50 Fun Facts About LGBTQ+ History and Culture

Which children's TV show had a handbag-carrying character denounced as a gay role model by Jerry Falwell in 1999?

Teletubbies drew the televangelist's fire because Tinky Winky was purple, had a triangular antenna and carried a bag. The BBC answered that he was simply a sweet technological baby.

Which Manhattan venue did police raid on 28 June 1969, sparking days of riots that reshaped gay activism?

Stonewall Inn regulars fought back instead of dispersing. A year later, marches in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago marked the anniversary, the first Pride marches in US history.

Which mathematician, convicted of gross indecency in 1952, is the namesake of a 2017 British law pardoning gay men?

Alan Turing, the wartime codebreaker, was sentenced to chemical castration and died in 1954. Some 49,000 men had been pardoned posthumously under the law by early 2017.

Which colour of ribbon, first worn on screen by Jeremy Irons at the 1991 Tony Awards, signals AIDS awareness?

Red was picked by the artists of New York's Visual AIDS for its link to blood and to passion. They took the idea from the ribbons then being worn for soldiers in the Gulf War.

Which dance style, born in Harlem's ballroom scene, did Madonna take into the mainstream with a 1990 hit?

Voguing copies the stances that models strike in fashion magazines, which is how it got its name. Dancers also borrowed the angular figures of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Which San Francisco supervisor, elected in 1977, was the first openly gay man to win public office in California?

Harvey Milk served for almost eleven months and sponsored a city law banning discrimination over sexual orientation. He was assassinated by a former fellow supervisor in November 1978.

Which ABC sitcom featured Mitchell and Cameron, a couple raising their adopted Vietnamese-born daughter Lily?

Modern Family married the pair in its fifth season, after same-sex marriage was legalised in California. Earlier seasons were criticised for rarely showing the two men being affectionate.

Which US state became the first to open marriage to same-sex couples, in May 2004, after a court ruling?

Massachusetts was only the sixth jurisdiction in the world to take the step, after the Netherlands, Belgium and three Canadian provinces. Its top court had found a ban broke the state constitution.

Which Star Trek actor came out as gay in 2005 and later married his longtime partner, Brad Altman?

George Takei, who played helmsman Sulu, spent part of his childhood in US internment camps for Japanese Americans. He later worked on Allegiance, a Broadway musical about that experience.

Which disco group, named after a Manhattan neighbourhood, dressed as a cowboy, a G.I. and a construction worker?

Village People took their name from Greenwich Village, then known as a gay neighbourhood. Members were recruited partly through an advert seeking macho types who could dance and had a moustache.

Which drag performer broke into the mainstream with the early-1990s dance hit 'Supermodel (You Better Work)'?

RuPaul took the single to number two on the US dance chart. Kurt Cobain called it one of his favourite songs of the year, and the pair posed together at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Which Puerto Rican pop star, a former member of the boy band Menudo, came out as gay on his website in 2010?

Ricky Martin posted the message eleven years after Livin' la Vida Loca made him a global star. He has campaigned for LGBT rights around the globe ever since.

Which British pop star came out in 1998 and sent up his own arrest in the video for the single 'Outside'?

George Michael filled the video with men dressed as policemen kissing. He later said that hiding his sexuality for so long had made him feel fraudulent.

Which 1993 film won Tom Hanks an Oscar for playing a lawyer fired by a law firm that learned he had AIDS?

Philadelphia was one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to tackle AIDS and homophobia directly. Bruce Springsteen's song for it won an Oscar as well.

Which 2005 Ang Lee film follows two cowboys whose secret romance begins while herding sheep in Wyoming in 1963?

Brokeback Mountain was shot almost entirely in the Canadian Rockies of Alberta, not in Wyoming. Ang Lee toured the story's real settings with author Annie Proulx, then chose Canada to save money.

Which comedian came out publicly in April 1997 and went on to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016?

Ellen DeGeneres came out on the cover of Time magazine. Weeks later her sitcom character followed, becoming the first openly gay lead on an American network show.

Which former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, became the first openly gay Cabinet secretary in US history in 2021?

Pete Buttigieg was confirmed as transportation secretary by 86 votes to 13. A year earlier, in Iowa, he had become the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus.

