LGBTQ+ History and Culture
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50 free LGBTQ+ History and Culture trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
LGBTQ+ history runs far deeper than most school lessons admit. It takes in emperors and poets of the ancient world, coded slang and secret manuscripts, police raids that turned into uprisings, and the court cases and elections that slowly changed the law. Alongside it grew a culture that shaped mainstream film, pop, dance, theatre and television. This quiz covers both. Expect questions on activists and pioneers, landmark firsts around the globe, the meaning of the letters in the acronym, and the artists, athletes and performers who came out when doing so carried real risk. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something. It suits curious beginners as much as seasoned quizzers: the opening rounds stick to names and stories most players will recognise, and later rounds dig into deeper cuts for anyone who wants a challenge. Use it for a Pride event, a classroom, a pub night or a quiet test of what you know.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which children's TV show had a handbag-carrying character denounced as a gay role model by Jerry Falwell in 1999?
Teletubbies
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.
Q 02Which Manhattan venue did police raid on 28 June 1969, sparking days of riots that reshaped gay activism?
Stonewall Inn
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.
Q 03Which mathematician, convicted of gross indecency in 1952, is the namesake of a 2017 British law pardoning gay men?
Alan Turing
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.
Q 04Which colour of ribbon, first worn on screen by Jeremy Irons at the 1991 Tony Awards, signals AIDS awareness?
Red
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.
Q 05Which dance style, born in Harlem's ballroom scene, did Madonna take into the mainstream with a 1990 hit?
Voguing
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.
Q 06Which San Francisco supervisor, elected in 1977, was the first openly gay man to win public office in California?
Harvey Milk
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.
Q 07Which ABC sitcom featured Mitchell and Cameron, a couple raising their adopted Vietnamese-born daughter Lily?
Modern Family
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.
Q 08Which US state became the first to open marriage to same-sex couples, in May 2004, after a court ruling?
Massachusetts
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.
Q 09Which Star Trek actor came out as gay in 2005 and later married his longtime partner, Brad Altman?
George Takei
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.
Q 10Which disco group, named after a Manhattan neighbourhood, dressed as a cowboy, a G.I. and a construction worker?
Village People
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.
Q 11Which drag performer broke into the mainstream with the early-1990s dance hit 'Supermodel (You Better Work)'?
RuPaul
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.
Q 12Which Puerto Rican pop star, a former member of the boy band Menudo, came out as gay on his website in 2010?
Ricky Martin
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.
Q 13Which British pop star came out in 1998 and sent up his own arrest in the video for the single 'Outside'?
George Michael
Q 21Who became the first transgender person on the cover of Time, beside the headline The Transgender Tipping Point?
Laverne Cox
Laverne Cox, then starring in Orange Is the New Black, was also the first openly transgender person given a waxwork at Madame Tussauds.
Q 22Which word for people who are not transgender was coined on a Usenet newsgroup in 1994 from a Latin prefix?
Cisgender
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.
Q 23Which country was the first in Southeast Asia to legalise same-sex marriage, with weddings starting in January 2025?
Thailand
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.
Q 14Which 1993 film won Tom Hanks an Oscar for playing a lawyer fired by a law firm that learned he had AIDS?
Philadelphia
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.
Q 15Which 2005 Ang Lee film follows two cowboys whose secret romance begins while herding sheep in Wyoming in 1963?
Brokeback Mountain
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.
Q 16Which comedian came out publicly in April 1997 and went on to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016?
Ellen DeGeneres
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.
Q 17Which former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, became the first openly gay Cabinet secretary in US history in 2021?
Pete Buttigieg
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.
Q 18In the acronym LGBTQIA+, which word, represented by a yellow flag with a purple circle, does the I stand for?
Intersex
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.
Q 19Which Australian city's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras began in 1978 as a protest that ended in 53 arrests?
Sydney
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.
Q 20Which tennis champion asked to defect from Czechoslovakia at 18 and has been openly gay since 1981?
Martina Navratilova
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.
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.
Q 24Which country, the fifth to legalise same-sex marriage, was first to protect sexual orientation in its constitution?
South Africa
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.
Q 25Which Russian composer, whose letters about loving men were long censored, left his bride within three months?
Tchaikovsky
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.
Q 26Which 2011 novel retells the Trojan War through Patroclus and his romance with the hero he grew up beside?
The Song of Achilles
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.
Q 27Which US president introduced the 'Don't ask, don't tell' compromise on gay troops after promising to lift the ban?
Bill Clinton
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.
Q 28Which 1996 rock musical moves Puccini's opera La Bohème to bohemian New York in the shadow of AIDS?
Rent
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.
Q 29Which musical, set in Berlin as the Nazis rise to power, draws on Christopher Isherwood's stories?
Cabaret
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.
Q 30Which artist and former US Army soldier created the rainbow flag with a collective in San Francisco in 1978?
Gilbert Baker
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.