October 1

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1760 – Extremely wealthy British author and connoisseur William Beckford (d.1844) was ostracized by English society for the last sixty years of his life because of his homosexuality.

Beckford's father was alderman and lord mayor of London, and his mother, connected by marriage to the Dukes of Hamilton, a stern and unrelenting Calvinist. Beckford's father died when he was ten, and his mother decided that it would be best not to risk sending her delicate son away to school. She hired a series of tutors and monitored his education herself. Beckford early on displayed an interest in art and music, and especially in the exotic Oriental arts of the Arab world.

As he entered adolescence, he was lucky that one of his series of tutors was Alexander Cozens, whose own fascination with Eastern lore encouraged Beckford's own. At the same time that Beckford's aesthetic taste began to develop, so did his devotion to emotional self-indulgence.

Chief among his emotional attachments was a young cousin, William Courtenay, known as "Kitty" to family and friends, who responded to Beckford's attentions with adolescent devotion. For years, Beckford poured out his soul in a series of epistolary endearments to Courtenay that were as extreme as they were indiscreet. These letters, almost inevitably, fell into the hands of Courtenay's reactionary and powerful uncle Lord Loughborough, a chief justice.

Although, Loughborough could not catch Beckford and Courtenay in flagrante dilecto, he let out a rumor that he had, and he advertised the scandal in the morning newspapers from October through December 1784. The result of this newspaper campaign was the utter ruin of Beckford's reputation.

He lived as an exile in his own estate at Fonthill, and he traveled freely on the continent. But he was never again received in polite society.

He lived until 1844, for sixty years an outcast. In his travels, he met various men who befriended him and boys whom he loved. Some stayed close to him throughout his life, and a few earned his sincere devotion. But society meant too much to him not for him to feel the blow of his disgrace, and the frantic building that went on at his estate, which began with a wall around the entire property and ended with his massive gothic Fonthill Abbey with its huge central tower, might be understood as his attempt to deal with his status as an outcast.

1783 – The last execution for sodomy in France occurs—a friar is broken on the wheel.

1864 – Arkansas revises its sodomy law to mandate the death penalty for all persons.

1867 – George (Cecil) Ives (d.1950) was a German-English poet, writer, penal reformer and early gay rights campaigner.

Ives was the illegitimate son of an English army officer and a Spanish baroness. He was raised by his paternal grandmother in Hampshire and the South of France. Ives was educated at home and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he started to amass 45 volumes of scrapbooks (between 1892 and 1949). These scrapbooks consist of clippings on topics such as murders, punishments, freaks, theories of crime and punishment, transvestism, psychology of gender, homosexuality, cricket scores, and letters he wrote to newspapers.

Ives met "Oscar Wilde at the Authors' Club in London in 1892. Oscar Wilde was taken by his boyish looks and persuaded him to shave off his moustache, and once kissed him passionately in the Travellers' Club. Ives was already working for the end of the oppression of homosexuals, what he called the "Cause." He hoped that Wilde would join the "Cause", but was disappointed. In 1893, Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom he had a brief affair, introduced Ives to several Oxford poets whom Ives also tried to recruit.

By 1897, Ives created and founded the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society for homosexuals which was named after the location of the battle where the Sacred Band of Thebes was finally annihilated in 338 BC. Members included Charles Kains Jackson, Samuel Elsworth Cottam, Montague Summers, and John Gambril Nicholson.

The same year, Ives visited Edward Carpenter at Millthorpe. This marked the beginning of their friendship.

In 1914, Ives, together with Edward Carpenter, Magnus Hirschfeld, Laurence Housman and others, founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. He also kept in touch with other progressive psychologists such as Havelock Ellis and Professor Cesare Lombroso.

The topics addressed by the Society in lectures and publications included: the promotion of the scientific study of sex and a more rational attitude towards sexual conduct; problems and questions connected with sexual psychology (from medical, juridical, and sociological aspects), birth control, abortion, sterilisation, venereal diseases, and all aspects of prostitution. In 1931, the organisation became the British Sexological Society.

