A more complete list of important dates can be found at the
Archive of Gay History
SIXTEENTH CENTURY
In 1528-36
Spanish explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca makes the earliest written account
of effeminate "Indians" in Florida who "go about dressed as women and do women's tasks."
In 1566
In Florida, Guillermo, a French interpreter accused of being a traitor and
"a great Sodomite" is murdered by the Spaniards.
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
In 1610
The Virginia Colony passes the earliest American sodomy law, dictating the
death penalty for offenders. The law does not include women as potential "sodomites."
In 1613
Francisco de Pareja, a Spanish missionary with the Florida Indians, records
in his work Confessionario (Confessional) the likelihood of sodomy between native
men and of sexual acts between native women.
In 1624
Though the evidence is slim, Richard Cornish, master of the ship Ambrose,
is executed by hanging in the Virginia Colony for alleged "buggery" of one of his
indentured servants, the ship's steward, William Cowse.
In 1629
The Virginia Court records the first incidence of gender ambiguity among the
American Colonists.
In 1636
In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Rev. John Cotton proposes the death
penalty for sixteen crimes, including sodomy, which he calls `unnatural filthiness' and
defines as "carnal fellowship of man with man, or woman with woman."
.
In 1641
The Massachusetts Bay Colony adopts a body of laws (which remain
unprinted until 1648), including sodomy as a capital crime.
In 1642
Connecticut adopts twelve capital crimes, among which is sodomy, defined
as "a man lying with a man.".
In 1646
Jan Creoli, a Negro, is executed by choking, in New Netherland, for
sodomy. Manuel Congo, the ten year old whom Creoli allegedly raped, receives
a public flogging.
In 1646
In Connecticut, William Plaine, one of the original settlers of
the town of Guilford, is accused of committing sodomy twice in England and of corrupting a
great part of the youth of Guilford by masturbation. Plaine is executed in New Haven.
In 1647
Rhode Island passes a law making sodomy between men a capital
offense.
In 1649
In Plymouth, two married women, Sara Norman and Mary Hammon, are charged
with "lewd behavior . . . upon a bed." Hammon, who is fifteen, is cleared of the
charges. Norman, apparently older, is required to acknowledge publicly her unchaste behavior
and receives a warning that if there are any subsequent carriages, her punishment will be
greater.
In 1656
New Haven passes a law that punished by death "men lying with men as with
women" and women changing "the natural use, into that which is against nature." This
law is unique among colonial legislation for its inclusion of women's "unnatural" acts.
In 1660
In New Netherland, Jan Quisthout van der Linde is, by drowning, executed for
sodomy.
In 1665
Conquered by the English in 1664, New Netherland becomes a proprietary
colony of the Duke of York. The following year, representatives from several towns enact
laws that include the death penalty for sodomy between men over the age of fourteen.
The law specifies that if "one party were forced" he was exempt from capital
punishment.
In 1668
New Jersey makes sodomy between men a capital crime, exempting children
under fourteen and victims of force. (Plymouth and Connecticut subsequently amend their
sodomy laws in 1671 and 1672 to include the same exemptions.)
In 1680
New Hampshire passes its first capital laws, including sodomy between
men, `unless one party were forced, or were under fourteen years of age.
In 1682
The Province of Pennsylvania, a Quaker colony, enacts legislation that
makes sodomy by "any person" a non-capital offense. Pennsylvania is the first American
colony to show such "leniency."
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
In 1712
Mingo, a slave of Wait Winthrop, chief justice of Massachusetts, is executed
in Charlestown, South Carolina for "forcible buggery."
In 1718
Pennsylvania revises its sodomy law, making it a capital
offense.
In 1719
The Delaware Assembly adopts a sodomy law, reproduced from the 1718
Pennsylvania law. Legislators include the text of the English "buggery law" of 1533,
including its death penalty in their colonial statutes.
In 1776
Fleury Mesplet, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and a fellow printer,
publishes the play Jonathas et David, or Le Triomphe de l'Amitie, which
becomes the first
book ever printed in Montreal. The play is a three part tragedy describing the thinly
veiled homoerotic relationship between Jonathan and David in the Old Testament.
In 1778
In the newly formed Continental Army, Lieutenant Frederick Gotthold Enslin
is court-martialed for "attempting to commit sodomy."
In 1782
Deborah Sampson, a descendent of Gov. William Bradford, is excommunicated from
the First Baptist Church of Middleborough, Massachusetts for "dressing in men's clothes"
and for behaving "very loose and unChristian like."
In 1798
Moreau de St. Merry, a French lawyer and politician, writes that,
in Philadelphia, where he has lived for several years, women "are not at all strangers
to being will to seek unnatural pleasures with persons of their own sex."
NINETEENTH CENTURY
In 1804-10
Nicholas Biddle, a member of the Lewis and Clark expeditions, records that
"Among Minitarees (Indians) if a boy shows any symptoms of effeminacy or girlish
inclinations he is put among the girls, dressed in their way, brought up with them &
sometimes married to men." The French called them Birdashes.
In 1811
In an account of events at Fort Astoria in the Oregon Territory, Gabriel
Franchere makes the first written reference to a female berdache from the Kutenai Indian
nation, who dressed as a man and was accompanied by a "wife."
In 1846
Edward McCosker is dismissed from the New York City Police Department for
making "indecent' advances to other men while on duty."
In 1860
Walt Whitman publishes the homoerotic Leaves of Grass, which
later inspires numerous gay poets.
In 1870
Bayard Taylor's Joseph and His Friend, the first U.S. novel to touch
on the subject of homosexuality, is published.
In 1896
For the first time on the American stage, two women hug and kiss in a scene
of the play A Florida Enchantment. Though the play is not lesbian in content, the scene is
so controversial that at intermission, ushers offer ice water to any audience member who
feels faint.
