Pride - LGBTQ History

An inside look at the music born, bred, and perfected in Chicago.

 Chicago house music originated in the city’s Black, gay underground in the late seventies and became one of the most popular musical genres in the world by the end of the century. In Chicago House Music: Culture and Community, Marguerite Harrold tells the story of the genre’s rise and the prolific creators who have sustained it for decades. You’ll learn about house music’s early innovators, like Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles, who transformed the social and political turmoil around them into a revolution in dance music. You’ll also hear remembrances from contemporary figures in the house community, like DJ Lady D, Avery R. Young, Czboogie and Edgar “Artek” Sinio, who have forged new paths as the genre has evolved. It’s a story about much more than music—it’s about a community struggling for acceptance, love, liberation, and freedom, and about the creative pioneers whose resilience helped turn house music into a worldwide phenomenon.

Full of interviews and first-hand accounts from the people who stood behind the turntables, carried crates of records, or danced until dawn, Chicago House Music is the history of an art form that continues to be a force for social interaction, spiritual liberation, and community today. 

How Long Beach caused the death of John A. Lamb.

Immediately after his 1914 election as mayor of Long Beach, Louis Napoleon Whealton fired the chief of police and raided the city treasury. To replenish the funds, Mayor Whealton concocted a scheme to collect fines from any male “who made advances toward other men.” Two special police officers entrapped and arrested thirty-one men, dragging them before a judge to pay up or risk a public trial. When one victim refused to play along, newspapers were quick to publish the names of everyone accused, including local pharmacist and popular churchman John A. Lamb. His suicide made headlines, but the city continued to target gay men well into this century.

Author and historian Gerrie Schipske uncovers the story of a tragic death with far-reaching consequences in Long Beach.

Denver is the Mile High City, the Queen City of the Plains, and the Gateway to the West. Today, the city attracts thousands of new residents each year, including the LGBTQ people from the rural West and digital nomads from around the nations seeking a welcoming community where they can thrive. In LGBTQ Denver, Phil Nash showcases how the city evolved from its pre-1970s history of rebuking gay people to a magnet for LGBTQ residents and the capital of the first state to elect and reelect the nation’s first openly gay governor.

San Francisco’s Transgender District, six blocks in the Tenderloin, was founded in 2017 by three black trans women. The first trans and gender nonconforming residents in the area were two-spirit residents of the Ramaytush Ohlone territory. After the founding of San Francisco, trans individuals continued to live, perform, advocate, and gather in the area. 

Some members of the trans community gained fame and fortune in local vaudeville theaters and performing in drag. Others regularly navigated issues with the police, landlords, and local businesses. The 1906 earthquake dramatically reshaped the neighborhood when Market Street was destroyed. José Julio Sarria, local clergy, “Screaming Queens,” the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Ms. Billie Cooper, and many others helped the trans community find glitter in the ashes and recover from hardship. The Transgender District includes the site of the first trans and queer uprising at Compton’s Cafeteria and Glide Memorial Church, the site of the first transgender support group in the United States. 

Rev. Dr. Megan Rohrer, an activist, award-winning historian, and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender nonfiction, leads regular walking tours of the district. Images in this book come from his personal collection, museums, archives, and local photographers.

Delve into the compilation of images that show how Richmond has a unique story to lend to the larger national LGBT history.

The history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Richmond, Virginia, invokes a rich but uncelebrated past. From the first recorded sodomy prosecution in America in 1624 to the fight to repeal the ""crimes against nature"" laws, LGBTs have left their imprint on almost 400 years of history in the Old Dominion's capital. Lesbian and Gay Richmond presents a photographic showcase of the events, people, and places that have been a part of this history. There are snapshots from the 1920s and 1930s when avant-garde and gay authors caroused and shared ideas in private homes. Previously untold stories from the post-World War II era tell of the rise of the gay cafés in Richmond and the subsequent attempts by the authorities to shut their doors. Much like larger cities to the north and west of Richmond, the attempts to close these bars led to the first public protests in the late 1960s. Other images show how Richmond has a unique story to lend to the larger national LGBT history.

Famous and forgotten, they’re all our fabulous ancestors.

From Charles Warren Stoddard, the first openly gay San Franciscan, to Felicia “Flames” Elizondo, the exuberant transgender rights advocate, the LGBT community is integrally woven into the fabric of the city’s history. Household names like Queen Califia, Charley Parkhurst, Elsa Gidlow, Jose Sarria and Harvey Milk are celebrated worldwide, while Bert LaRose, Mabel Edison and Clarence Lockett are now largely forgotten. Whether ’49ers, bohemians, beatniks, boomers, hippies, clones or conformists, their fascinating stories contributed to the development of a vibrant community, many simply by being themselves.

Join Dr. William Lipsky as he recounts their struggles and achievements in the City by the Bay.

In 1974, one of San Francisco’s most horrific unsolved serial murder cases began.

In less than two years, the man police called “The Doodler” took at least five lives, terrorized the LGBTQ community, and left three survivors forever changed. Initial reports claimed the murderer didn’t approach his victims with the knife he used to kill them, but that the suspect shared skilled drawings—sketches of faces and animals—before leaving a string of gay men to bleed out on the sands of Ocean Beach. Police investigations and activist efforts to uncover the killer led to several suspects, but no definitive identification of the artist of death.

Author Kate Zaliznock shines a light on this riveting cold case.