In the acronym LGBTQIA+, which word, represented by a yellow flag with a purple circle, does the I stand for?

Intersex people are born with sex characteristics that do not fit typical ideas of male or female bodies. The flag's two colours were picked because they carry no gender associations.

Which Australian city's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras began in 1978 as a protest that ended in 53 arrests?

Sydney police broke up the night-time street party, and a newspaper then printed the names of those arrested, costing many of them their jobs. The parade has been held every year since.

Which tennis champion asked to defect from Czechoslovakia at 18 and has been openly gay since 1981?

Martina Navratilova walked into a New York immigration office after losing a US Open semi-final in 1975. She went on to win a record nine Wimbledon singles titles.

Who became the first transgender person on the cover of Time, beside the headline The Transgender Tipping Point?

Laverne Cox, then starring in Orange Is the New Black, was also the first openly transgender person given a waxwork at Madame Tussauds.

Which word for people who are not transgender was coined on a Usenet newsgroup in 1994 from a Latin prefix?

Cisgender borrows cis-, meaning 'on this side of', the opposite of trans-, 'across from'. A graduate student proposed it to avoid treating transgender people as the odd ones out.

Which country was the first in Southeast Asia to legalise same-sex marriage, with weddings starting in January 2025?

Thailand saw more than 1,700 couples marry on the first day. Organisers of a mass wedding in Bangkok had aimed for 1,448 couples, the number of the civil-code section the law rewrote.

Which country, the fifth to legalise same-sex marriage, was first to protect sexual orientation in its constitution?

South Africa wrote the protection into the constitution that replaced apartheid. Its Constitutional Court later gave Parliament one year to open marriage to same-sex couples, which it did in 2006.

Which Russian composer, whose letters about loving men were long censored, left his bride within three months?

Tchaikovsky wed a former student at 37 and fled the marriage with acute writer's block. Soviet censors later cut the passages about his desires from his published letters.

Which 2011 novel retells the Trojan War through Patroclus and his romance with the hero he grew up beside?

The Song of Achilles took Madeline Miller ten years to write, and she threw away a finished manuscript halfway through. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012.

Which US president introduced the 'Don't ask, don't tell' compromise on gay troops after promising to lift the ban?

Bill Clinton had campaigned on letting everyone serve whatever their orientation, but Congress wrote the ban into law first. The policy ran from 1994 until its repeal took effect in 2011.

Which 1996 rock musical moves Puccini's opera La Bohème to bohemian New York in the shadow of AIDS?

Rent swaps the opera's tuberculosis for HIV. Its creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly the night before its first Off-Broadway performance and never saw it win a Pulitzer Prize.

Which musical, set in Berlin as the Nazis rise to power, draws on Christopher Isherwood's stories?

Cabaret reached the stage in 1966 by way of Isherwood's 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin and a play made from it, I Am a Camera. He had shared Berlin lodgings with a young English singer.

Which artist and former US Army soldier created the rainbow flag with a collective in San Francisco in 1978?

Gilbert Baker first raised two of the flags at a San Francisco parade that June. He also performed in drag as Busty Ross, a nod to the seamstress of the first American flag.

Which activist, called the Saint of Christopher Street, sat for Andy Warhol and co-founded STAR with Sylvia Rivera?

Marsha P. Johnson was paid $50 to sit for Warhol's Ladies and Gentlemen series. A veteran of the 1969 riots in New York, she spent her later years campaigning for people with AIDS.

Which Bronx-raised US Army veteran made front-page news in 1952 after gender-affirming surgery in Copenhagen?

Christine Jorgensen was the first person to become widely known in the United States for the surgery. The newspaper that broke the story billed her as a former GI turned glamorous blonde.

Which Roman emperor founded a city and a religious cult in memory of Antinous, his lover who drowned in the Nile?

Hadrian grieved so intensely at the death in the year 130 that ancient writers criticised him for it. The worship of Antinous became one of the most enduring cults of a deified human in the Roman empire.

Which umbrella term for gender-variant roles in Indigenous North American cultures was adopted in Winnipeg in 1990?

