Most famous gay men in history
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Then from 1955 to 1969, DeLarverie toured the Black theater circuit as the MC - and only drag king - of the Jewel Box Revue, the first racially integrated drag revue in North America. As a teenager, she joined the Ringling Brothers Circus where she rode jumping horses. Michelle V Agins / The New York Times via Redux Stormé DeLarverie (1920-2014)Ī biracial, butch lesbian, DeLarverie was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and was always a performer. law enforcement at the time Rustin's arrest. In pardoning Rustin, Newsom noted how LGBTQ people were unjustly punished for their sexuality by U.S. Rustin served 50 days in Los Angeles County jail and had to register as a sex offender. Gavin Newsom pardoned Rustin for his arrest in 1953 when he was found having sex with two men in a parked car in Pasadena.
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He organized the 1963 March on Washington and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2013 for his activism.
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Rustin was an LGBTQ and civil rights activist best known for being a key adviser to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
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Burns / Getty Images Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) According to a belated obituary published in 2019, The New York Times said Bentley, who died in 1960 at the age of 52, was " Harlem's most famous lesbian" in the 1930s and "among the best-known Black entertainers in the United States."Īmerican civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. Donning a top hat and tuxedo, Bentley would sing the blues in Harlem establishments like the Clam House and the Ubangi Club. via Wikimedia Commons Gladys Bentley (1907-1960)īentley was a gender-bending performer during the Harlem Renaissance. “Racism combined with the forces of stigma, phobia, discrimination and bias associated with gender and sexuality have too often erased the contributions of members of our community." Glady Bentley. Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, told NBC News. “As long as there have been Black people, there have been Black LGBTQ and same-gender-loving people,” David J.
#MOST FAMOUS GAY MEN IN HISTORY TV#
READ MORE: How the Great Depression Helped End Prohibitionīy the post-World War II era, a larger cultural shift toward earlier marriage and suburban living, the advent of TV and the anti-homosexuality crusades championed by Joseph McCarthy would help push the flowering of gay culture represented by the Pansy Craze firmly into the nation’s rear-view mirror.ĭrag balls, and the spirit of freedom and exuberance they represented, never went away entirely-but it would be decades before LGBTQ life would flourish so publicly again.From 1960s civil rights activist Bayard Rustin to Chicago's first lesbian mayor, Lori Lightfoot, Black LGBTQ Americans have long made history with innumerable contributions to politics, art, medicine and a host of other fields. This not only discouraged gay men from participating in public life, but also “made homosexuality seem more dangerous to the average American.” In the mid- to late ‘30s, Heap points out, a wave of sensationalized sex crimes “provoked hysteria about sex criminals, who were often-in the mind of the public and in the mind of authorities-equated with gay men.” The sale of liquor was legal again, but newly enforced laws and regulations prohibited restaurants and bars from hiring gay employees or even serving gay patrons. Each gay enclave, wrote George Chauncey in his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, had a different class and ethnic character, cultural style and public reputation. In addition to these groups, whom social reformers in the early 1900s would call “male sex perverts,” a number of nightclubs and theaters were featuring stage performances by female impersonators these spots were mainly located in the Levee District on Chicago’s South Side, the Bowery in New York City and other largely working-class neighborhoods in American cities.īy the 1920s, gay men had established a presence in Harlem and the bohemian mecca of Greenwich Village (as well as the seedier environs of Times Square), and the city’s first lesbian enclaves had appeared in Harlem and the Village. “In the late 19th century, there was an increasingly visible presence of gender-non-conforming men who were engaged in sexual relationships with other men in major American cities,” says Chad Heap, a professor of American Studies at George Washington University and the author of Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940.