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.

Anthony De Riggi, 88, died last March 23, his passing noted in his hometown of Farmingdale, New York, but virtually unreported in Wilton Manors, the city where he made his name: Tony Dee.