Two-spirit was coined in English to replace an older anthropologists' label that Indigenous people found offensive. An Ojibwe translation was created afterwards to honour the host territory.

LGBT History Month in the United States, founded by a Missouri teacher in 1994, falls in which month?

October was chosen to take in National Coming Out Day on the 11th and the anniversaries of two marches on Washington. Britain holds its own history month in a different season.

Which San Francisco neighbourhood, named for a Mexican-era governor, became one of America's first gay districts?

The Castro was a mixed working-class area of Irish and Italian families until the mid-1960s. Its years as a gay mecca began after 1967's Summer of Love in neighbouring Haight-Ashbury.

Which FX drama set in New York's ballroom scene from 1987 was billed as having TV's largest transgender cast?

Pose put five transgender actors in main roles. Co-star Billy Porter's Emmy for the series made him the first openly gay Black man to win a lead acting category.

Which Virginia Woolf novel, inspired by Vita Sackville-West, follows a poet who changes sex and lives for centuries?

Orlando was later described by Sackville-West's son as one long love letter from Woolf to his mother. The two writers were lovers as well as close friends.

Which artist won fame for chalk drawings of crawling babies and barking dogs in 1980s New York subway stations?

Keith Haring opened his Pop Shop in 1986 to sell his art cheaply, and used his images to promote safe sex and AIDS awareness. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1990.

Which country, Latin America's first to legalise same-sex marriage, passed a pioneering gender identity law in 2012?

Argentina was only the tenth country in the world to open marriage to same-sex couples, in 2010. Its later law lets people obtain hormones or surgery without a medical diagnosis first.

Which Dodgers outfielder, the first MLB player to come out as gay, is credited with co-inventing the high five?

Glenn Burke raised a hand to congratulate a teammate on a home run in 1977, and the teammate slapped it. Burke came out publicly in 1982, after his playing days were over.

Which critic's 1964 essay Notes on 'Camp', dedicated to Oscar Wilde, took the camp sensibility mainstream?

Susan Sontag published the essay in Partisan Review and set it out as 58 numbered notes. A 2019 fashion exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art was built around it.

Which English novelist kept Maurice, his story of love between two men, unpublished from 1914 until after his death?

E. M. Forster left a note on the manuscript wondering whether publishing it was worth the trouble. He insisted on a happy ending, which he feared would invite prosecution while gay sex was illegal in Britain.

Which US city gives its name to the 19th-century term for two women sharing a home independent of men's support?

Boston marriage is traced to a Henry James novel of 1886 about two unmarried women who live together, though James never used the phrase himself. A David Mamet play later took the term as its title.

Which Vienna-born writer coined the words homosexual and heterosexual in a letter of 1868, hoping to replace insults?

Karl Maria Kertbeny, a Hungarian journalist, wanted neutral terms in place of slurs such as sodomite. The next year he published anonymous pamphlets attacking Prussia's law against sex between men.

In a famous Chinese story, Emperor Ai of Han cut off which part of his robe rather than wake Dong Xian?

The sleeve was trapped under Dong Xian's head as he napped. The tale gave Chinese an enduring idiom for love between men, the passion of the cut sleeve.

Which US state was first to drop criminal penalties for consensual sodomy, nearly a decade before any other?

Illinois made the change in 1962 by adopting the Model Penal Code, a template drawn up by the American Law Institute. Until then sodomy had been a felony in every state.

Which poet, who called herself a Black lesbian mother warrior, coined 'biomythography' for her 1982 book Zami?

Audre Lorde built the word from biography and mythology. She served as New York State's poet laureate from 1991 until her death, and wrote The Cancer Journals about her own illness.

Which magazine, begun in 1967 as an activist group's newsletter, is America's oldest surviving LGBTQ publication?

The Advocate grew out of protests against a police raid on a Los Angeles bar on New Year's Day 1967. Two of its staff bought the paper from its activist owners for one dollar the next year.

Which Missouri defensive end became the first openly gay player drafted by an NFL team, the St. Louis Rams, in 2014?

Michael Sam had just been named his conference's defensive player of the year. The Rams cut him before the season, and he went on to become the first openly gay player in a Canadian Football League game.