As he grew older Ives developed odd passions. When the Second World War ended he refused to believe it and carried a gas mask with him until his death. He was also afraid to sleep alone and would always contrive to have at least one bed fellow.

Throughout his life, Ives had many lovers whom he called his "children". He took care of them, gave them money and bought them houses. He often lived with more than one lover at a time and some stayed with him several years.

At his death in 1950, George Ives left a large archive covering his life and work between 1874 and 1949. The papers were bought in 1977 by the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The bulk of the material consists of 122 volumes of diaries kept by Ives from the age of nineteen until about six months before his death at age eighty-two. Most of the diaries have daily entries. The view Ives provides in his diary of the life of an upper-middle class English homosexual from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century is of particular interest for understanding the homosexual movement in England during this time.

He was the model for Raffles, the fictional Victorian gentleman thief, according to Andrew Lycett, who says that the creator of Raffles, William Hornung, "may not have understood this sexual side of Ives' character", but that Raffles "enjoys a remarkably intimate relationship with his sidekick Bunny Manders."

1903 – Vladimir Horowitz (d.1989) was a Russian-born American classical pianist and composer. His technique and use of tone color and the excitement of his playing were legendary. He is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.

Born in Kiev, now capital of the Ukraine, Horowitz received piano instruction from an early age, initially from his mother, who was herself a pianist. In 1912 he entered the Kiev Conservatory. His first solo recital was in Kharkiv in 1920.

Horowitz's fame grew, and he soon began to tour Russia where he was often paid with bread, butter and chocolate rather than money, due to the country's economic hardships caused by the Civil War. During the 1922-1923 season, he performed 23 concerts of eleven different programs in Petrograd alone. Despite his early success as a pianist, Horowitz maintained that he wanted to be a composer, and undertook a career as a pianist only to help his family, who had lost their possessions in the Russian Revolution.

In December 1925, Horowitz crossed the border into the West, ostensibly to study with Artur Schnabel. Privately intending not to return, the pianist had stuffed American dollars and British pound notes into his shoes to finance his initial concerts.

On December 18, 1925, Horowitz made his first appearance outside his home country, in Berlin.He later played in Paris, London and New York City. Horowitz gave his United States debut on January 12, 1928, in Carnegie Hall. He played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham, who was also making his U.S. debut. Horowitz's success with the audience was phenomenal, and his place in American music was assured.

Despite his marriage, in 1933, to Arturo Toscanini's daughter, there were persistent rumors of Horowitz's homosexuality. Arthur Rubinstein said of Horowitz that "Everyone knew and accepted him as a homosexual." David Dubal wrote that in his years with Horowitz, there was no evidence that the octogenarian was sexually active, but that "there was no doubt he was powerfully attracted to the male body and was most likely often sexually frustrated throughout his life." Dubal observed that Horowitz sublimated a strong instinctual sexuality into a powerful erotic undercurrent which was communicated in his piano playing. Horowitz, who denied being homosexual, once joked "There are three kinds of pianists: Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists."

In the 1940s, Horowitz began seeing a psychiatrist. According to sources, this was an attempt to alter his sexual orientation.

Vladimir Horowitz died on November 5, 1989 in New York of a heart attack, aged 86. He was buried in the Toscanini family tomb in the Cimitero Monumentale, Milan, Italy.

1928 – Laurence Harvey (d.1973) was a Lithuanian-born actor. In a career that spanned a quarter of a century, Harvey appeared in stage, film and television productions primarily in the United Kingdom and the United States. His 1959 performance in Room at the Top brought him global fame and an Academy Award nomination. That success was followed by the role of the ill-fated Texian commander William Barret Travis in The Alamo, produced by John Wayne, and as the brainwashed Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate. Many of his films earned nominations and awards for either the films or his co-stars.

Although Harvey was married three times, in his account of being Frank Sinatra's valet, Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra (2003), George Jacobs writes that Harvey often made passes at him while visiting Sinatra. According to Jacobs, Sinatra was aware of Harvey's sexuality. In his autobiography Close Up (2004), British actor John Fraser claimed that Harvey was gay and that his long-term lover was his manager James Woolf, who had cast Harvey in several of the films he produced in the 1950s.