In 1897
Havelock Ellis writes in his famous Sexual Inversion of "the great
prevalence of sexual inversion in
American cities." His book is the first to treat homosexuality impartially, but his
observations are limited to men.
TWENTIETH CENTURY
In 1901
Influential New York politician Murray Hall dies and is revealed to
have been a woman passing as a man.
In 1912
At Polly Halliday's restaurant in New York City, Heterodoxy, a feminist
luncheon club for "unorthodox women" begins meeting bimonthly.
In 1914
In Portland, Oregon, a dictionary of criminal slang is published, in which
the first printed use of the word faggot to refer to male homosexuals
appears.
In 1917
In Montreal, nineteen year old Elsa Gidlow, a budding writer and a lesbian,
starts an artists' salon in her parents' home, which welcomes several women writers,
a painter, and a gay man named Roswell George Mills, who becomes her mentor.
In 1919
Under the orders of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S.
Navy, dispatching a squad of young enlisted men to act as decoys, initiates a search for
"sexual perverts" at the Newport (R.I.) Naval Training Station.
In 1920-35
Referred to as the Harlem Renaissance, this period witnesses an
unprecedented flourishing of African-American culture in the U.S. Central to this
significant time in African-American history are many gay and lesbian writers, artists,
and musicians.
In 1923
Sholom Asch's God of Vengeance, one of the earliest plays with
lesbian content, opens on Broadway.
In 1924
Henry Gerber and others found the Society for Human Rights in Illinois,
believed to be the first homosexual-rights organization in the U.S .
In 1924
The Captive, another early play with lesbian content, opens on
Broadway, starring Helen Menken, then the wife of Humphrey Bogart.
In 1926
"The journal "Fire!", a periodical showcasing the work of Harlem Renaissance
writers, publishes its first and only issue. Included is the erotic narrative poem "Smoke,
Lilies and Jade", by Bruce Nugent, which is the first published piece about homosexuality
by an African-American writer.
In 1927
Written and produced by Mae West, The Drag, the first play with gay
male content to be produced in the U.S., debuts in Connecticut on its way to
Broadway.
In 1929
New York publisher Covici-Friede is convicted of obscenity for publishing
Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. The conviction is later
appealed and overturned.
In 1930
Hollywood studios enact the Motion Picture
Production Code, prohibiting all references to homosexuality or "sexual perversion" in the
movies.
In 1934
Despite the Padlock Bill, Lillian Hellman's play,
The Children's Hour, about two teachers accused by a student of being lesbians,
opens on Broadway.
In 1942
The U.S. military issues further official prohibition against homosexuals
in the armed forces.
In 1948
The Kinsey Institute publishes its controversial ground-breaking study of
sexual behavior in American men, followed in later years by a study of the sexual
behavior of American women
In 1951
Harry Hay, Chuck Rowland, and others found the Mattachine Society in Los
Angeles, one of the first gay organizations in the U.S. and forerunner of the current
Gay Liberation Movement.
In 1952
The U.S. Congress enacts a law banning lesbian and gay foreigners from
entering the country. The legislation is on the books until its repeal in
1990.
In 1952
George Jorgensen, a former sergeant in the U.S. Army, undergoes his famous
sex-change operation in Denmark, becoming Christine Jorgensen.
In 1952
The Kinsey Institute publishes its second historic
study on human sexuality, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
In 1952
Dr. Evelyn Hooker begins her historic study of the
male homosexual personality. In the late 1950s she publishes the
findings of her research in a series of monographs, reporting that
she "can find no signs of maladjustment in homosexual men's personalities."
In 1954
The Los Angeles postmaster seizes copies of ONE magazine and refuses to
mail them, on the grounds that they are "obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy."
In 1955
The Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization in the U.S., is
founded in San Francisco by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.
In 1957
The American Civil Liberties Union adopts a national policy statement that
sustains the constitutionality of state sodomy laws and federal security regulations denying
employment to gay men and lesbians. The ACLU finally reverses this policy in 1964.
n 1961
Illinois becomes the first state to abolish its laws against
consensual homosexual sex.
In 1964
The first homosexual rights demonstration in New York City takes
place.
In 1965
The Mattachine Society leads a picket in front of the White House,
protesting the government's discriminatory employment practices.
In 1966
The SIR Center (Society for Individual Rights) opens in San Francisco,
the first gay community center in North America.
In 1967
The Advocate, the oldest continuing gay publication in the U.S.,
begins publishing in Los Angeles.
In 1967
The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the oldest gay bookstore in the U.S.,
opens in New York City on Mercer Street. In 1973 the store relocates to its current site
at the junction of Christopher and Gay Streets.
In 1969
In late June, when plainclothes police raid the Stonewall Inn
in New York's Greenwich village, they meet violent resistance from gay patrons of the bar
and people on the street, including transvestites, butch lesbians, and gay teenagers. That
weekend of riots, the Stonewall Riots, is now viewed as
THE START OF THE MODERN GAY RIGHTS MOVEMENT.
In 1969
Taking its name from the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, the Gay
Liberation Front is founded in New York by participants in the Stonewall riots and others
in the gay community as an ongoing militant political action group.
In 1969
Time magazine's "The Homosexual in America" becomes the first cover story on
gay rights in a national magazine.
In 1969
Amendments to the Canadian criminal code take effect, legalizing private
sexual acts between consenting adults over the age of twenty-one.
In 1970
The first legislative hearings on gay rights in the U.S. are convened in
New York City by three New York State Assembly members.
In 1970
The first march to commemorate the Stonewall Riots is held in New
York.
AND SO IT GOES, AS STEPHEN, JONATHAN's FRIEND, IN SHEELEY's NOVEL,
PREDICTS . . . . .
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