Check out these stories to celebrate LGBTQ History Month.
History
On Sept. 20, 1973, in their so-called “Battle of the Sexes,” tennis star Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, in the Houston Astrodome. It was the first time a woman had played against a man in such a venue, and it was an historic event with much media hype and an astounding amount of betting in Las Vegas with the odds in Riggs’s favor.
After months of deliberation, David Sheldon Fearon wrote a letter in 1959 to the committee responsible for developing the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible. Fearon, recently deceased, was then a 21-year-old seminary student in Canada who hoped to call attention to a mistranslation he’d discovered.
Robin Roberts (1960) is an American television broadcaster. Roberts is the anchor of ABC's Good Morning America. After growing up in Mississippi and attending Southeastern Louisiana University, Roberts was a sports anchor for local TV and radio stations. Roberts was a sportscaster on ESPN for 15 years (1990–2005). She became co-anchor on Good Morning America in 2005. She has been treated for breast cancer and for myelodysplastic syndrome.
It was 10 years ago that television writer Tracy Dawson met with studio executives, sharing the shows that resonated with her and where she could see herself writing. The response was not what she expected: they had hired out spots for female writers and were not in need of more.
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual freedom, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy and openness to Eastern religions.
Investigating obscure mysteries is often fun but not often rewarding. However, publishing information about one puts it out there and other armchair sleuths piggyback on the work you have laid out. That is just what happened with my July 17, 2019 investigation on the mysteries Allen Parsons, published in the South Florida Gay News. The statute of limitations on the case had run out and were no longer chargeable, but I still figured it would be a fun piece to read and thought it to be practically unsolvable after 40 years.
It’s hard to believe now but from the time South Florida began to grow in the 1890s through World War I in the 1910s, the land boom of the 1920s, the great depression in the 1930s, and World War II in the 1940s, the LGTBQ population lived in relative obscurity. There were always gay people, there were gay bars and clubs and even drag shows (known as female impersonators). It was just something that was there, something that was happening and nobody really talked about it or interfered and everyone was just fine with that…until 1954. The famous “Homosexual Panic” that battled gays from the 1950s through the 1980s and still has lasting remnants today in South Florida can be traced to one incident; the murder of Eastern Airlines Flight Attendant William T. Simpson in August of 1954 and Miami Daily News journalist Milt Sosin’s reporting of the incident.
1898: The German Social Democratic Party was the first to support gay rights. The only one to support the demands of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee when it submitted its first petition for repeal of the anti-homosexual Paragraph 175 of the German penal code.
For years, people have debated what actually happened that night in June 1969 when Stonewall was raided and a new, more militant struggle for equality was born.
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