1935 – John Gilgun, Irish American novelist, poet, memoirist, fabulist, and short fictionist, is openly gay and sees coming out and homosexuality as a struggle for self-identity fighting against the back-drop of the repressive and oppressive traditional Catholic Church of the Boston Irish, the United States Army, and family. He was born in Boston, and spent most of his working life teaching in St. Joseph.His works include Everything That Has Been Shall Be Again: The Reincarnation Fables of John Gilgun (1981), the novel Music I Never Dreamed Of (1989), the poetry collections The Dooley Poems (1991) and From The Inside Out (1991), and Your Buddy Misses You: Stories {1994).

He took a leave from teaching in the 80s to write his novel Music I never Dreamed Of. Wayne Cortois in The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered, tells us:

His memoir "Arms and the Boy" from Boyhood, Growing Up Male: A Multicultural Anthology, 2nd Edition (1998), edited by Franklin Abbott, is about the six-year-old Gilgun questioning what is wrong with him during World War II. He was a boy who was not like the other boys: he played with dolls, not guns. Gilgun never wanted to join the military like his uncles. He was open about this in public with his aunt and two sailors, which caused his aunt to shake him and shout at him. In this short memoir, Gilgun presents the loneliness and suffering one goes through for being different. Gilgun was a "sissy," but could not see why it was wrong for him to not want to kill humans, and puppies, like in a particular Hollywood war film. Not fitting in can cause psychological depression, and for Gilgun, writing this after coming out, what saves one is admitting who one is and accepting it no matter what the familial or public costs.

That Gilgun has had a successful career as a writer and has lived a long life is testament to the personal success of his philosophy of nonconformity. He currently lives in retirement in St. Joseph.

1936 – Francisco Franco is proclaimed Generalissimo and Head of State in Spain. His dictatorship lasts 40 years during which thousands of homosexuals are jailed, put in camps, or locked up in mental institutions for breaking the Vagrancy Act.

1940 – Paul A. Robinson, American writer and historian, born in San Diego, California, has specialized in nineteenth-and twentieth-century intellectual history in Europe and the United States. In his books, especially his more recent works, he has frequently written on the subjects of classical music and opera, sex and homosexuality, sometimes even combining essays on music with sex into one volume.

Many of his later essays in Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters focus on psychology, gay sex, and even pets, and are unrelated to the opera chapters except for the fact that they are all subjects that interest Robinson, giving the book a strong element of autobiography. Robinson has written more extensively about homosexuality in Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette and Queer Wars: The New Gay Right and Its Critics. In the former, Robinson's purpose is to analyze the lives of the gay writers who, from the Victorian period to the 1980s, "make attraction to their own sex a central theme of their autobiographies." The historian ruminates on the writings of such authors as Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James.

As the creator of the freshman seminar Gay Autobiography, which he has taught at Stanford since 2000, historian Paul Robinson has had a uniquely informed view of the evolving world of gay culture.

Robinson's work as a scholar, gay man and teacher has given him front-row seats to what he calls "the ongoing erosion of the closet."

"Keeping being gay a secret has been a particularly American way of dealing with homosexuality, but there's a growing sense that you can't live a lie," observed Robinson.

  Wowereit (R) with Kubicki

1953 – Klaus Wowereit is a German politician, member of the SPD (Social Democratic Party), and was the Mayor of Berlin from the 21 October 2001 state elections, where his party won a plurality of the votes, 29.7%, until December 2014. He served as President of the Bundesrat (the fourth highest office in Germany) in 2001/02. His SPD-led coalition was re-elected in the 2006 elections; after the 2011 elections the SDPs coalition party switched sides. He was also sometimes mentioned as a possible SPD candidate for the Chancellorship of Germany (Kanzlerkandidatur) in the next German federal election, but that never materialized.

Wowereit is one of the most famous German politicians who is openly gay. In coming out, prior to the 2001 mayoral elections, he coined the now famous German phrase "Ich bin schwul, und das ist auch gut so." ("I'm gay, and that is a good thing.") In his autobiography, Wowereit states that his decision to come out in public was made because after his nomination as candidate to become the Mayor of Berlin, he felt that the German tabloids were already "on the right track". With his coming out, Wowereit wanted to beat the tabloids to it and prevent them from writing wild, sensational and fabricated stories about his private life. Wowereit said those now famous words during a convention of the Berlin SPD. After the end of his speech, there was half a second of surprised silence, then spontaneous cheering and loud applause to support him.

