives and what they taught from any traces of queerness, terrified of becoming the case used to set an example (Gray, 2022).  Moral panic was brewing where books like books like Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin by Susanna Bösche, about Jenny, aged 5, who lives with her dad Martin, and his boyfriend Eric, go to the laundrette, and plan a surprise birthday party for Eric, were no longer simply bedtime stories, that by the way basically no one was reading anyway and wasn't in a single primary school in the UK, and instead were a “weapon in a political battle”, lofted in Conservative party conferences as an example of the  “vile, homosexual propaganda" that Section 28 needed to stop. (wikipedia, 2025. Borsche, 2000) Even though it was repealed in 2003 (the week before I was born), we still feel the ripple and often the absolute tidal wave, of Section 28, and the rhetoric it created that queerness, and queer people, are not family friendly. 

Right, back to gays being cool in the ‘80s, and the ‘90s for that matter. Ballroom culture was exploding in New York, a counter cultural celebration of dancing, music and art, standing on the shoulders of saloons, cabarets and speakeasier from the 1800s, the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s, and the funk music of the 1970s. Sound design and production equipment became cheaper and more accessible, so house and electronic music for these precious spaces could be specifically made (Vanvoguejam 2025). African Americans and Latinos were creating the tropes and features of drag, that your straight friend who has seen one season of Drag Race thinks they're an expert in: “reading”, “throwing shade”, lipsyncs, and with influence from fashion magazines, ancient egyptian art and heightened performances of rigid gender ideal: vogue. (Wolde-Michael, 2025) 

 

Gays were influencing more mainstream music too. Changes to how chart success was calculated meant that records that had been well in specialist circles, and by specialist I mean gay, were getting actual chart success, The Weather Girls’ It’s Raining Men, and a song that legitimately makes me cry Gloria Gaynor’s I am What I am. Synthy, high energy dance tracks that evolved from gay clubs became the song of the decade from bands who were actually gay like Petshop Boys and Frankie goes to Hollywood, and those who weren’t.  Not just the sounds of queerness, but the aesthetic of it, the flamboyance and androgyny, was becoming cool, and that let gays be in a way that hadn’t really before: David Bowie wasn’t wearing make up and sparkles because he was one of those homosexualist who was spreading disease and corrupting innocent chilren. He was doing it because that’s what was trendy (Murphy, 2024) 

And when they werent listen to pop music, and to be fair even when they were, the gays were doing what they do best and organising. I say best, it's also what we do worst. In reality, community probably wasn’t based around organised special interest groups as much as the historical record suggests; it's just that these organisations leave better paper trials, with meeting notes, publicity and sometimes even a t-shirt or a badge like the one below that are part of the Lesbian Herstory Archive https://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/.

However, they were still vital to the construction of knowing what it was like being queer. The Gay Rural Aid & Information Network, was supporting queers living in rural Britain from back to the land environmentalist and young people who couldn't move away from home to retirees (Brown, 2015) Black and White Men Together (BWMT), was a pioneer in intersectionality, a word my dad still can’t quite use properly but he is getting better, working in New York to connect White and African Americans through stories of oppression, and most importantly their shared resistance to that oppression. BMTW wrote a monthly newsletter, distributed it all over the country, and despite their name, were incorporating queer women of colour in their organisation at a time, when homosexuality was still being treated as a very different thing for men and women, and sexism was keeping women out of the conversation, even queer conversations and even more than now (Broad, 2023) Even our friends at LGSM made their own lesbian break out group.

Into the 1990s, HIV/AIDS continued to rise at an alarming rate but the legislative progress continued (equaldex, 2025)  and cultural visibility kept growing, Buffy was vampire-slaying, George Micheal and Ellen came out, and RuPaul was playing the head of gya conversion camp in another film you need to watch right now. Then the millennium was coming, and the gays were about to get wiped out along with everything else. Spoilers - still here. 

So well done gays, overall a pretty good few decades, so go thank a trans women and cheers a vodka and apple juice to the next few decades.

 

Footnotes

1. To read more about how I’m using the term “queer”, what it means to me, and what it means within the scope of this project please my introduction to this project.

2. not to be confused with Mark Stein, a South African footballer who played for Chelsea in the 1990s 

3. Big cities, their big populations, and the way they cause all sorts of people to cross paths has been key to queer rights and culture, notably in the Industrial revolution. I wrote about this more in my chapter on the Victorians. 

4. I’m pretty sure Robertson Davies was pro-gay, but my in my relatively brief googling, sorry I mean research, I couldnt be totally sure and that quote could really go either way. 

5. I’m no conspiracy theorist, I totally believe the moon actually exists and we did in fact land on it and it wasn’t directly by Stanley Kubrick who confessed it all in The Shining, however this bill was sponsored by Ruth Shack a former friend of Byrant. Was there something more going on there that caused Bryan to go so mental about this? We may never know but we can absolutely wonder.   

6.  I told my mum about this and she recalled being gifted a very fancy Polish vodka by a colleague who told her that the best way to drink it was with apple juice; from a follow up google it seems this is something quite common in Poland. I don’t have any proof but it is entirely plausible, especially given the wave of Polish immigrants to the USA post world war 2, it was a Polish immigrant, with fond memories from home, who suggested apple juice. 

Armstrong, E. A. 2006. Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000312240607100502 

Bosche, S. 2000. Jenny, Eric, Martin . . . and me.  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jan/31/booksforchildrenandteenagers.features11#:~:text=W%20hile%20researching%20for%20the,answer%20questions%20without%20unnecessary%20drama 

Broad, K. L. 2023. Stories of Antiracist Gay/Lesbian Gender Alliance: Articulating Intersectional Solidarity in the 1980s. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08912432231216939  

Brown, G. 2015. Rethinking the origins of homonormativity: the diverse economics of rural gay life in England and Wales in the 1970s and 1980s. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24583008?seq=1 

Equaldex, 2025. 1980s in LGBT Rights. https://www.equaldex.com/timeline/1980s  

Equaldex, 2025. 1990s in LGBT Rights. https://www.equaldex.com/timeline/1990s 

France, D. 2012. How to Survive a Plague.  https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8jkq2i  

Gray, M. 2022. Section 28: Impact and legacy. https://www.hfleducation.org/blog/section-28-impact-and-legacy 

HIV.gov, 2025, A Timeline of HIV and AIDS. https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline 

Iglikowski-Broad, V. 2025. The origins of Section 28. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/origins-section-28/  

Library of Congress, 2025. LGBTQIA+ Studies: A Resource Guide. The Daughters of Bilitis. https://guides.loc.gov/lgbtq-studies/before-stonewall/daughters-of-bilitis 

Lourenco, D. 2019. 5 LGBTQ Protests That Set the Stage for Stonewall. https://www.vice.com/en/article/lgbtq-protests-before-stonewall/ 

Murphy, K. 2024. Identity politics versus legislation: the paradox of queer culture in the 1980s music scene. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/paradox-of-queer-culture-1980s-music/ 

Ring, T. 2025. Why did a gay man throw a pie in Anita Bryant's face, and who was he? https://www.advocate.com/news/anita-bryant-pie-thom-higgins#toggle-gdpr 

Vanvoguejam, 2025. Ballroom History. https://www.vanvoguejam.com/ballroom-history  

Wolde-Michael, T. 2025. A Brief History of Voguing. https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/brief-history-voguing

Wikipedia, 2025. Gateways club. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateways_club  

Wikipedia, 2025. 1970s in LGBTQ rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_in_LGBTQ_rights 

Wikipedia, 2025. Antia Bryant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Bryant 

Wikipedia, 2025. Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Lives_with_Eric_and_Martin