Teacher

U.S. Congressman

b. December 10, 1960

“I will continue to fight for equality in Congress, as all Americans deserve to be treated equally under the law.”

A Japanese-American, U.S. Representative Mark Takano is the first openly gay congressman in California and the first openly gay congressman of color in the nation.

Born and raised in Riverside, California, Takano is the eldest of four brothers. In 1942, after the United States entered World War II, the government forced Takano’s parents and grandparents out of their homes and sent them to an internment camp. After the war, the entire extended family moved to Riverside, where Takano’s father managed a grocery store and his mother worked part-time as a hairdresser.

In 1979 Takano graduated as valedictorian of his high school. He received a B.A. in government from Harvard University and taught briefly in Boston before returning home to attend graduate school at University of California (UC), Riverside. In 1988 he began teaching high school English in Rialto, California. In 1990 he was elected to the Riverside Community College (RCC) Board of Trustees.

When Takano first ran for Congress in 1992, he lost by 450 votes. He ran against the same Republican in 1994 and was publicly outed by him. This time Takano lost by a more substantial margin. He continued to teach and win reelection to the RCC Board of Trustees.

In 2008 after the passage of Proposition 8, which prohibited marriage equality, Takano helped students start Rialto’s first gay-straight alliance. In 2010 Takano completed his M.F.A. in creative writing at UC Riverside. The next year, inspired by his GSA students and more equitable redistricting, he announced another congressional run.

In 2012 Takano won a seat in the House of Representatives. “It’s quite a symbol,” he said, “that the first openly gay person from California to serve in Congress is not from Los Angeles, not from San Francisco, not from San Diego, but from the Inland Empire.” In 2013 he was awarded LA Pride’s Person of the Year.

Takano helped pass three important veterans’ assistance acts to provide on-campus jobs, extend the enrollment period for rehabilitation services, and ensure that LGBT families receive veteran and survivor benefits. “Our veterans have sacrificed so much for our country,” he said. “All our returning heroes deserve to enjoy the same benefits and freedoms, no matter who they love or where they live.”

Takano won reelection in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020. He serves as chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and as a member of the Education and Labor Committee. He remains on the RCC Board of Trustees.

Author & Activist

b. July 19, 1875
d. September 18, 1935

“Unwittingly, you’ve made me dream
Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam”

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a racially-mixed bisexual poet and author whose career spanned multiple literary genres and culminated during the Harlem Renaissance. She was also a lifelong educator and activist who fought for women’s suffrage and equality for Black Americans.

Dunbar-Nelson (née Alice Ruth Moore) was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, 10 years after her enslaved mother gained freedom. Her father, who was rumored to have been a white merchant, left when she was young.

An exceptional student, Dunbar-Nelson graduated from high school at age 14. She attended Straight College (now Dillard University) and received her teaching certificate in 1892. She later attended Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Initially, Dunbar-Nelson taught in the Louisiana public school system and worked on her writing. In 1895 she published her first book, a collection of stories and poems titled “Violets and Other Tales.” Soon after, she moved to Boston to pursue a literary career. Her work for the Boston Monthly Review captured the heart of a fellow writer, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and they began a two-year correspondence.

During this period, Dunbar-Nelson relocated to Harlem where she cofounded and taught at the White Rose Mission, a “home for Black girls and women.” In 1898 she married Paul Dunbar in New York, and they settled in Washington, D.C.

In 1899 her second book, “The Goodness of St. Rocque and Others,” about Creole life, launched Dunbar-Nelson’s career-long exploration and critique of American culture and racial oppression. She wrote novels, stories, essays, poems, and reviews and kept a diary.

Dunbar-Nelson’s husband physically and emotional abused her. She divorced him in 1902 and moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught at various high schools and colleges. She created the Wilmington Advocate, a newspaper promoting racial uplift. She quietly married and divorced a second time and explored relationships with women, including Edwina Kruse, a high school principal, and Fay Jackson Robinson, a journalist and activist.

In 1916 Dunbar-Nelson married the journalist Robert J. Nelson. His activism further ignited her own. Among other pursuits, she served on the Delaware Republican Committee and championed civil rights and women’s suffrage.

During the Harlem Renaissance — the golden age of African-American art and expression in 1920s and ’30s — Dunbar-Nelson lectured and wrote prolifically. Her work inspired influential writers of the era.

