Protest

American Suffragist

b. February 15, 1820
d. March 13, 1906

“Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less.”

Susan Brownell Anthony was an American activist central to the women’s suffrage movement. She rallied for women’s voting and labor rights and for the abolition of slavery. Her efforts were foundational to securing women’s voting rights in America.

Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts. She grew up in a Quaker household, raised with the belief that all people are equal in God’s eyes. Quaker values underpinned Anthony’s lifelong battle for equality. Her seven siblings also became women’s rights activists and abolitionists.

In 1846 Anthony began teaching at Canajoharie Academy in New York. Five years later, she traveled to Seneca Falls for the seminal abolitionist convention. There, she forged friendships with Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who inspired her to include the abolition of slavery in her activism. Anthony eventually became the chief New York agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which Garrison founded.

In 1851 Anthony and Stanton began working and traveling the country together in the fight for women’s rights. Anthony gathered signatures for petitions and spoke publicly about women’s suffrage, despite the taboo against women making speeches. She faced angry hecklers who claimed her campaign was an attempt to destroy the institution of marriage. She was nearly arrested many times for speaking out.

Anthony and Stanton became lovers and lifelong companions. In 1866 they created the American Equal Rights Association, which distributed a newspaper called The Revolution. They used the publication to address all aspects of women’s equality, but especially suffrage, eliciting both love and hate from the citizenry. Detractors labeled Anthony “manly” — one of the worst insults a woman of the era could receive. Anthony countered with a published essay titled “The New Century’s Manly Woman.”

After the 15th Amendment was proposed, ensuring the right of Black men to vote, Anthony and Stanton were outraged that women were excluded. They formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 to pressure Congress to include women’s voting rights. In 1870 the U.S. ratified the 15th Amendment, leaving women out. Anthony managed to vote in the next election anyway. The police arrested her, and she received a $100 fine, which she refused to pay.

Though rarely acknowledged, Anthony is one of the most famous lesbians in American history. In addition to Elizabeth Stanton, she is known to have had relationships with a least tw oother women.

Anthony died at the age of 86. Fourteen years later, the United States ratified the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. In 1979 she became the first woman depicted on a circulating U.S. coin.

Indian Transgender Rights Activist

b. December 13, 1978

“It is only through faith that the original status of the transgender people in India can be reclaimed.”

Laxmi Narayan Tripathi is an Indian transgender rights activist, dancer and television star. She is among the most influential figures in India’s LGBTQ community.

Tripathi was born male in Thane, Maharashtra, near Mumbai, to an orthodox Brahmin family. Brahmin is the highest caste in Hinduism. Growing up, Tripathi was sexually abused by a close relative and bullied by her classmates.

Tripathi graduated with an arts degree from Mumbai’s Mithibai College and a postgraduate degree in Bharatanatyam, a form of Indian classical dance that often expresses religious and spiritual themes.

After starring in several dance videos directed by Ken Ghosh, an Indian director and producer, Tripathi took up choreography and became a well-known dancer in Maharashtra. When the state shuttered its dance bars, Tripathi organized protests against the decision.

Tripathi identifies as a female in the Indian sense of hijra. Considered nonbinary, hijras can be intersex, transgender or eunuchs. Historically, Hinduism viewed hijras as divine. In the late 1800s, when India was a British colony, transgenderism was criminalized. For centuries, transgender Indians have lived as outcasts. Tripathi is working to reclaim the hijras’ holy status.

During India’s HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1990s, Tripathi was one of the first activists to demand that the national anti-AIDS program include hijras as a separate category. She attended the 2006 World AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada, and participated in HIV/AIDS activism at other international forums. In 2008 she became the first transgender person to represent Asia Pacific in the United Nations, where she spoke of the plight of sexual minorities around the world, particularly in India.

In 2014, thanks to Tripathi’s successful petition, the Indian Supreme Court ruled to officially recognize a third gender. The landmark decision paved the way for transgender people to receive government benefits and for India’s decriminalization of same-sex relationships in 2018. In the wake of her Supreme Court victory, Tripathi formed the nonprofit Astitva Trust, Asia's first transgender organization, and established a Hindu hijra religious order, the Kinnar Akhara.

