20 famous LGBTQ+ people who changed the world
07/08/16
20 Famous LGBTQ+ people who changed the world
The LGBTQ+ community has evolved exponentially since the Stonewall Riots, generally considered the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. But queer folks were making an impact on the world long before the 1969 summer uprising outside the Stonewall Inn and they’ve continued to make an impact.
We’ve curated a list of 20 gay people in history who made a difference: great military leaders, a groundbreaking feminist monarch, revered authors, revolutionary activists. This list includes many names you will recognize, and some you may have not heard previously or knew were LGBTQ+.
Keep scrolling to see 20 LGBTQ+ people who changed the world.
Alexander the Great
Born Alexander III of Macedon, Alexander the Great came to think of himself as a demigod and a son of Zeus, the Greeks’ highest-ranking Olympian god, Joshua J. Mark writes in the World History Encyclopedia.
After inheriting an already significant kingdom from his father, Philip II, Alexander conquered Persia, Egypt, India, and beyond, spreading an advanced culture and high-minded ethos across his massive empire and ushering in the Hellenistic Period.
Considering his youthful accomplishments and strikingly handsome appearance, it’s no wonder that Alexander is often considered history’s first young queer hero. Although historians love to point out the inappropriateness of applying modern constructs such as “gay,” “bisexual,” “homosexual,” or “queer” to an ancient king like Alexander, no serious historian doubts that history’s penultimate warrior-monarch was attracted to men.
Hatshepsut
It may not be entirely accurate to refer to Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt as transgender, but it’s certainly not wholly inaccurate either.
Hatshepsut called herself a king and inscribed titles on granite monuments referring to herself as “Her Majesty, the King.” She further asserted her "kingship" by wearing the garb of a male monarch – even having a false beard made to fit her chin.
Hatshepsut also looked for ways to meld the image of king and queen to head off questions about a female sovereign, Chip Brown writes of Hatshepsut for National Geographic.
“In one seated red granite statue, Hatshepsut is shown with the unmistakable body of a woman but with the striped nemes headdress and uraeus cobra, symbols of a king,” Brown writes. “In some temple reliefs, Hatshepsut is dressed in a traditional restrictive ankle-length gown but with her feet wide apart in the striding pose of the king.”
By the time her nearly 20-year reign ended with her death in 1458 BCE, Hatshepsut had changed the world by laying the new political and architectural foundations upon which her successor, stepson Thutmose III, would grow Egypt’s dominance of North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of the Mediterranean. Sadly, Thutsmose III zealously sought to erase the arguably transgender aspects of his stepmother’s memory to secure the throne for his offspring.
After having been unknowingly passed over by famous Egyptologist Howard Carter in the 1920s, the queen-king’s mummy was positively identified using DNA technology. Discarded on the floor in a “pile of rags,” as Chip Brown describes the scene inside a dank, tertiary tomb, Hatshepsut’s final resting place stands in stark contrast to the grandeur and elegance of her crowning architectural achievement, her sprawling and towering mortuary temple dedicated to the Egyptian sun god, Amon-Ra, at Deir el Bahri.
Leonardo da Vinci
Acknowledgment of Leonardo's gayness is almost as universal as his impact on the course of modern human history.
History’s ultimate Renaissance man was a genius of art, science, engineering, and what we now might call futurism. As an artist, he painted the Mona Lisa, but he also sketched machines hundreds of years before they were ultimately constructed. Leonardo's sketches of various flying machines were among the foundations for early aviation research and design, according to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Leonardo’s blatant homosexuality rankled the ire of not just his contemporaries but also those who followed even far later. Sigmund Freud, for instance, claimed the artist was homosexual but celibate, but there is too much evidence to the contrary, including Leonardo’s correspondence, to believe Leonardo did not act on his same-sex sexual desires.
More enlightened modern historians speculate Leonardo explored both his sexual and gender identities.
“Leonardo’s own sexuality appears to transcend gender, to slip into godlike fantasies of androgynous liaisons between worlds. His Virgin of the Rocks includes an angel whose gender it is impossible to determine,” Jonathan Jones writes in The Guardian. “No other Renaissance artist was as preoccupied with androgyny: from his earliest works, including an angel he painted in a work by his master Verrocchio, it was Leonardo's trademark. Perhaps in his imagination, he was such an angel, neither masculine nor feminine but both, and able to infuse the world with infinite longing.”
