Books for the LGBTQ History in Your Life

Virginia's Hampton Roads region has long attracted diverse and mobile people, some of whom embraced same-sex love or fluid gender identities long before lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities identified as such. By the mid-1900s, Hampton Roads would lead the state in its development of LGBT institutions and infrastructure. Our Own Press would chronicle the extraordinary burst of creativity and activism that seemed to place LGBT developments in the region on a national stage. In the late 1980s and 1990s, however, military crackdowns and the HIV/AIDS epidemic devastated the leadership of local LGBT communities. Only in the new century would there be a renaissance of networking and engagement to bring the annual Pride Festival to center stage at Town Point Park in Norfolk.

Baltimore has long had an LGBT community, but it was not until the 1960s that this ostracized minority of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals began demanding equality. By 1973, Metropolitan Community Church was established, and in 1975, a brave band of a dozen met for a Pride Rally at Mount Vernon Square. It was also at this time that the Gay and Lesbian Community Center emerged, offering a clinic and gay youth and lesbian support groups. The Johns Hopkins SHARE (Study to Help the AIDS Research Effort) became a national model in 1984 for the treatment and etiology of HIV. The award-winning Chase Brexton Clinic serves thousands every year, having grown from a tiny office to the biggest AIDS health care facility in the city, with six more locations in Maryland today.

Cincinnati's LGBTQ history is a study in riveting contradictions. Seen as one of the more conservative cities in Ohio, Cincinnati is also the home of the first Pride march in the entire state. A strong move to censor the LGBTQ-related art of Robert Mapplethorpe at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center resulted in a nationally publicized trial where freedom of expression emerged victorious in the face of those who zealously sought to suppress the LGBTQ community's voice. The passage of Issue 3 in 1993 epitomized the tenet that minority rights should never be up for majority vote, while the repeal of Article XII eleven years later displayed the sheer power of mobilization. Through protests, celebrations, and demonstrations of unadulterated pride, Cincinnati has proven itself over and over again as a community of individuals trying to make the Queen City live up to its royal--and decidedly LGBTQ--name.

For a medium-size Rust Belt city with German Protestant roots, Milwaukee was an unlikely place for gay and lesbian culture to bloom before the Stonewall Riots.

However, Milwaukee eventually had as many--if not more--known LGBTQ+ gathering places as Minneapolis or Chicago, ranging from the back rooms of bars in the 1960s to the video bars of the 1980s to the openly gay bars and Pride Festivals of today. Over the past 75 years, LGBTQ+ people have experienced tremendous social change in America, and Milwaukee is a shining example of how a city of "traditional values'? embraced its brothers and sisters to make the city a safe place for them to live; in 2001, Milwaukee was even named the ,1 city for lesbians.