The Most Influential People in LGBTQ+ World History

Considering that he was only 32 when he died in 323 B.C., Alexander the Great was something of a high-achiever. Inheriting the Greek kingdom of Macedonia from his father was nowhere near enough to satisfy Alexander’s ravening ambition. He went on to conquer the mighty Persian Empire by force of arms and extended his territorial gains all the way to India.

As to Alexander’s sexual preferences, it seems that he had a taste for female and male company, favoring both in large numbers. When it came to men, Alexander is believed to have had a single highly significant relationship which was much more than a one-night stand. That was with one of his own generals, Hephastion. Tragically, Alexander’s lover was killed in battle and not long before the conqueror himself died. Some said that he had pined away after the death of Hephastion.

One of the most famous artists of all time, Leonardo da Vinci was not just a genius when it came to painting and drawing. It’s worth remembering that he also had an extraordinary talent for futuristic inventing. The innovations he sketched out included a convincing prototype helicopter, a machine gun, and an airplane. If ever there was an individual who merited the title of “renaissance man” it had to be da Vinci. 

What about his love life? A 2021 article in British news website The Independent quoted Kandice Rawlings of the Oxford University Press. She admitted, “There’s no way of knowing Leonardo’s sexual orientation for sure,” but added, “Scholars’ opinions on the issue fall along a spectrum between ‘maybe’ and ‘very probably’.” In fact in 1476 aged 24, da Vinci did end up in court for sexual misbehavior with a 17-year-old man. Frustratingly, we don’t know the outcome of the case.

If you’ve seen the 2014 movie The Imitation Game you’ll know who Alan Turing is. If you haven’t, he was the British math wizard who’s credited with helping the Allies to beat the Germans in WWII. He did this by cracking the secret code the German military used. This provided intelligence whose value can hardly be overestimated — many believe it actually shortened the war.

Turing was a gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in his native country, England. He fell foul of the law in 1952 when he was arrested and found guilty of what at the time was described as “gross indecency.” As a result, Turing lost his security clearance and was no longer able to do the important intelligence work to which he’d dedicated his life. Tragically, he took his own life a couple of years later. He was only 41.

Sally Ride became the first female American to launch into space, flying aboard the Challenger in 1983. Ride was one of six female candidates chosen by NASA as potential astronauts in 1978; it was the same year she had been awarded a Ph.D. in astrophysics. She flew her second and final space mission aboard Challenger in 1984. A further planned mission was canceled after that Space Shuttle exploded just after takeoff in 1986. 

In 1982 Dr. Ride wed the astronaut Steven Hawley, a marriage that ended in divorce after five years. After that, she was in a same-sex relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy, a partnership that lasted for 27 years until her death in 2012. Her sister Bear Ride told the Advocate website that Sally had been a very private person, and this explained why her sexuality had not been revealed until after her death.

Harvey Milk was one of America’s first openly gay men to win public office. His political career started in 1977 when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors at his third attempt. It was a time when what was known as the gay liberation movement still had many battles ahead of it. Sadly his time in office was severely limited by tragedy.

Milk had faced his own struggles as a gay man before he was elected in California. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War but was saddled with an “other than honorable” discharge for sexual activity in 1955. His time in politics was brutally ended in 1978 when a former San Francisco city worker shot him and Mayor George Moscone dead at City Hall.

In 20th-century America, author James Baldwin faced two formidable challenges: as well as being openly gay, he was also of African-American heritage. Canadian author Michael Ondaatje paid a fulsome tribute to Baldwin, who died in 1987. “If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one,” Ondaatje said. Baldwin earned this high praise with works such as Go Tell It on the Mountain and Another Country.

Speaking to NBC News in 2017 Michelle Gordon of Emory University said, “His sexuality was as complicated, as the rest of him and did not follow strict dichotomies of love. There are a lot of people who are uncomfortable about his homosexuality and his critique of his masculinity.” Charles Stephens of the Counter Narrative Project added, “There isn’t a single black gay writer of literary fiction or non-fiction that has not been influenced by James Baldwin on some level.”

Christine Jorgensen hit the headlines around the world in 1952 when her transgender transformation was announced to the public. She was the first American to undergo a full physical transition. She was born George Jorgensen in New York in 1926. She joined the U.S. Army in 1945, serving for a year before moving to Denmark for a time. 

According to the Britannica website, Jorgensen had been uncomfortable with her birth gender since she’d been a youngster. She “was tormented by feelings of being a woman trapped inside a man’s body.” In 1967 she published a book, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography, and appearances on the lecture circuit and royalties from the book earned her a living. In 1970 a film based on her book and titled The Christine Jorgensen Story was released.

