Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., a segregationist, called Rustin a “sexual pervert” on the Senate floor in an effort to discredit the march, according to Out History. The march was organized by Bayard Rustin, who had been arrested in 1953 for having sex with another man.

Kameny co-founded the Mattachine Society in Washington, D.C., one of the first homophile groups ('homophile' being the adjective of choice at the time), and he drew strategies directly from the Black civil rights movement, according to Eric Cervini, a historian and author of “ The Deviant’s War,” which focuses on Kameny and the early gay rights movement.įor example, Cervini said Kameny and a delegation of eight Mattachine Society of Washington members attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. Though Stonewall was a pivotal moment, activists like Frank Kameny were organizing for gay rights well before. Queer activists were building a movement long before the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City, which is widely referred to as a turning point in the LGBTQ rights movement.

“Influence can also come in the form of people who move between movements, or who are engaged in multiple movements, and we do have examples of that in the early LGBT movement.” The influence - or ‘plagiarism’ - of ideas “Influence can be the influence of ideas, and specifically, ideologies, influence of strategies,” he said. Greensboro News & Record, AP fileĮarly LGBTQ activists (though they didn’t use that acronym at the time) adopted many of the civil rights movement’s strategies, Stein said, and they relied on much of the foundation laid by Black civil rights activists.īut the two movements weren’t necessarily separate - they often overlapped - and so influence happened in a few ways, Stein said. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, on April 20, 1960. Black students wait in vain for food service at this F.W. Specifically, sit-ins organized by gay activists in the ‘60s appear to be directly inspired by protests held in 1960 by Black college students at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, against racial segregation.

The sit-in at Dewey’s is among a long list of examples that show a “direct line” to the Black civil rights movement, according to Stein. The Society wrote that the protests and sit-ins were successful in preventing future denials of service and arrests. Though the restaurant called the police, the protesters weren’t arrested, and after a few hours they left voluntarily, according to a Janus Society newsletter. On May 2, three more people staged a second sit-in at Dewey’s.

Peaceful fights for equal rights