Tripathi was featured in the 2005 documentary “Between the Lines: India’s Third Gender.” In 2011 she starred in the celebrity edition of the Indian reality television series “Big Boss” and in “Queens! Destiny of Dance,” an acclaimed Bollywood film about hijras. In 2012 Tripathi published her autobiography, “Me Hijra, Me Laxmi.”

In 2017 at the KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival, Tripathi received the Rainbow Warrior Award. She received the Sree Narayana Guru Award for social service the same year.

Tripathi lives with her fiancé, Aryan Pasha, a transgender man. The couple has two adopted children.

Poet & Activist

b. September 1946
d. July 22, 2011

“I don't practice [Islam]. But I compensate by helping other people, by doing my activism ..." 

Ifti Nasim was a gay Pakistani-American poet whose unique LGBT-themed collections, written in Urdu, were published internationally. He helped establish Sangat Chicago, an organization supporting South-Asian LGBT youth.

Nasim was born in Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was the middle child in a large, traditional Islamic family. Throughout his teens, Nasim experienced bullying, ostracization and loneliness as a gay youth. A passionate poet and an activist who opposed Pakistan’s martial law, Nassim was once shot in the leg during a protest.

Inspired by a Life magazine article touting America’s acceptance of gays, Nassim emigrated to the United States at the age of 21. He enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he continued his poetry. He spent most of his life in Chicago, Illinois, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Some of his siblings joined him in America.

In 1986, at the age of 40, Nasim helped found Sangat Chicago, an advocacy organization and support group for young people of South Asian origin. Sangat’s participants found solace connecting with one another and sharing experiences, particularly of being LGBT Muslims. Nasim also regularly hosted a weekly radio show and contributed to an American Pakistani newspaper.

Nasim wrote poems in English as well as in Urdu and Punjabi, two of the languages spoken in Pakistan. He published three books of poems in Urdu, which conveyed novel themes of the plight of LGBT people in Muslim and third-world countries. His most popular collection, "Narman" (1994), which translates to "hermaphrodite," became the first published articulation of gay themes in Urdu and sparked a movement of "honest" poetry. "Narman" was distributed in the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden and Germany, and underground in India and Pakistan. His other two books of poetry, "Myrmecophile" (2000) and "Abdoz" (2005), explored gay love, longing and the pressures of heteronormativity.

In 1993 Nasim became the first poet from a developing nation to read his work at Chicago’s Harold Washington Library Center. The following year, Chicago’s South Asian Family Services awarded him the Rabindranath Tagore Award for his poetry. In 1996 he was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.

Nasim died in Chicago of a sudden heart attack at the age of 64. The Chicago Tribune published his obituary.

Political Activist

b. August 16, 1946

“Issues come and go; values and principles never come and go. They are the core of your essence and who you are.”

David Mixner is a human rights activist, a political operative and a best-selling author. Newsweek once named him the most powerful gay man in America.

Mixner was born in New Jersey to a family of moderate means. His father worked on a corporate farm. His mother was a bookkeeper. In high school, Mixner supported Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and demonstrated for civil rights.

In 1964 Mixner enrolled at Arizona State University, where, in addition to civil rights, he engaged in antiwar activism. He entered his first same-sex relationship with a man he refers to as “Kit.” When Kit died in an automobile accident, the heartbroken Mixner could only attend the funeral as a friend, fearing Kit’s parents would learn their son was gay.

After Kit’s death, Mixner transferred to the University of Maryland to be closer to the political action in Washington. His activism soon took precedence, and he dropped out of college. He became a grassroots organizer for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which coordinated the 1967 March on the Pentagon, a defining moment in the antiwar movement.