Dunbar-Nelson died from a heart condition. Fifty years later, W.W. Norton & Co. published her journal, “Give Us Each Day.” It is one of only two African-American women’s journals published in the 20th century.

Equality Attorney

b. 1949
d. 1997

“I’ve been very lucky. I always got back more than I gave.”

Tom Stoddard was a lawyer who helped advance LGBT rights in America. He served as an early executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York from 1986 to 1992, where he fought against discrimination in employment, housing, health care and the military. Under his leadership, Lambda became one of the most important LGBT legal organizations in the country.

Stoddard taught one of the first courses on constitutional law and its impact on the LGBT community. He also authored the successful 1986 bill to protect gay people against bias in housing, employment and public accommodations in New York City. 

Former Mayor Ed Koch said of Stoddard, “He was an extraordinary lawyer. Even though he never retreated, he would find a way to explain, to placate and convince opponents that his approach was reasonable, rational and one they could accept. That’s a gift.”

Over the years, Stoddard became an important spokesperson for gay rights and civil liberties, eventually becoming the director of the Campaign for Military Service. In 1993 he asked President Bill Clinton to end the ban on gays and lesbians in the military, only to see the Clinton administration institute the controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. 

Stoddard had a keen sense of justice throughout his life. He once called the fight against Georgia’s sodomy law “our Dred Scott case,” and was an early champion of marriage equality. In 1985 he said, “The general public seems to feel that being gay is an inpidual existence that precludes family life. In fact, it often involves being part of a family in every possible sense: as spouse, as parent, as child. Society needs to foster greater stability in gay relationships.”

Stoddard eventually married his partner, Walter Rieman, in 1993. Though the marriage was never legally recognized, they exchanged rings and vows. 

Stoddard also became an important advocate for people with AIDS facing discrimination. When he was diagnosed with AIDS himself, he joined the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. He attended the first White House Conference on AIDS in 1995 and the 11th International AIDS Conference just before his death.

In 1995 the Tom Stoddard Fellowship was established at New York University. It encourages law students to advocate on behalf of gay civil rights cases in America.

Educators

Emery Hetrick
b. 1931  d. 1991

Damien Martin
b. 1933  d. 1987

“Blacks, Jews, and Hispanics are not thrown out of their families or religion at adolescence. ... Gay and lesbian kids are.” – Damien Martin

In 1979 Dr. Emery Hetrick and Dr. Damien Martin founded the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a nonprofit organization in New York, originally named the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth. The doctors created the institute to advocate for at-risk youth aged 13 to 21. The idea came after hearing about a 15-year-old boy who had been beaten and thrown out of an emergency shelter because he was gay.

In 1985 the institute established the Harvey Milk High School in cooperation with the New York City Department of Education. Named for the slain gay San Francisco city councilman, the school provides an alternative public education for LGBT youth. It is the largest school of its kind in the world. Programs include job training, HIV education and internships. Martin said the school was founded “for gay youths, partly because violence inflicted on young homosexuals made it impossible for some to stay in other schools.”

Hetrick and Martin helped establish a network of social service agencies serving New York’s LGBT community. Hetrick, an Ohio native, was a former medical director at the drug company Pfizer and a psychiatric specialist who worked at both Harlem Hospital Center and the Gouverneur Diagnostic and Treatment Center.

Martin, a native Philadelphian, was active in many gay rights organizations, including the Governor’s Task Force on Teen Suicide and the Child Welfare League of America’s Task Force on AIDS. He taught speech pathology at New York University.

Both men, life partners, died of AIDS-related complications.

Author

b. April 1, 1942

“Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be.”

Samuel “Chip” Delany is a renowned author, literary critic and professor, best known for his science fiction writing. First published at age 20, he has written more than two dozen books. His most celebrated novels include “Babel-17,” “Nova,” “Return to Neveryon,” and “Dhalgren,” which sold more than a million copies.

Delany has won four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards and a Stonewall Book Award. Among many other honors, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and in 2013 the Science Fiction Writers of America named him its 30th Grand Master.

Delany was born and raised in Harlem. His aunts, Sadie and Bessie Delany, were civil rights pioneers who inspired characters in his collection of semiautobiographical novellas, “Atlantis: Three Tales.” Henry Beard Delany, his grandfather, was the first black bishop of the Episcopal Church.
In 1961 Delany married Marilyn Hacker, a poet and lesbian. The couple had a daughter before separating in 1975.

