5history

5-2-1727 - Charles Hitchin, who had been convicted of attempted sodomy, was put in the pillory. When several of his friends from the molly houses (gay meeting places in which many of the patrons were also transgendered) attempted to protect him from the crowd the mob attacked them and a bloody fight took place. It was the earliest recorded act of GLBT resistance.

5-2-1972 - Former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover died, leaving most of his estate to his companion Clyde Tolson. Visit his grave at
http://www.findagrave.com/pictures/499.html

5-3-1702 - Lord Cornbury arrived in Manhattan to be the governor-general of New York. He would create scandal by publicly cross-dressing.

5-3-1989 - Transsexual Christine Jorgensen died of cancer at age 62

5-5-1996 - Transgendered activists demonstrated outside the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association to protest the labeling of transgendered people as mentally ill.

5-6-1933 - Nazis destroyed the Institute for Sexual Science as a brass band played outside. On the same day libraries were ordered to remove and destroy all books with positive or neutral references to homosexuality or gender variance.

5-9-1726 - In England, Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin and Thomas Wright were hanged after a trial of five men arrested during a raid on Margaret Brown's molly house, a meeting place for gay men and transgenders. George Kedger, another man who had been sentenced to death, was spared when a judge overturned his conviction.

5-9-1971 - Andy Warhol's play "Pork" opened. The cast included a sixteen-year-old drag queen named Harvey Fierstein.

5-12-1994 - A hearing on discrimination against transgendered people took place in San Francisco before the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. It resulted in a paper on transsexual discrimination and unanimous passage by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors of an amendment to add gender identity to the list of those protected from discrimination.

5-14-1897 - The Scientific Humanitarian Committee was founded in Berlin by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld to organize opposition to legal and social oppression of homosexuals and transgenders Germany. Hirschfeld coined the term “transvestite” and was reportedly a crossdresser. It would be the first of several pre-Nazi gay liberation organizations in Berlin.

5-15-1933 - The Broadway Brevities, a New York weekly tabloid, carried a story which warned of rampant "third-sexers" that had descended on Broadway and were making life intolerable for normal people.

5-15-1935 - Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of Berlin's Institute for Sexual Science and The Scientific Humanitarian Committee, died in Nice,
France.

5-15-1995 - John Lotter's trial began for the murder of Brandon Teena and his two friends. He would be found guilty and sentenced to death.

5-20-1782 - Deborah Sampson, a genetic female, joined the American army under the name Robert Shirtliff. He had previously fought in the Continental Army. His biological sex was discovered the following year.

5-24-1922 - In Vienna, GLBT liberation activist Dr Magnus Hirschfeld gave a speech before an audience of 2,000. Though not well publicized, hundreds of people had to be turned away.

5-24-1976 - The first part of the daily serial "Tales of the City" by Armistead Maupin appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. Maupin’s “Tales of the City” featured a transsexual as a main character.