Querying the Past at the University of Southern Maine

08/20/2026

Compton’s Cafeteria is one of the earliest examples of LGBTQ+ resistance. Today, a prison company occupies the site

08/18/2026

Online culture has transformed s*x and dating among gay men. Here are 20 key events that explain how.

07/29/2026

On the night of April 24, 1993, the Le***an Avengers handed out 8,000 flyers telling d***s to meet at Dupont Circle at 5 p.m. More than 20,000 women showed up. They marched to the White House without a permit and when they got there, some of the women ate fire while the crowd chanted, "The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own."

It was the first D**e March in history.

The fire eating hadn't started as a symbol of general defiance. It started with two specific people. In 1992, Hattie Mae Cohens, a Black le***an, and Brian Mock, a white gay man with a disability, were burned to death in Salem, Oregon when someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the apartment they shared.

A month later, on Halloween, the Le***an Avengers held a memorial for them in New York City and ate fire for the first time.

Choreographer Jennifer Monson introduced the act. The logic was direct: someone had used fire to kill two q***r people, so the Avengers took fire back.

The group was founded that same year by six women, all veterans of ACT UP and other organizations where le***an issues had spent years being pushed to the back of the room. Ana María Simo, Sarah Schulman, Maxine Wolfe, Anne-christine d'Adesky, Marie Honan, and Anne Maguire started the Avengers because they were tired of waiting for the broader gay rights movement to notice le***ans existed.

Their first recruiting flyer, handed out at New York Pride, invited "LE****NS! D***S! GAY WOMEN!" to get involved. Their handbook enabled chapters to organize anywhere, without a national structure telling them what to do. At the group's peak, more than 60 chapters operated across the United States, with others in Canada, Europe, and Australia.

The 1993 Washington march happened the night before the larger March on Washington for Le***an, Gay, and Bis*xual Rights and Liberation, which drew an estimated one million people on April 25. The D**e March had no permit and no corporate sponsors, both of which became founding traditions. One marcher shouted into the crowd that night: "This is the largest le***an demonstration in the history of the world."

By the end of 1993, D**e Marches had spread to New York, San Francisco, and Atlanta. They've since spread to cities across the globe, always the night before Pride, always without a permit, always a protest march rather than a parade.

The Le***an Avengers disbanded in 1997. The D**e March didn't.

Photo by Carolina Kroon.

07/26/2026

Berlin Pride attack.

Berlin has long occupied a central ​place in the history of ​gay rights and culture.

07/26/2026

“Nothing disgusts me more than a f**got on the sideline,” said the Lavender Panthers' collar-clad founder.

07/19/2026

Womontown: How a group of 80s le***ans built their own community to escape the patriarchy

07/07/2026

06/25/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BkkR6jtZp/?mibextid=wwXIfr

06/21/2026

As America gets set to celebrate its 250th birthday on July 4, here’s a timeline of some of the most noteworthy events that have shaped the gay rights movement.