Alan Turing
Biographer Andrew Hodges, author of Alan Turing: The Enigma and who maintains a website (turing.org.uk) devoted to the late British war hero, defines Turing as a “founder of computer science, mathematician, philosopher, codebreaker, strange visionary and a gay man before his time.”
As portrayed in Morten Tyldum’s 2014 critically acclaimed film The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Turing led the successful effort to break the Nazi Enigma code. Enigma was the supposedly unbreakable ciphering machine the German government used to send messages to military commanders across the globe. The ability to read German military communications was a key factor to their ultimate defeat in World War II.
In addition to inventing modern computing and saving the West from Nazi conquest, Turing also conceptualized and created a scientific test to confirm artificial intelligence.
The British government showed its homophobia and ingratitude for Turing’s wartime contributions by arresting him in 1952 for the crime of being gay. Soon after being chemically castrated by order of a British court as punishment, Turing died by suicide, ingesting cyanide, in 1954.
Alan Turing was 41 when he died.
Only after his death was Turing recognized for his efforts. In 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a formal apology to Turing. He was pardoned in 2014 by Queen Elizabeth II under royal prerogative. Then, in 2017, the ‘Alan Turing law’ was enacted, providing retroactive pardons to everyone convicted of homosexual acts under earlier laws.
Michelangelo
The University of Illinois at Springfield's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, and Allied Resource Office offers a frustrating, however technically accurate, assessment of the sexual ambiguity of the legendary sculptor and painter of the ceiling at the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
"Despite occasional instances of gossip and innuendo (e.g. Pietro Aretino’s suggestions of pederasty), there is no clear evidence of Michelangelo’s homosexuality or, at least, none indicating overt sexual activity," reads an entry at the university's website. "...Nonetheless, the physical beauty of many of his monumental male nudes, such as the David, the Creation of Adam and the decorative male nudes (Ignudi) on the Sistine ceiling, gives a clear indication as to where Michelangelo’s erotic interests lay."
Barbara Gittings
Long before Stonewall, when same-sex sexual relations were still punishable by jail, out lesbian Barbara Gittings was fighting public battles on mulitiple fronts for gay and lesbian rights.
In 1958, she founded the New York Chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis. The chapter’s parent organization founded in San Francisco three years earlier is now regarded as the first lesbian civil rights group in the U.S.
During the 1960s, Gittings edited the lesbian periodical Ladder. She also teamed with gay activist Frank Kameny to organize the first demonstrations in support of LGBTQ+ rights in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. Philadelphia’s Annual Reminders demonstration met every year on July 4 in front of Independence Hall from 1965 to 1969.
She suspended the Annual Reminders demonstration in 1970 to instead help organize the first march in memory of the Stonewall riots, which took place at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village the year before. That march, from Greenwich Village to Central Park, is now remembered as the first Pride parade in NYC.
Gittings is also credited with leading the successful movement to change the psychiatric and psychological professions' view of homosexuality as a mental pathology. In 1971, she and fellow activists stormed the stage and seized the microphone at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The pair organized a panel discussion on homosexuality the following year. And because no gay or lesbian psychiatrist would speak out against the classification for fear of arrest or losing their license, Gittings recruited gay John E. Fryer, M.D. to join the panel as Dr. H. Anonymous wearing a disguise and using a voice modulator.
In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association revoked its designation of homosexuality as a disorder. Gittings and Kameny were invited guests of the APA for the announcement.
Later in life, Gittings returned to writing and editing.
She died in 2007 at the age of 74. She was survived by her partner of 44 years, fellow activist Kay Lahusen.
It’s no wonder Gittings is widely revered as the mother of the lesbian civil rights movement.
Christine Jorgensen
Long before the era of Lia Thomas and Caitlyn Jenner, Christine Jorgensen was blazing the trail for transgender affirmation, but her journey was not easy.
The Daily News headline that announced her as the world’s first out transgender woman was anything but subtle: Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Operations Transform Bronx Youth.
Jorgensen was a photographer and former soldier during World War II. While visiting relatives in Copenhagen, she realized she could receive gender-affirming care from Dr. Christian Hamburger, a Danish endocrinologist and specialist in rehabilitative hormonal therapy. She stayed in Denmark where she started a more robust rehabilitative hormonal therapy and underwent a series of medical procedures.