Winner of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for his lifetime contribution to gay and lesbian literature, Delany has written several memoirs, including “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,” which examines the subculture of New York’s adult movie theaters. In “The Motion of Light and Water,” he describes his life as an openly gay science fiction writer; in it he writes, “I was a homosexual who now knew he could function heterosexually.” In “Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York City,” he famously documents his intimate relationship with a homeless book vendor.

Though he does not have a college degree, Delany was a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University for 14 years; he retired in 2015. He taught previously at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for more than a decade.

Inaugural Poet

b. February 5, 1968

“I don’t exclusively align myself with any one particular group — Latino, Cuban, gay or ‘white’ — but I embrace them all.”

Blanco is the youngest, the first Latino and the first openly gay person to be named a U.S. inaugural poet. He read his poem “One Today,” written soon after the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration. He describes the poem as “a unique snapshot of where we are as a country.”

Blanco was born in Madrid to Cuban exiles. Shortly thereafter, the family immigrated to New York and later settled in Miami, where Blanco was raised. He graduated from Florida International University with a degree in civil engineering and worked initially as a consulting civil engineer. His creative yearnings eventually sent him back to his alma mater, where he earned an MFA in creative writing.

His first book of poetry, “City of a Hundred Fires,” published in 1998, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh. After the book’s success, Blanco accepted a creative writing professorship at Central Connecticut State University. Subsequently, he taught at Georgetown University, American University and at the Writer’s Center.

Blanco’s poetry explores his cultural heritage and sexuality, most notably in “Looking for the Gulf Motel,” published in 2012. “It’s trying to understand how I fit between negotiating the world, between being mainstream gay and being Cuban gay,” he says.

His work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, New England Review, Americas Review and many other poetry journals and publications. He received the PEN Open Book Award for “Directions to the Beach of the Dead” in 2006 and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry for “Looking for the Gulf Motel” in 2013. He wrote and read the poem, “Matters of the Sea,” for the reopening ceremony of the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba, in 2015.

Blanco has participated in many charitable causes, including Freedom to Marry and One Fund, an organization that benefits victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. He lives in Bethel, Maine, with his partner, Dr. Mark Neveu, a research scientist.

Poet

b. July 9, 1936, Harlem, New York

d. June 14, 2002, Berkeley, California

“To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that’s political, in its most profound way.”

June Jordan was an activist, journalist, essayist, educator and celebrated African-American poet. Her commitment to fighting oppression, particularly of women and blacks, was the defining element of her work.

Jordan discovered her calling as a poet at an early age. Her father loved literature and maintained irrationally high expectations of Jordan. He required his young daughter to memorize poetry from the time she could read. Although these compulsory assignments strained Jordan’s relationship with her father, they also ignited her passion for language. Speaking of this fraught parental relationship, she said, “My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.”

Jordan attended Barnard College in New York, but left without graduating because of her opposition to the white patriarchal curriculum. In 1969 she published her first book of poetry, “Who Look at Me.” Jordan composed this work in black English vernacular, which she believed was an essential characteristic of her culture.

Throughout her prolific career, Jordan’s work ranged from poems to political essays to children’s literature. Though it spanned numerous genres, her work was consistent in engaging social issues and speaking out against oppression.

Jordan received many awards including a lifetime achievement award from the National Black Writers’ Conference. She was well respected and taught at prominent universities including Yale and University of California, Berkeley.

After battling breast cancer, Jordan died at age 65. Toni Morrison described Jordan’s legacy best: “forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.”

Poet and Playwright

b.  February 27, 1880, Boston, Massachusetts

d.  June 10, 1958, New York, New York

“I oft have dreamed the bliss
Of the nectar in one kiss.”

Angelina Weld Grimké was a poet, teacher and playwright who helped pave the way for the Harlem Renaissance. Grimké was one of the nation’s first celebrated female African-American authors.

Grimké was born to a prominent biracial couple who divorced soon after her birth. Her mother left when Grimké was a toddler and committed suicide several years later. Grimké had a strained relationship with her father, whose lineage of notable abolitionists set high expectations for his daughter.

Grimké excelled academically, publishing her first poem at age 13. She earned a degree in physical education from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. She moved to Washington, D.C., where she taught while writing poetry in her spare time.