Oscar Wilde’s outstanding literary achievements include his single, haunting novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his comic dramas such as The Importance of Being Earnest. Although he’s rightly remembered for those works and others, unfortunately he’s also well-known for the grief that his sexuality caused him. Wilde’s trials and tribulations stemmed from the fact that he chose the wrong lover and lived in highly intolerant times.

The object of Wilde’s desire was a young English aristocrat, Lord Alfred Douglas. But it wasn’t Douglas that caused Wilde’s legal problems — it was Douglas’ father, the Marquess of Queensbury. He strongly disapproved of his son’s affair with Wilde and publicly accused the playwright of homosexuality, a serious charge in the 1890s. Unwisely, Wilde sued Queensbury for libel. He lost the case and as a result was charged with gross indecency, a catch-all for illicit gay sex. Wilde’s reputation was ruined, and he was sentenced to two years’ hard labor.

Appalling and scarcely credible as it seems to us now, until quite late in the 20th century the American Psychiatric Association classed homosexuality as a mental disorder. Barbara Gittings, a brave woman who was an out lesbian as early as the 1950s, campaigned tirelessly against this gross discrimination. And she succeeded: in 1973 the Psychiatric Association scrapped its outrageous characterization of gayness. 

It was in the 1950s that Gittings founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the very first organization that advocated for lesbians on the national stage. After Gittings died in 2007 her obituary in The New York Times quoted the words of author David Carter. “She was one of the rare people in the homophile movement — before Stonewall — who took a militant stance,” Carter observed. “And she not only took a militant stance, but she was in the forefront.”

African-American Bayard Rustin was another man who suffered for his sexuality in the mid-20th century, when gays were faced by intense hostility from the forces of law and order and much of the public. In 1953 he was arrested in California for having gay sex and served 50 days in prison for this so-called crime. But the irrepressible Rustin didn’t let that stop him from becoming an ardent campaigner for racial equality.

Rustin was a key advisor to Martin Luther King and the principal organizer of the historic 1963 civil rights event, the March on Washington. Rustin later spent more than a decade as president of the New York-based civil rights group the A. Philip Randolph Institute. He also became involved in campaigning for gay rights. Rustin died in 1987 but in 2013 Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2020 his criminal record from 70 years previously was scrubbed.

It’s still controversial to say the least, but there are those who believe that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Lady Eleanor had a lesbian affair with a journalist. Mrs. Roosevelt certainly was a trailblazer, enjoying a much higher public and political profile than her predecessors in the White House. But what’s the actual evidence that she conducted a long-term lesbian affair?

Roosevelt’s alleged lover was a journalist called Lorena Hickok. She was also involved in politics, writing reports for President Roosevelt’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration in the 1930s. Hickok wrote many passionate letters to Eleanor, who replied in kind. Hickok destroyed many of the letters, but more than 2,000 survive. And this correspondence offers what many consider as compelling evidence that the two women had a romantic relationship.

A prominent campaigner for LGBTQ+ rights in the 1960s and ’70s, Marsha P. Johnson was a gay African-American transgender woman and self-proclaimed drag artist. The “P” in Marsha P. Johnson, a name she chose herself, stood for “Pay It No Mind,” which is how Johnson would respond when asked about her gender identity. This was a time when being queer was officially considered to be a form of mental illness in the United States, and Johnson’s remarkable activism and bravery make her one of the most influential people for the LGBTQ+ rights movement in history. Her life as a campaigner was intimately tied in with the persecution of the gay community in the New York of the 1960s.

It was the summer of 1969 when police raided a well-known gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village: the Stonewall Inn. This led to a six-day uprising as the gay community and supporters rejected oppression and asserted their civil rights. One of the most active participants in this uprising was Johnson, who was just 23 at the time. She died in 1992 and is remembered today as a hugely significant pioneer campaigner for LGBTQ+ rights.

Born in 1951 in Kansas, Gilbert Baker became famous for his tireless campaigning for gay rights. But he achieved fame for another reason as well — his work as a vexillographer. Yes, we had to look up that word as well. It means “flag maker.” Gilbert was the man who invented the rainbow flag, that international symbol of gay pride, used as an instantly recognizable banner by campaigners for LGBTQ rights.

Baker raised his iconic flag in its first public appearance at the United Nations Plaza in New York. As well as making flags, Baker pursued a career as a fine artist, and one of his silk-screen rainbow motifs was exhibited in the White House when Bill Clinton was President. Obviously, such a powerful design as the rainbow flag could have made Baker a rich man. But he refused to trademark it, insisting that it was a symbol that everyone was free to use.