During the height of the AIDS epidemic, Mixner became an organizer and a fundraiser, lobbying for the government to proactively address the crisis. He lost hundreds of friends to the virus, including the love of his life, Peter Scott. He worked on AIDS prevention and treatment projects in the U.S. and abroad, including in Russia and Africa.

Mixner has raised tens of millions for charitable causes and political candidates. He worked on more than 75 elections as a campaign manager, fundraiser or strategist. He was instrumental in Bill Clinton’s 1992 election and served as President Clinton’s unofficial advisor on LGBT issues.

Mixner helped found the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA), a group of donor-class LGBT individuals who became involved in local politics. He served as the national co-chair of the Victory Fund, whose mission is to elect LGBT politicians and allies. He is a former member of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party Delegate Selection Committee.

Mixner is the author of three best sellers, including his critically acclaimed memoir, “Stranger Among Friends” (1997). In 2014 he premiered in “Oh, Hell No!,” the first of his three autobiographical one-man shows known as the “Mixner trilogy.”

In 2005 Yale University Library established the David Benjamin Mixner collection, which houses his personal books, papers, photos and other media. In 2019 he announced his retirement after 60 years of activism.

Russian Activist

b. December 23, 1977

“Without an ideal, nothing is possible.”

Nikolay Alexeyev is Russia’s best-known and most quoted LGBT activist and the founder of Moscow Pride. In 2010 he won the first case on LGBT rights violations in Russia at the European Court of Human Rights.

Alexeyev was born and raised in Moscow. He graduated with honors from Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he pursued postgraduate studies in constitutional law. In 2001 the university forced him out, refusing to except his thesis on the legal restrictions of LGBT Russians. Claiming discrimination, he filed an appeal, but the Moscow district court denied it.

In 2005, after publishing multiple books and legal reports on LGBT discrimination, Alexeyev fully dedicated himself to LGBT activism. He realized “that it wouldn’t be possible to change things in Russia just by writing” and that he should be involved in more direct activism.

Despite an official ban on LGBT events, Alexeyev founded and served as the chief organizer of Gay Pride in Moscow. Participants in the Gay Pride parades were attacked and bullied by anti-gay protesters. Police arrested Alexeyev and fellow activists multiple times.

Through both illegal public protests and legal appeals, Alexeyev’s uncompromising fight for the right to hold Moscow Pride drew international attention to the issue of LGBT rights in his country. In 2009, alongside Russian, French and Belarusian LGBT activists, Alexeyev organized a protest to denounce the inaction of the European Court in considering the legality of the Moscow Pride bans. In 2010 he finally won his battle. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia had violated Alexeyev’s right to protest and fined the government. The verdict marked the first international legal defeat of the Russian government on the issue of LGBT rights.

In Russia’s intensely homophobic political and social environment, few have risked as much as the publicly outspoken Alexeyev. He has campaigned against Russia’s “homosexual propaganda” and anti-LGBT hate speech; against the gay blood-donation ban; and for recognition of same-sex marriage. In 2008, in response to Alexeyev’s campaign, the Russian Ministry of Health eliminated a provision banning homosexuals from donating blood.

Alexeyev has received numerous international awards, including an honor from the International Gay and Lesbian Cultural Network (IGLCN) for “outstanding and courageous efforts in the face of unusually fierce homophobia.”

Taiwanese Gay Pioneer

b. October 12, 1958

“This should certainly offer some encouragement to different societies to consider following in Taiwan’s footsteps and giving gays and lesbians the right to marry.”

Chi Chia-wei is a pioneering Taiwanese gay rights activist and marriage equality champion. He helped make Taiwan the first nation in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. 

Chi was raised by open-minded parents who were supportive of his homosexuality. He came out in high school and his classmates were overwhelmingly accepting. 

Chi began his LGBT activism in his 20s, when there were virtually no other visible gay rights activists. Today, hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese support or have joined the LGBT rights movement. 

For some time, Chi was Taiwan’s only AIDS activist. He operated a halfway house for HIV/AIDS patients and created awareness campaigns to promote safe sex among the country’s LGBT citizens. 

