The ’80s saw the birth of GLAAD and The LGBT Community Center as well as the start of the AIDS crisis, leading to ACT UP’s establishment in 1987. In 1977, the New York Supreme Court ruled in Renee Richards’ favor, making her the first trans woman to compete in the U.S. The Lesbian Herstory Archives, birthed by lesbian members of the Gay Academic Union including Joan Nestle, set up shop in Brooklyn. This is where Audre Lorde, then living on Staten Island, co-founded Kitchen-Table: Women of Color Press.
Thus began the more open development of lesbian life in New York. The Gay Activist Alliance formed in NYC six months after Stonewall, and the Lavender Menace group stood up against their exclusion from the feminist movement at the Second Congress to United Women in NYC on May 1970. The first-ever Gay Pride Parade came the next year in NYC’s West Village, led by bisexual activist Brenda Howard, starting from the Oscar Wilde Bookshop. In 1969, the Stonewall Uprising took place, a rebellion of gay men, trans women, butch women and working-class lesbians against ongoing police harassment.
In the 1960s, gay activism began gaining steam amid the feminist and other countercultural movements of the era - and new, increasingly liberal, city government led to genuine political progress. They joined the thousands of women who’d moved to the city to snag jobs unavailable to them prior to so many men shipping out to serve, and the long history of “chosen family” in the queer community began forming. military authority had begun cracking down on this allegedly deviant behavior for the first time, dropping soldiers off at the nearest port, many of whom believed they couldn’t go home again. Its rich history begins with “romantic friends” in the late 1880s and runs through World War II, when many lesbian and bisexual women were literally shipped to the city on “queer ships” of homosexual discharges. New York City is home to one of the biggest, loudest, proudest and most diverse lesbian, bisexual and queer populations in the world, as well as the U.S.’s largest trans population. If you’re in NYC, now until July 15〰️ check out the beautiful #stonewallexhibition at These pics don’t do it justice, the exhibition design is excellent.