In August 1963, roughly 250,000 people marched on Washington under the logistical leadership of Bayard Rustin, a Black gay organizer whose sexuality was treated by some civil-rights leaders as a political liability.

More than six decades later, Rustin is widely recognized as one of the most influential LGBTQ+ figures in modern history. Public recognition arrived far later for many LGBTQ+ activists, writers, scientists, and political organizers whose influence was minimized or ignored during their lifetimes.

The Eleven

Alan Turing

In January 1952, Alan Turing, a 39-year-old mathematician and computer scientist, reported a burglary at his Manchester home. The investigation exposed his relationship with Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old man. Turing was prosecuted for “gross indecency” under the law used against Oscar Wilde 57 years earlier and was given a choice between prison and chemical castration. He chose hormone treatment.

By then, Turing had already made foundational contributions to both wartime cryptography and computer science. His work on the Bombe at Bletchley Park accelerated the breaking of the German Enigma cipher and may have shortened World War II by several years. His 1950 paper proposing the Turing test remains one of the central texts in artificial-intelligence theory.

Turing died from cyanide poisoning on June 7, 1954, at age 41. The coroner ruled the death a suicide. Queen Elizabeth II granted him a royal pardon in 2013, and the 2017 Policing and Crime Act, called Turing’s Law, posthumously pardoned thousands of men convicted under similar laws.

James Baldwin

Giovanni’s Room was published in 1956 after Knopf, Baldwin’s American publisher, rejected it as “commercially suicidal.” Dial Press in New York later published the novel after Michael Joseph released it in London the same year. Centered on a white American man’s relationship with another man in Paris, the book has remained in print since publication.

Baldwin’s broader influence came through essays such as Notes of a Native Son (1955), The Fire Next Time (1963), and No Name in the Street (1972), which examined race, sexuality, and American Christianity as deeply connected forces in American life. His 1965 debate with William F. Buckley at the Cambridge Union on whether the American Dream came at the expense of Black Americans remains widely studied in rhetoric and political thought.

Baldwin spent much of his adult life abroad. “I left the United States because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here,” he said. He died in 1987 at age 63 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France.

Frank Kameny

In 1957, the United States Army Map Service fired Frank Kameny, a Harvard-trained astronomer, for being gay. His 1961 Supreme Court petition arguing that gay people had constitutional civil rights was the first known American filing of its kind, though the Court declined to hear it. That same year, Kameny co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington and began organizing openly for gay rights.

He led the first White House picket by openly gay activists in 1965, dressed in jacket and tie, carrying signs reading “Government Should Combat Prejudice, Not Submit to It.” His longest campaign targeted the American Psychiatric Association. Working with Barbara Gittings, he pushed the APA to host a 1972 debate featuring psychiatrist John Fryer disguised as “Dr. Henry Anonymous.”

On December 15, 1973, the APA Board of Trustees voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Kameny later described the decision as the day “we were cured en masse by the psychiatrists.” He also coined the slogan “Gay Is Good” in 1968 after hearing Stokely Carmichael lead the “Black Is Beautiful” chant.

Bayard Rustin

“We need in every community a group of angelic troublemakers,” Bayard Rustin said in a 1963 New York speech. “Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable.” The line became closely associated with his work as a civil-rights organizer. Rustin spent two years in federal prison during World War II as a Quaker conscientious objector and later served as Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategic advisor. He also played a major role in developing the movement’s doctrine of nonviolent civil disobedience.

His most prominent achievement was organizing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, and working under A. Philip Randolph. Philip Randolph. Rustin coordinated transportation, marshals, sound, speakers, and security for roughly 250,000 attendees in less than two months.

Because Rustin was openly gay, some civil-rights leaders kept his name off the public program. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2013 and a posthumous California pardon in 2020 tied to a 1953 conviction involving a same-sex encounter.

Marsha P. Johnson

Marsha P. Johnson arrived at the Stonewall Inn around 2 AM on June 28, 1969, after the uprising had already begun. She clarified the timeline herself in a 1989 interview with historian Eric Marcus.

“I threw the second one,” she said about the Molotov cocktail story. “I did not throw the first one.” The attribution became part of Stonewall’s broader mythology and contributed to Johnson’s lasting public recognition.

In 1970, Johnson and Sylvia Rivera co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. STAR House, the apartment they operated for homeless trans youth at 213 East 2nd Street in Manhattan’s East Village, became the first known North American shelter for homeless LGBTQ+ youth and operated from November 1970 to July 1971. Her middle initial, P, stood for “Pay it no mind,” the response she gave to intrusive questions about her gender.

Johnson was found in the Hudson River on July 6, 1992. The death was initially ruled a suicide, though the NYPD reopened the case as an unsolved homicide in 2012.

Sylvia Rivera

On June 24, 1973, Sylvia Rivera took the microphone at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally in Washington Square Park after struggling to get past a hostile crowd. Her speech criticized white middle-class gay activists for sidelining the street queens and trans women involved in the Stonewall uprising four years earlier.