Jorgensen sought a private life when she returned home after her transition in Denmark in 1952, but she could not find regular work in her profession after she was outed by the Daily News. So she decided to monetize her instant celebrity status, developing a night club act, making public appearances, becoming a regular on the TV talk show circuit, writing articles, and penning a best-selling autobiography, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography.
Only a year after her return to the U.S., Jorgensen was the most storied person on the Associated Press, more so than the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, or Marilyn Monroe.
Jorgensen brought a likable, relatable, intelligent, and kind face and voice – not to mention a generous portion of elegance and style – to the previously hidden reality that gender is anything but a binary issue.
Sally Ride
If you were a kid in the 1980s, you knew the name Sally Ride. A Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree, Ride was America’s first female astronaut. In 1983 she flew with fellow crew members aboard the space shuttle Challenger, the same orbiter that exploded after lift-off during a mission in 1986.
Ride only came out as a lesbian posthumously. But that had more to do with her very private nature, according to her sister, Bear Ride, than a lack of pride in being gay. Bear – a lesbian, activist, and ordained Presbyterian minister – was very comfortable about being out. Shortly after her sister’s passing, Rev. Ride explained her sister’s decision to stay in the closet to the general public:
"My sister was a very private person. Sally had a very fundamental sense of privacy, it was just her nature, because we’re Norwegians, through and through,” Bear Ride explained.
Bear Ride also spoke of her sister’s loving relationship with life partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy.
“Most people did not know that Sally had a wonderfully loving relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy for 27 years. Sally never hid her relationship with Tam.”
Ride and O’Shaughnessy created Sally Ride Science at the University of California, San Diego, a STEAM-for-girls science education movement in the nation.
Despite her many achievements in space and science, it was her anonymous act as a whistleblower while serving on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger disaster that may remain her greatest yet least well-known contribution to the American space program.
General Donald Kutnya, a fellow commission member, later revealed to Popular Mechanics what happened:
"One day Sally Ride and I were walking together. She was on my right side and was looking straight ahead. She opened up her notebook and with her left hand, still looking straight ahead, gave me a piece of paper. Didn't say a single word. I look at the piece of paper. It's a NASA document. It's got two columns on it. The first column is temperature, the second column is resiliency of O-rings as a function of temperature. It shows that they get stiff when it gets cold. Sally and I were really good buddies. She figured she could trust me to give me that piece of paper and not implicate her or the people at NASA who gave it to her, because they could all get fired.”
True to her private nature, she let others take credit for the discovery, content in knowing she had helped save the American space program.
Harvey Milk
Harvey Milk’s name is synonymous with fighting for change from within the American political system.
Being one of the nation's first openly gay elected officials, Milk was the standard-bearer of what during his time was called the gay liberation movement. Before he was assassinated in 1978, along with San Francisco Mayor George Mascone, Milk helped stave off a conservative backlash against LGBTQ+ equality in the form of the so-called Briggs Initiative, which would have barred gay people from teaching in California's public schools.
Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. Even in the comparatively liberal decade of the 1970s, even inside the long-standing capital of America's progressive movement, it took Milk three tries before he won a seat at the table of power for himself and, at least symbolically, for untold millions of other LGBTQ+ folks. Since Milk's victory, hundreds of LGBTQ+ candidates have been elected across the nation.
There were a few out gay and lesbian candidates elected before Milk, including Elaine Noble to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and Kathy Kozachenko to the Ann Arbor, Mich., City Council, both in 1974. And Minnesota State Sen. Allan Spear, already in office, came out shortly after Noble's groundbreaking win, then was reelected in 1976 and several times thereafter. But Milk's outsized personality and the circumstances of his death have inspired a documentary, a feature film, an opera, and more, and given him a special place in the collective LGBTQ+ memory.
Tammy Baldwin
Democrat Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin is the first lesbian and first out member of the LGBT community to be elected to the U.S. Senate. As her state’s senior senator, Baldwin has fast become one the most vocal advocates for sensible gun control in the upper chamber of Congress. Sen. Baldwin has also called for a national LGBT Equality Day.
