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#QueerHeroes Day 20. Gloria Allen It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes someone like Gloria Allen to raise the village in the first place. After retiring from her position as a registered nurse, she became frustrated with the resources and subsequent positions fellow trans women of younger generations experienced. So "Mama Gloria"—as …
#QueerHeroes Day 19 William Dorsey Swann/The Queen Today is Juneteenth, which celebrates when the Emancipation Proclamation was read aloud to slaves in Texas—the last state left for it to be announced, two years after the proclamation was issued. The first self-proclaimed drag queen was a freed slave. William Dorsey Swann was born in the 1850s in …
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#QueerHeroes Day 18 Sister Rosetta Tharpe This Black lesbian gospel singer was the godmother of Rock and Roll. Her sound was different than anyone else’s at the time not just because of her stunning voice, but because she would heavily increase the distortion on her electric guitar, giving it an added grit that, by the 60s, …
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#QueerHeroes Day 17. Alvin Ailey Ailey was born in Texas in the middle of the Great Depression. He and his mother spent much of his childhood picking cotton and working as a domestic worker for white people. At night, he would sneak out to watch adults in nightclubs dance. He moved to LA in high school …
#QueerHeroes Day 16. Bayard Rustin Rustin was born in 1912. His mother was a Quaker. He moved to Harlem in 1937 and his civil rights work quickly began garnering attention, including his work to free the wrongly accused Scottsboro Boys. He began orchestrating some of America’s earliest freedom rides down South in the 1940s. That decade, …