“I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail,” she said in the line most often quoted from the speech.

Born on July 2, 1951, Rivera was a Latina trans activist of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent who was present at Stonewall alongside Marsha P. Johnson. In 1970, the two co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and helped operate STAR House for homeless trans youth.

Rivera’s 1973 speech was controversial at the time, though it later became widely studied within queer history and gender studies. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, founded after she died in 2002, continues providing free legal services to low-income trans people of color in New York.

Harvey Milk

San Francisco elected Harvey Milk to its Board of Supervisors on November 8, 1977, making him the first openly gay person elected to public office in California and one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States. Milk moved to San Francisco in 1972 and, with partner Scott Smith, opened Castro Camera at 575 Castro Street in March 1973. The shop became a center of political organizing in the Castro district.

Milk sponsored a city ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, employment, and public accommodations. The measure passed 11-1 and was signed by Mayor George Moscone in March 1978. On June 25, 1978, Milk delivered the Hope Speech on the steps of San Francisco City Hall during the campaign against the Briggs Initiative. “You and you and you have got to give them hope,” he said.

On November 18, 1978, nine days before former supervisor Dan White assassinated him and Moscone, Milk recorded a statement to be released in the event of his death. “If a bullet should enter my brain,” the tape said, “let that bullet destroy every closet door.”

Audre Lorde

“My silence had not protected me,” Audre Lorde wrote in The Cancer Journals in 1980. “Your silence will not protect you.” The line came from a book written during her breast cancer treatment and reflected themes present throughout her essays and poetry.

Lorde was born on February 18, 1934, in Harlem to West Indian immigrant parents. She described herself as “a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” Her 1984 collection Sister Outsider became a major text in Black lesbian feminist thought. It included the 1981 essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, originally delivered at NYU’s Second Sex conference after Lorde criticized the program’s absence of Black women and lesbians.

Her books Coal, The Black Unicorn, and The Cancer Journals examined the overlap between race, sexuality, gender, illness, and political identity at a time when feminist, gay-rights, and Black civil-rights movements often operated separately. She died of liver cancer on November 17, 1992, at age 58.

Edith Windsor

Edith Windsor was 83 when the IRS issued a $363,053 estate-tax bill after refusing to recognize her marriage to Thea Spyer under the Defense of Marriage Act. Spyer died of multiple sclerosis in 2009 after a relationship with Windsor that began in 1963.

Windsor sued the federal government in 2010, and the case reached the Supreme Court in 2013. On June 26, 2013, the Court struck down Section 3 of DOMA in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. The ruling required federal recognition of same-sex marriages performed in states where they were legal and helped establish the constitutional framework later used in the 2015 Obergefell decision on marriage equality.

In the years before her death in 2017, Windsor also spoke publicly in support of transgender rights. “This all happened to me because Thea died, and I miss her,” she told reporters.

Laverne Cox

The June 9, 2014 issue of Time featured Laverne Cox under the headline The Transgender Tipping Point, making her the first openly transgender person to appear on the magazine’s cover. The cover appeared during her run as Sophia Burset on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which premiered the previous year.

Cox was born in Mobile, Alabama, on May 29, 1972. Alongside her acting career, she became one of the most visible public advocates for transgender rights in American media. In 2014, she became the first openly trans person nominated for a Primetime Emmy in an acting category.

She later hosted the MTV news program Transformation and produced the documentary Free CeCe! about CeCe McDonald, and received multiple GLAAD Media Awards. The Time cover is often treated as a major milestone in mainstream American transgender visibility.

Janet Mock

Pose, which premiered on FX in 2018, was the first major television series centered on Black and Latina trans women in New York’s late-1980s ballroom scene. Janet Mock, one of the show’s writers, directors, and producers, directed the Season 1 episode Love Is the Message, becoming the first trans woman of color to direct an episode of a major television series. Pose ran for three seasons before ending in 2021.

Before Pose, Mock published the memoir Redefining Realness in February 2014. The book described growing up Black, Native Hawaiian, and trans in Honolulu and beginning hormone therapy at 15. It reached the New York Times bestseller list and became the first bestseller by a Black trans author. Her second memoir, Surpassing Certainty, followed in 2017.

Mock’s work as a writer, producer, and director helped bring ballroom culture and Black trans storytelling into mainstream American television.

Gaps in the Queer Historical Record

Any account of queer historical influence is necessarily incomplete. Figures often missing from the surviving record include:

• Pre-modern rulers whose same-sex relationships were omitted or rewritten by court historians.
• Tang-dynasty poets whose works scholars are still cataloging and translating.
• Heian-era Japanese diarists who documented same-sex relationships within aristocratic society.
• Women in 19th-century Boston marriages whose relationships survive mainly through private letters and diaries.

