Ada Bello

Cuban-American chemist and lesbian activist

Philadelphia, PA

Ada Bello was born into a middle-class family in 1933 in Havana, Cuba. Aware from early on that she was attracted to girls, she also...
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Perry Brass

Gay Liberation Front member, author

Bronx NY

Perry Brass was born in 1947 in Savannah, Georgia. His family was part of a close-knit community of mostly Polish Jews. Perry’s relationship with his...
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Manuel Garza

MATTACHINE ACTIVIST, HAIRDRESSER

New York, NY

Legacy of Voices is an oral history project created in 2008 by Lara Spotts and Brian O’Donnell, inspired by their realization that to better understand...
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Susan Griffin

environmental feminist author and activist

Berkeley, CA

Susan Griffin was born in Los Angeles, California in 1943. She came into the world at a time of global war and the Holocaust. These...
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Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

transgender women of color activist

Little Rock, AR

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy was born in the 1940s in Chicago, Illinois. Around age 13, she came out to her parents as transgender. After a psychologist,...
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Michela Griffo

Gay Liberation Front radical; artist

New York, NY

Michela Griffo was born in 1949 in Rochester, New York, into a large, unruly family of Irish, Germans, Italians—what Michela calls the United Nations of...
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John James

reminder day protester; founder, AIDS treatment news

Philadelphia, PA

John James was born in 1941 in Brooklyn, NY. His father, a Montana native, was a lawyer; his mom was from Iowa and sold real...
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Kay Lahusen

traiblazing lesbian photojournalist

Kennett Square, PA

From very early on, Kay Lahusen loved sports, and taking pictures with her box camera. So it’s not surprising that she went on to become...
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Dick Leitsch

president, NY Mattachine Society; sit-in organizer

New York, NY

Dick Leitsch was born in 1935 in Louisville, Kentucky. While in high school, he came out to his Catholic parents, who took his revelation in...
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Marge McCann

Daughters of Bilitis activist, urban planner

Kennett Square, PA

Marjorie (Marge) McCann was born in 1939 in New Jersey, the eldest of five children. When she was a freshman in high school, her family...
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Alexei Romanoff

1967 Black cat protest organizer

Pasadena, CA

Alexei Romanoff was born in the Ukraine in 1936, fled with his family to the United States during World War II, and came of age...
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Mark Segal

Stonewall witness, publisher, Philadelphia Gay News

Philadelphia, PA

Mark Segal was born in Philadelphia, and raised in the only Jewish household in his public housing project. As a child, he learned of friends...
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Martha Shelley

Gay Liberation Front / Lavender Menace activist; writer

Portland, OR

Martha Altman (later Shelley) was born on December 27th, 1943, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish parents of Russian and Polish descent.  At 17, she...
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Charles Silverstein

gay mental health reformer; author, The Joy of Gay Sex

New York, NY

Charles Silverstein was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1935, and grew up in what he describes as a very typical Jewish family of that era:...
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Sandy Stone

Academic, Theorist, Honorary founder of Transgender Studies

Aptos, CA

Allucquére Rosanne "Sandy" Stone was born in New York City on June 1st, 1954. Sandy and her sister grew up in a conservative Jewish family...
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