Following her recent victory in her third run for the Senate, Baldwin is now the only out LGBTQ+ member of the U.S. Senate, but being the sole LGBTQ+ representation in the halls of power is nothing new to her. Baldwin was elected to the U.S. House in 1998 and was a state and county legislator in Wisconsin before that. She was the first LGBTQ+ House member elected while being out in her first election; others had come out while already in office.
And Baldwin hasn’t forgotten her community. She was instrumental in ushering the Respect for Marriage Act through the Senate in 2022, which repealed the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and established into federal law that same-sex marriages in one state must be recognized by another. She said she was spurred into action by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion questioning marriage equality in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade and women’s right to an abortion.
“I can tell you that as a member of the LGBTQ community and hearing from both same-sex couples and interracial couples who read Dobbs and read the Thomas concurrence and said, ‘Oh, my God, what is happening,’” Baldwin told CNN in 2022. “‘We’ve gone back 50 years with regard to women’s reproductive rights. What’s next for marriage?’”
Lily and Lana Wachowski
Lilly and Lana Wachowski shocked Hollywood when both came out as transgender, just a few years apart, but the two elite moviemakers thrived personally and professionally after embracing their true gender identity. They remain among Hollywood's genuine-article elite moviemakers, with directing, writing and production credits under their belts that read like a roll call of Academy Award nominees and winners. Imaginative Wachowski films and screenplays ranging from the Matrix franchise to Cloud Atlas have not only changed the way we think about film as an art form, but also the way the world thinks about life and living.
Lana came out in 2012 and Lilly followed four years later.
In her open letter to the Windy City Times in 2016 where she reveals her journey to embrace her true gender identity, Lilly wrote that she was “one of the lucky ones” who received personal support and gender-affirming care.
“Having the support of my family and the means to afford doctors and therapists has given me the chance to actually survive this process,” Lilly wrote. “Transgender people without support, means and privilege do not have this luxury. And many do not survive. In 2015, the transgender murder rate hit an all-time high in this country. A horrifying disproportionate number of the victims were trans women of color. These are only the recorded homicides, so, since trans people do not all fit in the tidy gender binary statistics of murder rates, it means the actual numbers are higher.”
Ellen DeGeneres
The previously sterling reputation of actor, producer, talk-show host, and comedian Ellen DeGeneres took a pummeling in 2020 as multiple former employees came forward with accusations of what can only be described as an extreme toxic work environment on the set of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. She publicly apologized for the show’s backstage failings and retired from the show in 2022. Despite these shortcomings, it’s impossible to deny the magnitude of Ellen’s impact on the burgeoning LGBTQ+ community.
“Most of us can remember exactly where we were 25 years ago when we saw Ellen DeGeneres on the Time magazine cover with the attention-grabbing title, ‘Yep, I’m Gay,’” Advocate editor John Casey wrote in a 2022 interview with DeGeneres.
“I remember once I made the decision to come out, I knew that it was the right choice,” DeGeneres told The Advocate. “I just remember having no fear about it. I had been living with so much trepidation that someone was going to ask me about my sexuality in an interview, or that someone would out me. And I look back at that and those opinions of myself, and I just think it was all so silly."
For weeks in 1997, America wondered, and ABC's publicity department fueled speculation about whether or not DeGeneres’s character on her hit sitcom Ellen, would follow the lead of the real-life lesbian who played her by coming out.
Packed with clever humor including a gag about receiving a free kitchen appliance for exiting the closet (an obvious reference to the age-old homophobic notion that the LGBT community "recruits" members), the widely viewed coming-out episode of Ellen made television history — and made a laughing nation measurably more comfortable with and accepting of gay people in general.
DeGeneres's later success as a talk-show host and voice of Disney's Dory would only cement her iconic status.
Barney Frank
Barney Frank has been a longtime fighter for gay rights.
The first bill he introduced in 1973 as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives sought to ban anti-gay discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations. It didn’t pass, but the state eventually passed the protections.
Frank continued his fight for gay rights after he was elected to the U.S. House in 1980, where he was an early proponent of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), an early attempt at codifying gay protections that predated the later Equality Act.
Along with former Sen. Christopher Dodd, he is an author-namesake of the Dodd-Frank Act, the foundation of 21st-century financial-sector regulation.
