1965
Sixteen people picket the Pentagon
On July 31, 1965, one of America’s first organised public protests for gay rights took place. Sixteen people picketed outside the Pentagon over the ban on homosexuals serving in the military.
Frank Kameny organised them. He had a Harvard doctorate in astronomy and a job mapping stars to guide American missiles, until the Army Map Service found out he was gay and fired him in 1957. In 1961 he became the first person to bring a sexual-orientation discrimination case to the US Supreme Court. His rule for the picket line was business dress - suits and dresses, nothing anyone could use to dismiss them.
Organising alongside him was Barbara Gittings, who in 1958 founded the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organisation in the country, and went on to edit its magazine. She turned thirty-three that day.
Eight years later the American Psychiatric Association voted to stop calling people like them mentally ill. Gittings had spent those years making it happen.
New York Public Library: photographs of the Pentagon picket, July 31, 1965