In September 2007, Wowereit published an autobiographical book titled "…und das ist auch gut so.", after his famous coming-out phrase

Wowereit's civil partner, Jörn Kubicki, is a neurosurgeon. They have been in a relationship since 1993.

1956 – The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals upholds the deportation of a Gay alien for exposing himself in a restroom. The concurring opinion of Judge Jerome Frank limits his support for the deportation to the alien's lying about a previous conviction. Frank embarks on a remarkable opinion raising questions about why homosexuality seems to bother people so much.

1965 – James Paul Oetken, known professionally as J. Paul Oetken, is a District Judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He is the first openly gay man to serve on the federal bench.

On January 26, 2011, President Barack Obama nominated Oetken to serve on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to replace Judge Denny Chin, whom Obama previously appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

New York Senator Charles Schumer recommended Oetken to the post. Schumer recommended Oetken a year after he recommended former Assistant United States Attorney Daniel S. Alter, also openly gay, whom the White House declined to nominate after concluding, because of statements that had been attributed to Alter, that his nomination was unlikely to survive the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. Schumer stated that diversity was a consideration in his recommendations for federal judgeships, and that he was "shocked to learn" that no openly gay men had served on the federal bench.

The full United States Senate confirmed Oetken on July 18, 2011 in an 80–13 vote.[10] He received his commission on July 20, 2011. Oetken is the second openly gay Article III judge in the country, after Deborah Batts.

Oetken is openly gay. He lives with his partner Makky Pratayot in Manhattan. They were married on September 6, 2014 at Jane Hotel in Manhattan by Judge Alison J. Nathan.

1968 – Michael Thomas Ford is an American author of primarily gay-themed literature. He is best known for his "My Queer Life" series of humorous essay collections and for his award-winning novels Last Summer, Looking for It, Full Circle, Changing Tides and What We Remember.

Ford began his writing career in 1992 with the publication of 100 Questions & Answers about AIDS: What You Need to Know Now (Macmillan), one of the first books about the AIDS crisis for young adults. Named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, the book became the most widely used resource in HIV education programs for young people and was translated into more than a dozen languages.

Ford's next book, 1996's The World Out There: Becoming Part of the Lesbian and Gay Community (The New Press), was a handbook for people coming out and wanting to know what it means to be part of the queer world.

1971 – In October of this year, Pink Triangle Press, a Canadian non-profit organization which specializes in LGBT media including publishing, online interactive media, and television, is formed. Pink Triangle Press's main asset is the LGBT magazine, Xtra! and its spinoffs Xtra! West and Capital Xtra!. The company's headquarters are located in Toronto, although it also has offices in Ottawa and Vancouver.

Pink Triangle Press' roots trace back to 1971 (although not in name) in Toronto, when a group of volunteers began to produce The Body Politic, a paper containing news and opinions on gay liberation. By 1976 The Body Politic was being published monthly, and in the early 1980s it claimed a circulation of over 9,000 nationally, and boasted contributions from writers all over the world.

In 1978, Pink Triangle Press was incorporated, its name was chosen as a symbol of history and commitment, as it comes from the symbols placed on suspected homosexual men in Nazi concentration camps. Later that year, Pink Triangle Press was charged with "publishing immoral, indecent and scurrilous material" because of an issue of The Body Politic which included Gerald Hannon's article "Men Loving Boys Loving Men".

The Press was brought up on similar charges again in May 1982, this time for "Lust With a Very Proper Stranger", an article on fisting. Pink Triangle Press however won both cases.

In an attempt to broaden Pink Triangle Press's Toronto readership, the collective launched Xtra! in March 1984. Xtra! was meant to be more upbeat and accessible than The Body Politic. By 1985 Xtra! had taken over its parent publication's role of providing local entertainment and community event listings. Xtra!'s circulation had soon overtaken The Body Politicwhich was in financial trouble, so in an effort to save Pink Triangle Press and keep Xtra! going, The Body Politicwas discontinued February 1987. Xtra! West in Vancouver and Capital Xtra! in Ottawa followed in 1993.

