Stonewall 50 Ofrenda

Tseng Kwong Chi 1950-1990 Tseng Kwong Chi was a photographer, performance artist and New York downtown personality who evolved two major bodies of work. Tseng’s most famous body of work is his self-portrait series, East Meets West, also called the “Expeditionary Series.” In the series, Tseng dressed in what he called his “Mao suit” and [...]

Leslie Feinberg 1949-2014 Leslie Feinberg was an American butch lesbian, transgender activist, communist, and author. Hir* writing, notably Stone Butch Blues and hir pioneering non-fiction book, 1996’s Transgender Warriors, laid the groundwork for much of the terminology and gender studies. Feinberg described hirself as “an anti-racist white, workingclass, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist.” [...]

Dainna Cicotello 1948-2018 Dainna served our country in the US Navy for over a decade. She transitioned in 1978. Over the years, she served the Denver community by presenting at panels, trainings and by doing consulting work on transgender-related issues. Dainna taught classes at several trans-themed conferences such as the International Conference of Transgender Law [...]

Sahaykwisa 1850-1895 Sahaykwisa was a Mojave Indian shaman (a healer with supernatural powers), who specialized in the treatment of venereal diseases. Scholars have limited information about their life. They were a gender-nonconforming lesbian, or hwame (a female who chose to live as a male), and often told people they had been turned into a man [...]

James Baldwin 1924-1987 It is often the outsider who divines truth most clearly. James Baldwin, to whom many doors were closed by virtue of his poverty, his race, and his sexuality, was a prophet and truth-teller whose writing searingly delineates the soul and image of 20th century America. In 1953, the publication of Go Tell [...]

Matt Kailey 1955-2014 Matt was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He earned a BA in Sociology and Psychology from Iowa State University, and an MA in Education from the University of Missouri– Kansas City. From a young age Kailey knew he felt different, and though his journey took many years he eventually began his transition in [...]

Vito Russo 1946-1990 Vito Russo was an American LGBTQ activist, film historian and author. He is best remembered as the author of the book The Celluloid Closet (1981, revised edition 1987), described in The New York Times as “an essential reference book” on homosexuality in the US film industry. In 1985 he co-founded the Gay [...]

Mary Oliver 1935-2019 Mary Oliver was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She would retreat from a difficult home to the nearby woods, where she would build huts of sticks and grass and write poems. Oliver was notoriously reticent about her private life, but it was during this period [...]

Del Martin 1921-2008 Del Martin was in the forefront of the battle for lesbian and gay rights for more than 50 years. After a brief early marriage, she found that she was attracted to women. Martin and her partner, Phyllis Lyon, founded the first advocacy group for lesbians, Daughters of Bilitis, which grew to have [...]

Harry Hay 1912-2002 Harry Hay was a Communist political organizer, a musicologist, an actor, a social science researcher, and many more things. He was also one of the earliest and most prominent gay rights activists. Today, Hay remains one of the most complex figures in the American history of gay rights. As a young man [...]