In 1986 the 28-year-old Chi organized an international press conference to announce his sexual orientation and bring attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis. In doing so, he became the first person in Taiwan to come out on national television. Media outlets such as the Associated Press and Reuters covered the event. 

Chi’s quest to bring same-sex unions to Taiwan also began in 1986, when he applied for a marriage license. His request was denied by the Taipei District Court Notary Office as well as the Legislative Appeals Court. Later that year, he was detained by police and served a 162-day sentence. Such imprisonment was common during Taiwan’s White Terror, a period of oppression during which the government imprisoned political dissidents. 

Chi unsuccessfully applied for a same-sex marriage license again in 1994, 1998 and 2000. In 2013, when he applied and was denied once more, Chi appealed the decision to the Taipei city government’s Department of Civil Affairs, who referred the issue to the Constitutional Court. 

Chi and the Taipei city government petitioned the court to examine the constitutionality of the same-sex marriage prohibition. On May 24, 2017, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court struck down the previous classification of marriage and ruled that same-sex couples could marry, beginning in May 2019. A celebration erupted outside the court and Chi announced, “Today’s victory is for everybody!” The decision marked the culmination of Chi’s 30 years of activism. 

In October 2016, Queermosa, a leading Taiwanese LGBT organization, presented Chi with its first Queer Pioneer Award. Chi has a longtime romantic partner whose identity he keeps private.

AIDS Activist

b. January 9, 1961

“I was a bond trader by day and an AIDS activist by night.”

Peter Staley is a pioneering American AIDS activist who founded the Treatment Action Group (TAG) and AIDSmeds.com. He is featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary “How to Survive a Plague.”

Staley was born in Sacramento, California. He attended Oberlin College, where he studied classical piano. He later studied economics and government, which led to a job as an investment banker at J.P. Morgan.

Though Staley was out to his family, he was closeted at his job on Wall Street. After he was diagnosed with AIDS-related complex (ARC) in 1985, he joined the advocacy group ACT-UP to help fund-raise. In 1988 he took part in an ACT-UP protest on Wall Street and talked about his diagnosis on the local news. 

After giving up his career in banking, Staley became a prominent AIDS activist. He was one of three men who barricaded themselves at a drug research company to protest the exorbitant price of AZT, one of the first marketed AIDS drugs. He worked with pharmaceutical companies to lower the cost of AIDS drugs and raised large contributions for AIDS clinical trials and charities. Staley spoke at many of the earliest AIDS conferences around the globe.

In 1991 Staley founded TAG to help find AIDS treatments. He is famous for draping a giant condom over the home of North Carolina Senator Jess Helms, after the senator criticized the use of federal money for AIDS research.

From 1991 to 2004, Staley served on the board of amfAR, the foundation for AIDS research. During that period, President Bill Clinton named him to the AIDS Task Force on AIDS Drug Development. The Task Force honored him with the Award of Courage in 2000.

In 1999 Staley created AIDSmeds.com, a portal offering information and resources on HIV/AIDS drugs and gay health. In 2006 the website merged with POZ, a publication for people living with the virus. Staley became an advisory editor and blogger for the site.

Staley created an educational campaign about crystal meth addiction in the gay community. A former addict, he talked publicly about his recovery and launched an ad campaign, funded with his own money, to highlight the dangers of the drug and its relationship to HIV transmission.

The 2012 documentary “How to Survive a Plague” chronicles Staley’s activism. The film earned critical acclaim, including best documentary from the Gotham Independent Film Awards and the Boston Society of Film Critics and nominations from the Sundance Film Festival and the Academy Awards. GLAAD Media named it the outstanding documentary of the year.

Gay Pioneer

b. October 31, 1940
d. June 18, 1993

“There was no one thing that happened or one person. There was just … mass anger.”

Craig Rodwell was a Gay Pioneer and the leading New York activist of the 1960s. He founded the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the nation’s first gay bookstore, and the New York Pride Parade.