Pink Triangle Press launched www.Squirt.org in 1998, a gay mens' personals, dating and cruising website, which now has more than 600,000 active members.

In July 2004, Pink Triangle Press became a minority partner in PrideVision TV when the channel was sold by Headline Media Group . PrideVision was subsequently rebranded OUTtv and a new gay male adult subscription channel, HARDtv, was launched at the same time. PTP owns approximately 25% of OUTtv and 55% of HARDtv.

In February 2008 Pink Triangle Press acquired Toronto-based publication fab, a gay scene magazine which had previously been seen as Xtra!'s competition.

1971 – Connecticut becomes the second state to abolish its laws prohibiting homosexual acts by consenting adults.

1971 – African Americans Donna Burkett, 25, and Manonia Evans, 21, apply for a marriage license in Wisconsin but the application is refused by the clerk. The two women file a lawsuit but the suit is dismissed. They have a wedding without a license on December 25, 1971.

1973 - The Maine Supreme Court overturns a sodomy conviction because the penis had been touched, but not swallowed.

1975 – Albert M. Chan is a Canadian actor and filmmaker based in the United States.

Chan was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and lived in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada before moving to Boston, Massachusetts in 1997 to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.

Chan first began his career working on student films, indie films, and theatre in the Boston area while still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It took several years before he landed his first major role in 2006, a part in Walt Disney Picture's Underdog, which was released in 2007. He followed up with TV roles that same year in The CW Television Network pilot I'm Paige Wilson and Showtime's Brotherhood.

Also in 2007, Chan took matters into his own hands and wrote, directed, produced, and starred in his own film, Fate Scores, which also featured the acoustic guitar song "It Won't Be Long", written and performed by Chan. In his directorial debut, Chan was recognized by the National Film Board of Canada as second runner-up for Best Canadian Short Film at the Vancouver Asian Film Festival in 2009. Fate Scores premiered at the Wisconsin Film Festival on April 5, 2009, and has since appeared in seven additional film festivals in North America. The film was acquired for distribution in 2010 by Moving Images Distribution (formerly Canadian Filmmakers Distribution West).

Chan returned to filmmaking in 2011 when he wrote, directed, executive produced, and starred in his own film, The Commitment, about an interracial gay couple adopting a newborn baby. The film was inspired by an unsuccessful adoption in Chan's actual life. "Those familiar with domestic adoption had told us before we began that the adoption process is truly a roller coaster ride, and now we finally understood what these people meant," Chan explained on the film's official website. "I dealt with the feelings of loss and disappointment the only way I knew how—I wrote a screenplay. Four unsuccessful birthparent matches and one year later, The Commitment went into production. Two weeks after the film wrapped, our beautiful son Andrew was born, the result of our fifth match." The film premiered in Palm Springs on September 22, 2012, and has since won numerous awards.

1981 – Under intense pressure from Moral Majority and other right-wing groups, the U.S. House of Representatives vetoes the new sex offenses law passed by the District of Columbia council, which includes repeal of the sodomy law. This is the first time that a District law that does not violate federal supremacy is vetoed.

1983 – Brock McGillis is a Canadian former ice hockey goaltender and current advocate for LGBT+ rights. He was among the first men's professional hockey players to publicly come out as gay.

McGillis played in the Ontario Hockey League between 2001 and 2002 with the Windsor Spitfires and the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds (shortened to Soo Greyhounds). After playing for a season with the Kalamazoo Wings in the United Hockey League (UHL), he left North America to play in the Netherlands.

From 2009 to 2010, he played with the men's team at Concordia University in Montréal.

In November 2016, McGillis came out as gay to the public. Since then, he has been outspoken about LGBT+ issues and problems within North American ice hockey.

After former NHLer, Daniel Carcillo launched a class-action lawsuit against the CHL for promoting a culture of abuse, McGillis spoke of it, stating that, "Whether it's associations, leagues, federations — it doesn't matter, pick a level — there's thousands, thousands of stories like this," and emphasized that hockey needs to change its culture.