Perhaps the most famous of all 20th-century female movie stars, Marlene Dietrich’s sexuality was flexible: she took both male and female lovers. Born in 1901 in Berlin, Dietrich started on the stage as a singer as soon as she left school and also began to take parts in the silent movies of the day. She spent much of her time in the gay and lesbian bars of 1920s Germany, a time when more liberal attitudes prevailed before the rise of the Nazis. 

It wasn’t until the relatively late age of 29 that Dietrich got her big break in Hollywood, starring in the classic 1930 movie Blue Angel. In her next movie, Morocco, she even managed to pull off what looked very much like a lesbian kiss. During her life, Dietrich had many lovers of both sexes, even managing to sleep with both Errol Flynn and his wife Lili Damita.

The 2021 movie The United States vs. Billie Holiday showed the battles that the blues singer fought against segregation and racism in the U.S. as well as giving a frank insight into her bisexuality. She served a jail sentence in 1948 for drug use, but there were many who believed that she was actually being persecuted for her unambiguous civil rights stance. It tells us something that she won four Grammys — each one only awarded after her death. 

Her contemporaries recognized Holiday’s formidable talent and were apparently unfazed by the fact that she was widely known to be bisexual. Frank Sinatra’s tribute to her is quoted on the bi.org website: it reads, “It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me,” Sinatra said. “Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last 20 years.”

Rock Hudson was a highly successful Hollywood leading man during the 1950s and ‘60s. But because of the prevailing morality and prejudices of the times, Hudson was forced to lead a double life. In the era that his fame was at its height there was just no way that a prominent Hollywood actor could have admitted that he was gay. And so he was compelled to stay in the closet right up until his final illness in 1985. 

Hudson had contracted AIDS, and when this was announced it came as a real shock to many of his fans, who’d had no inkling that he was gay. His disclosure that he had been struck down by the condition was the first to come from a well-known public figure. AIDS was a highly stigmatized illness in the mid-1980s, and Hudson’s frank admission went a long way to combating the prejudice that those suffering from the disease faced.

Born in 1819 in Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was working as a printer by the age of 12. Later he moved into teaching and then journalism before he published his best-known work in 1855. Unable to find a publisher, he had to print it himself. It was a collection of poetry titled Leaves of Grass which the Britannica website calls “a landmark in the history of American literature.”

There’s still controversy about the nature of Whitman’s sexuality, but most researchers agree that he was either gay or bisexual. He certainly had a close relationship with a man called Peter Doyle, a streetcar conductor whom Whitman met in 1865. Doyle himself said that the two used to regularly rendezvous at a hotel after he’d finished his streetcar shift. The relationship continued until Whitman’s death in 1892.

The Britannica website has no doubt about the eminence of musical genius Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, calling him “the most popular Russian composer of all time.” It goes on to add that his music’s appeal comes from “its tuneful, open-hearted melodies, impressive harmonies, and colorful, picturesque orchestration.” For many years, the fact that Tchaikovsky was gay was suppressed. But an English edition of previously censored letters published in 2018 left no doubt that he was homosexual. 

In fact, Tchaikovsky’s sexuality had already been widely recognized in the West for many years. But in Russia, as the editor of the new edition of his letters, Marina Kostalevsky, told newspaper The Guardian, “It is still a subject of heated and often ugly public debate.” One of Tchaikovsky’s most passionate affairs was with his own nephew, Vladimir Davydov. The composer dedicated his final work, the Symphonie Pathétique, to him.

Gertrude Stein thrived in the literary and artistic hothouse that was Paris in the early part of the 20th century. She moved from her American homeland to the French capital, where she made her home on the legendary Left Bank. The love of her life, Alice B. Toklas, had only been in the city for a single day when she met Stein for the first time. 

The two women ran a literary salon that was at the very heart of cultural life in Paris. Visitors to their informal gatherings included the likes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Stein and Toklas were inseparable partners through the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, traveling through Europe together when they weren’t at home in Paris. It was only Stein’s death in 1946 that ended their relationship.

Born in 1942 on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, but brought up from 1964 in England, Farrokh Bulsara would come to the attention of the world as the irrepressible rock superstar Freddy Mercury. As the Britannica website puts it, his “flamboyant showmanship and powerfully agile vocals, most famously for the band Queen, made him one of rock’s most dynamic frontmen.” He also became one of the world’s most famous gay icons.

Yet despite Mercury’s status in the gay world, he himself never spoke openly about his sexuality. When he was at the height of his fame in the 1970s and ‘80s, discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community was still a powerfully negative force. His background also militated against coming out — his parents were Zoroastrians, a religion that is not tolerant of homosexuality. Afflicted by an AIDS-related illness, Mercury died far too young in 1991. He was 45.