September 19: We Were Already Here
🏳️🌈 THIS DAY IN LGBTQ+ HISTORY
Before Pride became a global celebration, before rainbow logos appeared across corporate America, before marriage equality and before social media gave LGBTQ+ people the ability to find community with a few taps on a screen, we were already here. Black and white LGBTQ+ people were living, loving, creating, organizing and quietly changing America long before the country was ready to openly acknowledge us. Some made history in crowded clubs and underground gathering spaces. Others made it through books, courtrooms, military service, art, music and activism. Their experiences weren't identical, but together they created the complicated, beautiful and sometimes uncomfortable history behind today's LGBTQ+ community.
For generations, simply being visible could come with consequences. Gay men and lesbians could lose jobs, housing, military careers and family relationships if their sexuality became known. Police routinely targeted gay establishments, and homosexuality was treated by major institutions as something criminal, immoral or mentally disordered. That meant LGBTQ+ people became experts at creating community underneath the surface of mainstream America. Bars became meeting places. Bookstores became information centers. Apartments became organizing headquarters. Nightclubs became safe spaces. Friends became family. What outsiders sometimes dismissed as nightlife was often something much deeper: a community creating room to breathe.
Black LGBTQ+ people were already part of that story decades before the modern gay-rights movement. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, Harlem became one of America's most important centers of Black art, literature, music and nightlife. Queer Black artists and intellectuals were part of that cultural explosion. Harlem's cabarets, rent parties, drag balls and nightlife created spaces where sexuality and gender expression could sometimes exist more openly than mainstream society allowed. Black queer culture wasn't sitting outside American culture watching it develop. It was helping create the music, language, fashion, literature and energy that America would eventually celebrate.
Alain Locke, one of the intellectual architects of the Harlem Renaissance, belongs within that history. So does writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent, whose work addressed same-sex attraction with remarkable openness for his generation. Their stories challenge the idea that Black LGBTQ+ history suddenly appeared after Stonewall. Black queer people had already been creating, loving and influencing American culture long before the modern vocabulary surrounding LGBTQ+ identity existed.
That legacy continued through people like James Baldwin, whose writing confronted America with uncomfortable conversations about race, sexuality, religion, masculinity and love. Baldwin refused to make himself smaller so society could understand him more easily. Audre Lorde brought another dimension to that history, writing unapologetically as a Black lesbian woman, mother, poet and activist. She challenged racism, sexism and homophobia without pretending those struggles existed in separate rooms. Later, writers such as Essex Hemphill would speak directly about Black gay men, desire, masculinity, family and AIDS. Their work gave language to experiences that mainstream America often ignored.
At the same time, white gay men and lesbians were building organizations that would become important pieces of the early LGBTQ+ rights movement. The Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis created networks during a period when publicly identifying as homosexual could destroy someone's reputation and career. Activists such as Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny and Harry Hay challenged government discrimination, psychiatric classifications and the idea that gay and lesbian people should simply remain invisible.
These movements were important, but they weren't perfect. Predominantly white LGBTQ+ organizations could reproduce the same racism that existed throughout American society. Black LGBTQ+ people could find themselves fighting homophobia in Black communities while confronting racism inside gay spaces. Lesbians sometimes had to challenge sexism inside organizations dominated by gay men. Transgender and gender-nonconforming people could help build movements and still find themselves pushed away when organizations wanted to appear more acceptable to mainstream America.
That tension is part of LGBTQ+ history too.
There were moments of beautiful solidarity, and there were moments when members of our own community failed one another. Telling the full story means acknowledging both. Black and white LGBTQ+ Americans weren't walking through the same America simply because they shared a sexuality. Race affected housing, employment, policing, healthcare and nearly every other part of American life. A white gay man could experience serious homophobia while still benefiting from racial privileges unavailable to a Black gay man. A Black lesbian could experience racism, sexism and homophobia simultaneously. Our histories intersected, but our experiences weren't interchangeable.
The Stonewall era brought many of these different identities into the same historical frame. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black gender-nonconforming activist, became one of the most recognizable figures associated with the movement that emerged after Stonewall. Stormé DeLarverie, a biracial lesbian and drag king, became another enduring symbol of resistance. Sylvia Rivera, a Latina activist, fought fiercely for transgender and gender-nonconforming people whose struggles weren't always prioritized by the broader gay-rights movement. Alongside them were countless white gay men, lesbians and other LGBTQ+ people who protested, organized, published newspapers, created political organizations and demanded change.
The movement wasn't one color, one gender or one story. It was a collection of people who had different experiences but understood what it meant to be told that some part of who they were needed to remain hidden.
That struggle for visibility eventually reached America's military. One of the most recognizable figures from that fight was Leonard Matlovich, a white gay Vietnam veteran who deliberately challenged the United States Air Force's prohibition against homosexual service members in 1975. Matlovich had served for twelve years and completed three tours in Vietnam. He had received a Purple Heart and Bronze Star, yet acknowledging that he was gay suddenly placed his military career in jeopardy.