He was featured in the 2019 documentary Standing on the Line. Brock is an ambassador for Athlete Ally. Brock has also contributed a chapter to Bob Mackenzie's book "Every Hockey Heroes". He appeared in the Book "Proud To Play", featuring LGBTQ+ athletes in Canada. Brock graced the cover of and featured in the September/October 2018 issue of IN Magazine.

The LGBTQ+ advocate also appeared in many Canadian TV features, including CBC The National, CTV Your Morning, ET Canada Pride and Global News. Brock shared the stage with Richard Branson and Billy Porter at the 2019 New York City World Pride.

In 2020, the Toronto Maple Leafs became the first NHL team to work with him, hiring him to run a virtual workshop about homophobia for Maple Leafs personnel.

1985 - An Indiana appellate court rules that an enclosed booth in a video arcade is a "public place" for purposes of sex.

CODCO:
Cathy Jones, Andy Jones, Greg Malone,
Mary Walsh, & Tommy Sexton

1986 – In October, CODCO, a sketch comedy series whose cast includes the openly gay Greg Malone and Tommy Sexton, begins production for CBC Television. Along with the later The Kids in the Hall, the show plays a prominent role in the representation of LGBT characters and issues on Canadian television; in addition to the gay characters "Jerome and Duncan", Sexton and Malone were especially renowned for drag-based impersonations of celebrity women such as Queen Elizabeth, Barbara Frum, Barbara Walters, Tammy Faye Bakker and Margaret Thatcher.

In 1973, Tommy Sexton and Diane Olsen wrote a comedic show about Canadian stereotypes of Newfoundlanders, Cod on a Stick. Originally launched in Toronto, the cast consisted of Sexton, Olsen, Greg Malone, Cathy Jones, Mary Walsh and Paul Sametz. The show subsequently opened in St. John's, with Scott Strong replacing Sametz, and then toured the province with Robert Joy replacing Strong. When the show was taped by the National Film Board in 1974, Andy Jones appeared in the cast as well.

In 1985, Walsh, Sexton, Malone, Cathy Jones and Andy Jones reunited as CODCO for a benefit show in St. John's. The troupe's name was an abbreviation of "Cod Company". Sexton and Malone had just completed the successful and popular S and M Comic Book series of CBC Television specials, and the CBC was interested in developing further projects with the duo — after the success of the CODCO reunion show, the troupe decided to work on a CODCO series.

CODCO began production in 1986, and debuted on the CBC in 1987. Although not regular contributors, Thomey and Joy sometimes appeared on CODCO as guest performers.

For most of its run, CODCO aired as the latter half of a one-hour sketch comedy block, immediately following The Kids in the Hall.

In 1991, the CBC refused to air Pleasant Irish Priests in Conversation, a sketch involving three Catholic priests discussing their sexual experiences. The Mount Cashel Orphanage child abuse controversy was very much in the news at the time, and as Newfoundlanders, the CODCO crew quite naturally had very strong opinions on the matter. As a result, Andy Jones quit the show in protest. Although the series carried on for one more year, his departure was widely perceived to have weakened the show, which subsequently ended in 1992. Ironically, the CBC subsequently aired Pleasant Irish Priests in a Best of CODCO special just a few months after the regular series ended.

Following the end of CODCO, Walsh and Cathy Jones worked with Thomey and Rick Mercer to create This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Several CODCO characters, including Dakey Dunn and Jerry Boyle, were carried over to the new series.

Sexton died in 1993 of complications from AIDS.

1987 – The US Senate voted 75-23 to allow the former hospital at Presidio Army base to be used for a regional AIDS treatment facility in order to meet the projected needs of San Francisco. President Reagan said if the bill was passed by the House of Representatives, he would veto it.

1987 – ACT-UP disrupted evangelist Pat Robertson's formal announcement of his candidacy for the Republican nomination for US President.

1989 - Denmark becomes the first country to legalize same-sex partnerships, the start of the worldwide move to marriage equality.