Long Beach, California, founded in the 1880s by conservative, pro-temperance settlers, has been known as “American Colony,” “Queen of the Beaches,” “Iowa-By-The Sea,” “Home of the Pike,” and “Paradise for Pansies.” This book gives a glimpse of how Long Beach went from making national headlines in 1914 for entrapping 31 gay men as “social vagrants” to receiving a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s “Municipal Equality Index” for issues that contribute to a positive climate for LGBTQA+ people. Over time, Long Beach changed, becoming one of the most diverse cities in California. Voters elected a lesbian to city council in 2006 and a gay mayor in 2014 who they sent to Congress in 2022. Its new main library is named in honor of its hometown lesbian heroine, Billie Jean King. Today, Long Beach has the third largest “Pride Parade and Festival” in California.

Located in the middle of the nation’s heartland, Wichita, Kansas, has been a regional hub for LGBTQ persons, forming a community that extended well beyond just local residents.

In spite of the area’s restrictive laws and conservative attitudes, these people have, since the 1960s, found space among an ever-fluid bar and club scene and a larger network from community centers to rodeos to religious organizations to art and activism groups. It has a history that includes one of the nation’s earliest gay rights ordinances as well as pioneering figures in AIDS research. The community has faced discrimination and hostility and the AIDS crisis. Since then, it has celebrated milestones like the legalization of gay marriage and the losses of many of its key leaders. With a legacy that extends from homophile to gender fluid, this story provides a window into how LGBTQ persons in the center of the country have both faced challenges and lived ordinary lives.

Since 2010, The Center of Wichita has been a community resource and is proud to preserve the history of the LGBTQ community of the region. Working with a team of researchers and students from Wichita State University, The Center of Wichita hopes that this work inspires future collecting and storytelling. 

From arrests and ostracization to public festivals and drag shows, the LGBTQ+ people of Evansville have walked a twisting path to their current existence.

In the early days of the city, local newspapers harassed and bullied members of this group, even going so far as to encourage them to commit suicide. A series of murders in the 1950s and 1960s left Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender population of Evansville without justice and validation. The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s did the same. Happily, things have changed. Today, the city’s LGBTQ community is out and proud, and thousands attend the annual Pride parade down Main Street.

Looking back on more than a century of uneven progress, Kelley Coures unfolds this often tragic yet at times hopeful story.

"Jack's sports reporting was always fair, honest, and straightforward. He tells his own story in the same exact way." —Cris Collinsworth, NBC Sunday Night Football

In Jack Brennan’s decades-long career as a sports journalist, he covered teams like the MLB’s Reds and the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals. As the public relations director for the Bengals, he wrangled sports stories, reporters, and players. At home, he played basketball with the neighborhood husbands and raised three kids with his wife, to whom he was devoted. At the same time, he had a passion that never left him: he liked dressing as a woman. Blonde silky hair, bright lips, and smooth legs escaping short skirts, topped off with heels as high as they go. 

He kept his life as a crossdresser mostly private, so his public coming out via The Athletic in 2021—one of the first men in the NFL to come out as LGBTQ+—was a surprise to many. Football Sissy offers a no-holds-barred trip through his dual lives, from his earliest love affair with a puff-sleeve blouse at age three through to his first jaunts dressed in public to surprise visits to the hospital alongside a fulfilling family life and an exciting career.

Told with the characteristic humor and ease of Brennan’s sports columns, Football Sissy is a heartwarming tale of acceptance and love, even within the most masculine of environments. 

Gay and Lesbian Philadelphia is a historical look at the neighborhoods, events, and people that have been a part of this community. The 1920s saw the birth of private dance bars on Rittenhouse Square. It was a time when drag shows in straight bars were the order of the day, as was the presence of men in drag during the annual Mummer's Parade on New Year's Day. The pre-Civil Rights era, when segregation was the status quo, saw the proliferation of African American house parties in neighborhoods such as North Philadelphia, where black gays and lesbians formed a community. During the 1950s and 1960s, Rittenhouse Square was the site of informal public gatherings. These gatherings of friends and strangers helped set the stage for the Annual Reminder, the first public protest in support of "homosexual equal rights," which took place every Fourth of July at Independence Hall. Throughout all of these eras, members of the community faced challenges, celebrated victories, and continued to try to blend their lives with those of their gay and straight neighbors.

Long before Stonewall, queerness thrived in the Queen City.

From queer soldiers in 1862 to drag kings and queens who lit up saloons and concert halls, Cincinnati’s early LGBTQ+ history reaches into the forgotten corners of the city's past, introducing unlikely and extraordinary figures. Like Mary Ann Jefferson, a Black transgender woman who, in the late nineteenth century, became a fixture in the criminal underworld of Rat Row, Cincinnati’s most dangerous neighborhood. Or Julius "Junkie" Fleischmann, a gay man who, even as the U.S. government launched a purge of homosexuals from its ranks, secretly served as a covert operative for the CIA at the end of World War II.

Charting the rise of pre-Stonewall bars, brothels, and hidden sanctuaries that offered fleeting refuge amid relentless repression, historian Jacob Hogue offers a bold, long-overdue reclaiming of queer Cincinnati’s place in the American narrative.

For over a century, drag has been an unstoppable force in Milwaukee nightlife. On June 7, 1884, "The Only Leon'? brought the fine art of female impersonation to the Grand Opera Hall, launching a proud local legacy that continues today at This Is It, La Cage, Hamburger Mary's, D.I.X. and innumerable other venues.

Historians Michail Takach and BJ Daniels recognize that today's LGBTQ liberties were born from the strength, resilience, and resistance of yesterday's gender non-conforming pioneers. This is a long overdue celebration of those stories, including high-rolling hustler of the Fourth Ward "Badlands'? Frank Blunt, over-the-top dinner theater drag superstar of the 1950s Adrian Ames, and "It Kid'? Jamie Gays, first-ever Miss Gay Milwaukee and Latin community hero.

And many, many more.