Born in Chicago, Rodwell attended an all-male Christian Science boarding school, where he experimented with same-sex relationships. After graduating from a public high school, he accepted a scholarship in 1958 to the American Ballet School in New York City. In New York he volunteered for The Mattachine Society, one of the nation’s first gay organizations.

In 1962 Rodwell developed a relationship with Harvey Milk. It was his first serious romance.

In 1964 Rodwell protested against the exclusion of gays from the military. It was the first gay rights demonstration in New York City. The same year, he and fellow Gay Pioneer Frank Kameny conceived the first organized public demonstrations for gay and lesbian equality. Known as Annual Reminders, the protests took place in Philadelphia each Fourth of July from 1965 to 1969 in front of Independence Hall. Demonstrators participated from Philadelphia, New York and Washington.

During those seminal years, Rodwell was involved in numerous gay rights organizations. He was an early member of East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) and started the Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods, which held rallies and published the periodical HYMNAL.

In 1965 Rodwell led a protest at the United Nations Plaza against the detention of gay Cubans in work camps. The following year, he participated in a “sip in” at Julius, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, to protest a State Liquor Authority rule prohibiting homosexuals from congregating in places that served alcohol. Continuing protests ended the rule in New York State.

Rodwell opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in 1967. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, it became a mecca for gay activists.

In 1969 Rodwell took part in the Stonewall Rebellion and was the first to shout “Gay Power!” At an ECHO meeting thereafter, he proposed a resolution to suspend the Annual Reminders in favor of an event commemorating the anniversary of Stonewall. Rodwell, Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings and other pioneering activists organized a march. Held on June 28, 1970, it is remembered as the first New York Gay Pride Parade.

Rodwell remained a consequential figure in the gay liberation movement of the ’70s and ’80s. He was honored with the Lambda Literary Award for Publisher’s Service in 1992. He sold his bookstore the following year. It remained open until 2009.

Rodwell died of stomach cancer at age 52. 

Black Lives Matter Cofounder

b. January 4, 1981

“We understand organizing not to happen online but to be built through face-to-face connections.”

Alicia Garza is an African-American activist and writer who cofounded the racial justice movement Black Lives Matter.

Garza (née Schwartz) grew up with her African-American mother and Jewish stepfather in Marin County, California. Her activism began early. In middle school she worked to make birth control information available to  San Francisco Bay Area students.

Garza attended the University of California San Diego. At 22, she met Malachi Garza, a biracial transgender male activist and organizer. A year later she came out to her family. She married Garza in 2008.

In 2013 Garza cofounded #BlackLivesMatter following the the not-guilty verdict in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black youth. The hashtag derives from a post she published on Facebook.

In 2014 Garza led the Freedom Ride to Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of Michael Brown—another unarmed black youth—by a police officer. She also attempted to stop a Bay Area Rapid Transit train to memorialize Brown’s death. She and other protestors chained themselves to the train before police arrested them. The Ferguson-shooting protests coincided with the development of Black Lives Matter chapters across the country.

Garza works in Oakland, California, as a community organizer around issues of health, student rights, domestic worker rights, police brutality and anti-racism. She identifies as a queer woman and has been an outspoken advocate against violence aimed at transgender and gender-nonconforming people of color. Her writing has been featured in Rolling Stone, The Nation, The Guardian, The Huffington Post and other publications.

Garza served as director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights in San Francisco and won the right of youth to use the city’s public transportation for free. She also fought gentrification and helped expose police brutality in the Bay Area. She serves on the board of directors of Forward Together, a grassroots organization that trains people for leadership, and she is involved with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity. She also directs special projects for the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Along with other honors, Garza received the Bayard Rustin Community Activist Award and twice received the Harvey Milk Democratic Club Award. She was named to The Root 100 list of African-American Achievers between the ages of 25 and 45 and to Politico’s 2015 guide to thinkers, doers and visionaries. In 2015 the Advocate selected her among its nominees for Person of the Year.

Garza's first book, "The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart," was published in October 2020. She lives in California with her spouse.