1989 – Axil & Eigil Axgil became the first gay couple to be legally married in Copenhagen, Denmark. They had been together for 40 years, 32 of which were under a common last name. Ten other couples were married the same day. These unions, the world's first legal modern same-sex civil unions, were called "registered partnerships."

1991 – Gus Kenworthy is a British-born American freestyle skier from Telluride, Colorado who competes in slopestyle and also the halfpipe. Kenworthy won the silver medal in Men's freestyle skiing at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Kenworthy is the youngest of three sons of an English mother and an American father, Pip and Peter Kenworthy. He has two older brothers, Hugh and Nick Kenworthy.

Kenworthy's father, Peter, has been the executive director of the Mountainfilm film festival in Telluride, since 2006. He is a former banker from Philadelphia, who worked in London (UK) for several years. Kenworthy's mother, Pip, is English and originally from Bristol, England. She was born into a large family, with eight siblings. After moving to London in the early 1970s, she began working backstage in costumes, at the Kings Head Theatre Club. She also ran a vintage booth at the Camden Lock Market. She emigrated with her then husband, Peter, and her sons, including then two-year-old Gus, to Telluride, in 1993.

Kenworthy graduated from Telluride High School in June 2010. He could have graduated in 2009, but decided instead to take a year off to ski.

Kenworthy won AFP World Championships overall titles in 2011, 2012, and 2013. In 2013, he placed second at the Olympics in Sochi, Russia and won his first medal, a bronze, at the X Games in Tignes, France in the slopestyle event.

On February 13, 2014, Kenworthy won the silver medal during Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Kenworthy gained international media attention as a result of his photographer friend, Robin Macdonald, texting him a photo of five stray dogs: four puppies and their mother; during their stay in Sochi, at the 2014 Winter Olympics. He stayed behind for more than a month to save the family of dogs, and others; while he fought to bring them back home. Their adoption of these dogs helped bring further attention to the problematic rise of the stray dog population in Sochi, which grew significantly during the Olympics.

In October 2015, Kenworthy came out as gay. Rolling Stone noted the "freestyle medalist is the first action-sports star to come out." After a long term relationship with Canadian photographer Robin Macdonald, he is was dating Matthew Wilkas. The two gained some attention when they shared their Times Square kiss on New Year's Eve 2015. Although the two are no longer together, they are still good friends.

1993 – An Ottawa court ordered the Canadian government to grant a gay federal worker spousal and bereavement benefits equal to those heterosexual employees receive.

1993 – National Public Radio in the US announced it would offer domestic partner medical and dental benefits to employees in same-sex relationships. The policy also included unmarried heterosexual couples.

1994 – Rodney Wilson, a Missouri high school teacher, creates LGBT history month. He gathers other teachers and community leaders who select October because public schools are in session and existing traditions, such as Coming Out Day (October 11), occur that month.

1996 Argentina: Buenos Aires police begin a campaign of raids on gay and lesbian clubs and arrests of cross-dressing patrons and transsexuals in an apparent protest against impending gay and lesbian rights measures.

1998 – Javier Cruz was executed in Texas by lethal injection for the murder of two gay men, James Ryan, 69, and Louis Neal, 71, in their home.

2008 – Construction of the Royal Airforce Base at Lakenheath was held up in 2008 when relics of this base’s ancient inhabitants were unearthed during a routine construction project. The base must work with British archaeology officials for every base construction because of the area’s dense concentration of buried artifacts.

Before the Air Force set up shop at Lakenheath more than 60 years ago, it was home to the Anglo-Saxons — ancient peoples who inhabited the south and east of the country from the early fifth century through the Norman conquest of 1066.

Toiling alongside a construction crew that rebuilt the traffic circle on the northside of the base in August, a team of British archaeologists dug up three Anglo-Saxon graves dating to between 450 and 650.

In one of the graves they found two unusually large bodies dating from before the Norman Invasion of 1066 that appeared at first glance to be a husband and wife. The bodies were buried embracing each other, but genetic testing revealed both were men. It remains unknown if they were lovers, relatives, warrior companions, or just good friends.

2009 – Nevada, USA legalises domestic partnerships from this date.