Although Grimké was called to write, she felt pressure to please her father by not publishing anything that could tarnish the family name. What Grimké did publish was highly successful, including her three-act drama, “Rachel,” the first play by a black woman to be staged in a public theater.

Little is known of Grimké’s personal relationships, but her work often alludes to suppressed emotions, and several of her unpublished poems feature explicitly lesbian content. Her diary includes entries about her female lovers.

Although her work was well received, Grimké retreated to solitude for most of her life. After her father’s death in 1930, she never published again.

Gay History Month Founder

b. January 1965

“The greatest act of advocacy for civil rights for LGBT Americans is the act of coming out.”

Rodney Wilson is a high school teacher credited with creating Gay History Month. October was selected because schools are in session, and it is the month in which the first national march for lesbian and gay rights occurred and National Coming Out Day is celebrated.

Born in Missouri, Wilson grew up watching “Jerry Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour” on television. Until his 20s, he was a fundamentalist Christian. When he developed an interest in history, he found his calling as a teacher. He wrestled with his sexuality and read everything he could find about gay history. He said, “LGBT history gave me self-confidence as a gay person and strengthened my resolve to live, as best I could, an honest, open and integrated life.”

In 1994, as a teacher at Mehlville High School in suburban St. Louis, Wilson came out to his history class during a lesson about the Holocaust. If he had lived in Germany during World War II, he explained, he likely would have been imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis for being gay.

When he came out, Wilson was a graduate student at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He became the first openly gay K-12 teacher in the state. What began as a lesson evolved into a much broader mission to teach young people about gay history. Inspired by Women’s History Month and Black History Month, he worked with national organizations to develop a gay-friendly curriculum for educators.

In 1994 Wilson wrote the first article about gay history published by the Missouri Historical Society. University of Missouri-St. Louis became the first college in the country to hold a Gay History Month function, and Wilson helped organize a gay film festival on campus to launch the festivities. In 1995 Gay History Month received its first mainstream media coverage in Newsweek.

As Wilson and partners sought endorsements from educational groups, they faced backlash from conservatives who feared that teaching gay history would endanger youth. Gay History Month continued into the late ’90s, but lost momentum when no organization would take responsibility for its observance and financial resources grew scarce. In 2006 Equality Forum created LGBTHistoryMonth.com.

Wilson holds master’s degrees from University of Missouri-St. Louis and Harvard University’s extension school. He founded GLSEN-St. Louis (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network), the first GLSEN chapter outside of Massachusetts. He teaches history, government and comparative religion.

Scholar and Activist

b. October 13, 1944

“We need women leaders.” 

Charlotte Bunch is an internationally renowned activist, feminist author and National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee, who has devoted her life to women’s rights. She is the founding director and senior scholar at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University, where she is also a distinguished professor in the Department of Women’s Studies.

Raised in a liberal family, Bunch spent most of her childhood in Artesia, New Mexico. She enrolled at Duke University and graduated magna cum laude in 1966. In college she was involved in the Young Women’s Christian Association and the Methodist Student Movement. She became a youth delegate to the World Council of Churches Conference and served as president of the University Christian Movement in Washington, D.C., before leaving the church over its homophobic policies.

Bunch became politically active in the women’s movement and later in lesbian rights advocacy. She was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and cofounded The Furies Collective, a lesbian organization that espoused lesbian separatism. Bunch helped launch the publications Women’s Liberation and Quest: A Feminist Quarterly. The National Register of Historic Places named The Furies headquarters a landmark. It is the first lesbian-related historic landmark in Washington, D.C.

By 1979 Bunch had become a consultant to the World Conference for the United Nations Decade on Women, which lobbied for women’s rights globally. In 1989 she founded the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Douglass College at Rutgers University, which created the Charlotte Bunch Women’s Human Rights Strategic Opportunities Fund in her honor.

In 1996 Bunch was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She received the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights from President Bill Clinton and the Women Who Make a Difference Award from the National Council for Research on Women. In 2002 Rutgers University honored her with its Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research.

Bunch has worked with numerous organizations, including the Advisory Committee for the Human Rights Watch, the Global Fund for Women and the International Council on Human Rights Policy. She consulted on the 2006 Report to the U.N. General Assembly on Violence Against Women and has written and edited many books and reports on women’s rights.

A documentary film, “Passionate Politics: The Life & Work of Charlotte Bunch,” explores her lifetime of advocacy on behalf of women worldwide.