LGBTQ Rights: Early 20th Century

Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Root's editor-in-chief, notes that the Renaissance "was surely as gay as it was black."

Blues music in the 1920s was so far under the radar of mainstream America that female blues singers could get away with occasionally expressing unconventional desires.

Then Prohibition ended, and the closet was born.

Early drag queens like Jean Malin helped bohemian gay culture thrive – before mob violence, Nazism and Hollywood homophobia drove it back underground.

Henry Gerber, immigrant and World War I Army enlistee, came to Chicago to live near other German-speaking immigrants. After seeing how people with different sexual orientations were treated here, he championed the plight of gays in American society.

In 1924 Henry Gerber founded the Society for Human Rights, the first gay rights organization in the United States.

Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues.

An early gay rights activist in the U.S., Gerber founded the Society for Human Rights (SHR) in 1924, the nation's first known homosexual organization, and Friendship and Freedom, the first known American homosexual publication.

Dr Magnus Hirschfeld was a trail-blazer who advanced the understanding of human sexuality and the advocacy of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) human rights at a time when it was deeply unpopular to do so.

The Queer Black Woman Who Reinvented The Blues: In the 1910s and 20s, Ma Rainey took the stage with an ostrich feather in one hand and a gun in the other.

An openly gay African American writer, artist, and actor associated with the Harlem Renaissance.