“JUST MARRIED,” Fernando, seated, and his husband, both members of Los Angeles’ Blue Max Motorcycle Club, get pulled over as they leave their wedding ceremony, December 1969. Photo c/o @onearchives. In the mid-twentieth century, the Blue Max Motorcycle Club, along with many other gay motorcycle clubs, provided an alternative to gay bars, which were constantly at risk of police raids and harassment. #lgbthistory #lgbtherstory #lgbttheirstory #lgbtpride #queerhistorymatters #haveprideinhistory (at Los Angeles, California)
fun fact: motorcycle clubs in the U.S. were founded and run largely by gay men who missed the homosocial camaraderie of being in the U.S. military during WWII. the lifestyle and aesthetics of those motorcycle clubs gave rise to many of the stereotypical/classic gay “looks” (leather, chaps, etc) and indeed to the gay leather scene itself (both the gay male leather/biker scene and the lesbian/dykes on bikes leather/biker scene)
Trump has pledged to sign the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), if passed by congress. It was first introduced in the House on June 17, 2015 and would effectively legalize anti-LGBTQ discrimination across the board, including among employers, businesses, landlords and healthcare providers, as long as they claim to be motivated by a firmly held religious beliefs.
It’s important to vote here, folks. Trump presidency is a massive no.
Please vote hillary I’m begging you
Vote for Hillary. A third-party candidate may be closer to your ideals, but a vote for anyone other than Hillary is a vote closer to Trump winning. The race is CLOSE, if the well-being of others matters AT ALL to you, please vote Hillary Clinton.
If you are LGBTQIA or remotely care about the LGBTQIA community and our wellbeing you NEED TO VOTE FOR HILLARY
Trump is a repulsive evil fucking COCKROACH that despises LGBTQIA people and if this slimy reptillian scumbag got elected one of the first things he’d seek to do would be to make it legal to take jobs AWAY from queer and trans americans
If you are LGBTQIA: THAT MEANS YOU
If you remotely care about ANYONE who is LGBTQIA: THAT MEANS PEOPLE YOU CARE ABOUT
Vote for Hillary and keep this bigoted and repulsive sack of shit and his hateful agenda of evil OUT of the white house
In a private cemetery in small-town Arkansas, a woman single-handedly buried and gave funerals to more than 40 gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when their families wouldn’t claim them.
–Source
One person who found the courage to push the wheel is Ruth Coker Burks. Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
How have I never heard of this?
People like her should be remembered. And even more importantly, we must remember that there was a time in our history when we needed someone like her.
“When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: ‘Someday, all of this is going to be yours.’
‘I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,’ she said. ‘Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?’"
i want to like. make a list of not-str8 historical figures bc ppl are tagging that walt whitman post like “omg wait really” & honestly yall deserve better.
Like, you know who wasn’t straight? Charlotte Bronte, who wrote Wuthering Heights. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who wrote Swan Lake. E.M. Forster, who wrote A Passage to India. Marcel Proust. Henry James. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Virginia Woolf. Herman Melville. Michelangelo. Leonardo Da Vinci. Socrates. William fucking Shakespeare.
And these are just (a few of) the ones we known about, because there’s a storied history of coded messages in literature that mean we are often looking gay metaphors in the face and not understanding them. We’re there, we’re out there, and I’m so mad that I didn’t know.
We have a history. We have a legacy. WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN HERE.
This post only lists white people for some reason, so here’s a list of not-straight writers and scholars and artists of color. They wouldn’t have used modern LGBT terminology to describe themselves, of course, but the fact remains that they weren’t straight.
James Baldwin
Sylvia Rivera
Marsha P. Johnson
Langston Hughes
Frida Kahlo
Billie Holiday
Josephine Baker
Bessie Smith
Freddie Mercury
Cesar Romero
George Washington Carver
Bayard Rustin
Audre Lorde
George Takei (who is still alive btw)
Shah Hussain
If anyone knows about more historical not-straight famous people of color, please add on!
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