Large parts of queer history are missing from surviving records. Pre-modern rulers often relied on court historians who controlled official accounts. In 19th-century America, descendants sometimes destroyed private letters between women out of embarrassment or fear of scandal. Religious and legal institutions also treated same-sex relationships as immoral or criminal, limiting what was preserved publicly.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in Germany in 1869 and Magnus Hirschfeld in the early 20th century developed many of the legal and intellectual arguments later LGBTQ+ activists adopted elsewhere. English-language histories often place Stonewall at the center of the modern movement, even though organized queer-rights advocacy in Europe began decades earlier.

Many societies recognized gender-variant social roles long before modern Western LGBTQ+ frameworks emerged, including two-spirit traditions in Indigenous North America, the māhū of Polynesia, the muxes of Oaxaca, the hijra of South Asia, and the bissu of Sulawesi. Colonial governments and Christian missionaries often suppressed or marginalized those traditions, and parts of that history survive only through ongoing Indigenous and regional scholarship.

Some contemporary figures also remain difficult to place within a settled historical narrative. Ellen DeGeneres’s 1997 coming out marked a major moment in American television history, though workplace allegations that emerged after 2020 complicated her standing within parts of the LGBTQ+ community.

RuPaul helped bring drag culture into mainstream American entertainment, while comments made in 2018 about transgender contestants drew criticism from some trans activists and performers. Historical assessments of both figures are still evolving.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the most famous LGBTQ+ people?

The best-known contemporary LGBTQ+ public figures include Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Lil Nas X, Pete Buttigieg, Laverne Cox, and Janet Mock. Historically influential figures include Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Harvey Milk, Bayard Rustin, Frank Kameny, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Edith Windsor, and Alan Turing, each associated with major political, cultural, legal, or scientific change.

Who was Marsha P. Johnson?

Marsha P. Johnson was a Black trans woman, drag performer, and gay-rights activist who was present at the Stonewall uprising in June 1969 and co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with Sylvia Rivera the following year. Johnson helped operate STAR House, the first known shelter for homeless LGBTQ+ youth in North America, from 1970 to 1971. Born in 1945, she was found in the Hudson River in July 1992. The death was initially ruled a suicide before the NYPD reopened the case in 2012.

Who is the most influential gay person in history?

There is no single answer because influence can be political, cultural, scientific, or legal. Bayard Rustin is often cited for his role in organizing the 1963 March on Washington, Harvey Milk for his impact on openly gay political representation, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde for their literary and cultural influence, and Alan Turing for his contributions to cryptography and computer science.

What did Harvey Milk do?

Harvey Milk became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States after winning a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in November 1977. He sponsored a city ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, employment, and public accommodations, which passed in March 1978. Former Supervisor Dan White assassinated Milk and Mayor George Moscone at San Francisco City Hall on November 27, 1978.

What was Stonewall?

Stonewall was the uprising that began in the early hours of June 28, 1969, after the New York Police Department raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. Days of resistance followed. The uprising is widely regarded as the defining event of the modern American gay-rights movement, and its first anniversary in 1970 marked the beginning of Pride marches.

Who was Bayard Rustin?

Bayard Rustin was a Black gay civil-rights organizer and Quaker pacifist who organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He served as a strategic advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. and played a major role in developing the movement’s doctrine of nonviolent civil disobedience. Because Rustin was openly gay, some civil-rights leaders kept his name off the public program.

What did Frank Kameny do?

Frank Kameny was fired from the United States Army Map Service in 1957 for being gay and later became one of the leading organizers of the early gay-rights movement. He led the first openly gay White House picket in 1965, co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, and helped pressure the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the DSM in 1973.

Who is Janet Mock?

Janet Mock is a Black and Native Hawaiian trans writer, director, and producer born on March 10, 1983. Her 2014 memoir Redefining Realness became the first New York Times bestseller by a Black trans author. In 2018, she joined the FX series Pose as a writer, director, and producer, becoming the first trans woman of color to direct an episode of a major television series.

What did Alan Turing do?

Alan Turing was a British mathematician whose work on the Bombe machine at Bletchley Park helped break the German Enigma cipher during World War II. In 1950, he proposed the Turing test for machine intelligence. Convicted of gross indecency in 1952 for a same-sex relationship, he chose chemical castration over prison and died in 1954 at age 41.

Who was Audre Lorde?

Audre Lorde was a Black lesbian poet and essayist whose 1984 collection Sister Outsider became a major work in Black lesbian feminist thought. She described herself as “a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” and wrote openly about breast cancer in The Cancer Journals (1980). Lorde died of liver cancer in 1992 at age 58.

What was the Edith Windsor case?

Edith Windsor was the plaintiff in United States v. Windsor, the 2013 Supreme Court case that struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in a 5-4 ruling written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Windsor sued after the federal government imposed a $363,053 estate tax on her late wife Thea Spyer’s estate because their marriage was not federally recognized. The ruling established the constitutional framework later used in the 2015 Obergefell decision on marriage equality.