By the time of his retirement from Congress in 2013, Frank had been serving as the first voluntarily out member for more than 20 years and was well established as an elder statesman of financial regulation and, perhaps to a lesser extent, foreign policy.
James Baldwin
Author Michael Ondaatje famously said of gay writer James Baldwin, “If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one.” And he’s not alone in his praise of the writer of seminal books such as Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni's Room, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Another Country abounds.
Baldwin took part in the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965. “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually,” he later wrote of his participation.
His influence endures. In a 2013 essay titled “Gay Will Never Be the New Black: What James Baldwin Taught Me About My White Privilege,” seminary student and writer Todd Clayton explained how Baldwin incomparably illuminated the experience of being both gay and black in America. Baldwin's insights on race and sexuality have also been widely quoted within the Black Lives Matter movement.
More recently, Baldwin's life is slated for the silver screen in a film starring legendary out actor Billy Porter.
Bayard Rustin
Despite efforts even within the civil rights movement itself to overshadow him because he refused to be closeted even in the LGBTQ-oppressive 1940s and '50s, history was never able to hide that Bayard Rustin was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, at which Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking "I Have a Dream" speech.
Rustin was born to a Quaker father and was an early Communist and pacifist, although he later became disillusioned with Communism and denounced the party. In 1942 he went to California to help Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. He was arrested multiple times for his activism, serving on a chain gang for protesting segregation, but also served 60 days behind bars for having sex with two men in a parked car in Pasadena in 1960.
Despite opposition to his sexual identity from most of the Civil Rights movement, Rustin organized a staff, battled infighting and outside attacks from segregationists, and coordinated the event with the goal of bringing 100,000 people to Washington, D.C.
"It will show the black community as united as never before -- united also with whites from labor, and the churches, from all over the country," Rustin said.
In the end, Rustin's organizational skills brought an estimated 250,000 people to the Washington Mall in what is rightfully remembered as one of the most influential peaceful public uprisings in American history.
In 2013 President Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rustin's longtime partner, Walter Naegle, accepted the medal on his behalf.
Troy Perry
A high school dropout who became a Baptist preacher at the age of 15, Rev. Troy Perry is considered by many LGBTQ+ people of faith as the father of modern queer religiosity and organized spirituality.
In 1968, Perry founded the Metropolitan Community Church in Southern California. From its fledgling beginnings at a single congregation in Huntington Park, the LGBTQ-affirming church has grown to over 220 member congregations in 37 countries.
After reading an article on the Stonewall Riots in The Advocate, Perry met with Morris Knight, Rev. Bob Humphries, and other like-minded friends and gay activists to honor the riots and continue the fight for LGBTQ+ riots with a parade down Hollywood Blvd. He detailed the experience in an article he wrote for The Advocate in 2007.
Perry wrote that he initially received a cold response from then-Los Angeles Chief of Police Ed Davis when applying for the necessary parade permits in May of 1970.
“Well, I’ll tell you something, as far as I’m concerned, granting a parade permit to a group of homosexuals to parade down Hollywood Boulevard would be the same as giving a permit to march to a group of thieves and murderers!” Perry recalled Davis telling him.
Davis eventually relented and granted the permit after demanding bonds totaling $1.5 million. One month later on June 28, 1970, Los Angeles.
“That first LGBT parade in Los Angeles put a political edge on our fight,” Perry wrote of the experience. “Never again would the police or anyone who tried to stop our movement frighten us. Our community made up its mind that year that the most important thing that we could do was to encourage people to come out of the closet by joining parades and demonstrations. And we have never looked back.”
He and his partner Phillip Ray De Blieck successfully filed suit against California’s Proposition 8, which outlawed marriage equality, when the state failed to recognize their Canadian marriage. The California Supreme Court sided with Perry and De Blieck and ruled the proposition approved by voters was unconstitutional.
Harry Hay
Transplanted Brit national Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society in 1950, one of the modern world’s first organizations for gay men. But in 1953, the Mattachine Society ousted Hay for his communist views. Ironically, the American Communist Party also kicked him out because it believed his homosexuality made him a "security risk."
After more than a decade away from activism, Hay returned to his work fighting for LGBTQ+ equality by founding the Los Angeles chapter of the Gay Liberation Front. He also founded the Radical Faeries with his longtime partner, John Burnside.
