Queering Up History: Sept 24th

Queer Events On This Day In History...

1731 In Amsterdam, 22 men are executed for sodomy.

1951 Christine Jorgensen entered the hospital for the first sex change surgery.

1981 A Toronto judge acquits a gay school teacher of a charge of keeping common bawdyhouse in own home.

1981 A report at Toronto city council calls for a permanent police/gay dialogue committee. It takes many years for police to grudgingly agree.

1984 Conspiracy charges laid against three gay bath owners in connection with the Feb 5, 1981 Toronto police raids, were settled by plea-bargained fines, without trial.

1984 A New York psychiatrist announces his belief that AIDS is caused by depression.

1985 Right-wing opponents of a law to lower the age of gay sexual consent to 16 in New Zealand stage a "Nuremberg Rally" on the steps of New Zealand's parliament in Wellington. The present a petition claiming 810,000 signatures to oppose the proposed legislation (in a country of about 3,000,000 people), but it later comes out only 350,000 of the signatures were valid.

1992 The US House of Representatives passes a resolution by a vote of 235-173 to allow a Washington DC ordinance which extends spousal health insurance benefits to same sex partners of district employees to remain on the books, but prohibited money to be spent on its enforcement. The US Senate had already approved the measure.

1992 The Twin Cities chapter of Dignity, an organization for gay and lesbian Roman Catholics, is evicted from its meeting space at St. Stephens Church in Minneapolis. Archbishop John Roach ordered that the organization could not use church space unless it publicly said it agrees with church teaching that homosexuality is an intrinsic moral evil.

1992 The Kentucky supreme court overturns the state's sodomy law with a vote of 4-3 in the case of Wasson v. Kentucky. In the majority decision justice Charles Leibson wrote "We need not sympathize, agree with, or even understand the sexual preference of homosexuals in order to recognize their right to equal treatment." Dissenting judges claimed that the ruling would increase homosexuality, incest, and prostitution.

1993 The University of Michigan's school board votes 7-1 to adopt a ban on anti-gay discrimination.

1994 OutRage, a London direct-action group, stages a zap against The Courage Trust's Open Day and Chorleywood, an event aimed at parents of lesbians and gays to persuade them that their children could be cured through conversion to Christianity.

1994 The Exhibition "Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall" closes at the New York Public Library. It had been there just over three months.

2004 Nova Scotia became the sixth Canadian province or territory to allow gay marriages as the provincial Supreme Court rules that banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

2005 A general election in New Zealand results in a record number of openly gay parliamentarians getting elected, five LGBT MPs in a national Parliament of 122 seats.

Brought to you by our friends at Wicked Gay Blog