Matlovich understood the contradiction. America had trusted him to serve his country, but the same government questioned whether he should continue serving once it knew he was gay. His story eventually reached the cover of TIME magazine in September 1975, placing an openly gay man in military uniform before millions of Americans. The image became powerful because it challenged stereotypes about what a gay man supposedly looked like and what roles gay people could occupy.
Interestingly, Matlovich had also worked as a race-relations instructor in the military. His experiences studying racial discrimination influenced the way he thought about discrimination based on sexuality. The struggles weren't identical, but the larger question was difficult to ignore: when should government institutions be allowed to exclude someone because of who that person is rather than how well that person performs their job?
That question would continue long after Matlovich. LGBTQ+ service members lived through decades of exclusion and eventually the era of “Don't Ask, Don't Tell,” when gay, lesbian and bisexual personnel could serve only under restrictions surrounding disclosure of their sexuality. Matlovich died from complications related to AIDS in 1988 and never lived to see the military changes that would come generations later.
The AIDS epidemic would become one of the most painful chapters connecting Black and white LGBTQ+ history. Gay and bisexual men died in enormous numbers while government response was widely criticized as inadequate. Black and Latino communities would also experience devastating HIV/AIDS burdens, complicated by healthcare disparities, economic inequality and stigma. Once again, the epidemic demonstrated that LGBTQ+ people could share a crisis without experiencing that crisis in exactly the same way.
Communities responded because they had to. Gay men became caregivers for partners and friends. Lesbians played major roles in caregiving, organizing and advocacy. Black LGBTQ+ organizations created education and outreach programs for communities that weren't always being reached effectively by mainstream AIDS organizations. Activists demanded research, medication and government action. Artists documented what was happening. Friends became legal advocates, nurses, emergency contacts and family when biological relatives refused to show up.
Some neighborhoods seemed to attend funeral after funeral.
And still, the community kept moving.
That resilience is one of the threads connecting generations of LGBTQ+ history. When society denied us spaces, we created them. When publishers ignored our experiences, we wrote our own stories. When organizations excluded us, we built new organizations. When families rejected people, chosen families formed. When government policies treated LGBTQ+ people as problems to be managed rather than citizens to be respected, activists challenged those policies.
Black LGBTQ+ people contributed extraordinary culture while fighting racism and homophobia. White LGBTQ+ activists challenged laws and institutions designed to keep homosexuality invisible. Latino LGBTQ+ organizers fought for recognition inside multiple communities. Transgender and gender-nonconforming people challenged society's expectations about gender while sometimes fighting for recognition within the LGBTQ+ movement itself. Lesbians confronted sexism and homophobia. Bisexual people fought against being treated as though their identities weren't real.
No single group owns LGBTQ+ history.
We built it together, but we didn't all experience the journey the same way.
That distinction matters.
September 19 gives us an opportunity to look beyond a single famous person or event and recognize the larger truth behind LGBTQ+ history. Progress didn't begin when mainstream America finally started paying attention. The culture, relationships, activism and communities already existed. The world simply became less able to pretend they didn't.
The Harlem Renaissance had queer Black voices. Early gay-rights organizations had people risking careers and reputations simply by organizing. Stonewall had people of different races, genders and backgrounds refusing to accept another night of harassment. The AIDS epidemic had communities caring for one another when too many institutions failed them. Military veterans challenged policies that told them their service mattered less because they were gay.
Different generations. Different races. Different experiences. Different battles.
One extraordinary history.
We were in the jazz clubs. We were in the military. We were writing the books. We were creating the art. We were organizing meetings behind closed doors. We were marching through the streets. We were caring for people in hospital rooms. We were building businesses. We were creating families. We were falling in love.
America didn't suddenly create LGBTQ+ people when it finally began acknowledging us.
We were already here.
And that may be one of the most important lessons our history can teach the next generation. Visibility can change. Laws can change. Language can change. Culture can change. But LGBTQ+ people have always found ways to exist, connect and leave something behind for the people coming after them.
September 19 is about honoring that inheritance. It's about remembering Black LGBTQ+ trailblazers and white LGBTQ+ pioneers without pretending their experiences were identical. It's about recognizing the people whose names became famous and the thousands whose names history never recorded. Most importantly, it's about understanding that the LGBTQ+ community we see today stands on generations of people who built lives in a world that often told them they shouldn't.
🏳️🌈 Know the history. Honor the differences. Celebrate the culture. Remember the struggle. Tell the whole story.
I AM ME INC.
This Day in LGBTQ+ History is presented by I Am Me Inc. as part of our commitment to informing, empowering, connecting and celebrating LGBTQ+ people and our Allies.
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Our History. Our Voices. Our Legacy.
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