Hay’s activism was chronicled in the award-winning PBS documentary, Hope Along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay.
Despite his early struggle to establish and defend LGBTQ+ rights and culture, you might have regretted inviting Hay to dinner. Gay playwright Jon Marans, whose play The Temperamentals charted the course of the Mattachine Society, put it bluntly.
“He was an obnoxious, aggressive human being who had this great idea that gays were a minority, which was novel and revolutionary at the time.” Marans told The Advocate in 2009.
Hay died in 2002 in San Francisco at the age of 90. Burnside was at his side when he passed.
Laurence Michael Dillon
Laurence Michael Dillon is the first known transgender man to undergo gender-affirming reconstructive surgery in 1946, but his decision proved costly personally and professionally due to the transphobic prejudices of the times.
Born into the upper-class world of British nobility, Dillon was orphaned at a young age. He was a gifted athlete who served as captain of the women’s rowing team at Oxford. He was an author who wrote Self Study: A Study In Ethics And Endocrinology and the posthumously published memoir Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions. During his life he worked as a research assistant and a doctor onboard a merchant marine ship, but also as a grudgingly respected auto mechanic.
Beginning in 1945, he underwent 13 gender-affirming surgeries over the course of four years. His decision to embrace his gender identity, however, cost him his family, his claim to peerage (a noble title), and his career in medicine when he was outed a decade later in 1958.
Nevertheless, Dillon continued his lifelong pursuit of inner truth, moving to India and becoming a Buddhist monk, writing about spirituality, and giving away his estate before his untimely death at the age of 47 in 1962.
Oscar Wilde
Irish playwright Oscar Wilde gained initial fame for penning masterpieces such as The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, but later in life became the bullied face of the LGBTQ+ community in the latter part of the 19th century.
Despite being married with children, Wilde engaged in same-sex sexual relationships with other men later in life, such as the much-younger Alfred Taylor and Lord Alfred Douglass, as well as multiple gay prostitutes.
Against the advice of friends, Wilde sued Douglass’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury. The Marquess was a brusque man and amateur boxer who was upset with the pair’s relationship and who had called Wilde a “sodomite” on a calling card left at an exclusive club. The trial exposed Wilde’s libertine lifestyle and same-sex liaisons. He was quickly arrested for sodomy and gross indecency along with Taylor. The first trial ended in a hung jury but he was convicted at a second trial and was sentenced to two years of hard labor.
He spent his final three years in impoverished exile.
Wilde is remembered far more positively these days, with his arrest and conviction viewed as an early example of viral homophobia. Banksy painted a mural on an exterior wall of the since-closed HM Prison Reading, also known as Reading gaol, in Berkshire where Wilde was imprisoned. Current plans are for a museum and educational foundation on the site that dates to medieval England.
Wilde was posthumously pardoned for his conviction with the passage of what is known as the Alan Turing Law in 2017.
Deborah Sampson
Deborah Sampson's name may not be world-famous, but the life-threatening risk she took by posing as a man in order to fight the British for American independence during the Revolutionary War — arguably the most world-changing war in human history — cannot be overstated.
Sampson's life was full of examples of her courage and compulsion to sacrifice, or at least risk, her own safety and well-being so that others might live and flourish. Posing as a man, she once married a colonial woman who had been captured by a Native American tribe in order to save her from being killed. According to historian Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, Sampson's decades-long battle to win the pension she had earned as a soldier in the Continental Army finally succeeded after much publicity and through the advocacy of none other than Paul Revere.
Mainstream historians have been unwilling to say Sampson, whose lineage on both her father's and her mother's side traces directly to the Mayflower, was anything but heterosexual, Keith Stern, author of Queers in History, begs to differ.
“My interpretation of the early biographical material is that Deborah Sampson was a very masculine young girl, who enjoyed taking on the male role throughout her early life,” Sterns writes. “She was so unwilling to get married that she chose to dress as a man and joined the army, where she found herself very attractive to other women. She reciprocated their attentions passionately, and treasured the memory of her romantic affairs with women. She participated in a marriage with a young white girl, ostensibly to liberate her from Indians, and she continued the relationship, with passionate attachment, long after it was necessary to obtain the girl’s freedom.”
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