Between 1978 and 1997, English footballer Justinus Soni "Justin" Fashanu played for a number of teams. He was openly homosexual when he came out publicly later in his career, making him the first professional footballer to do so. His early teams were aware of his sexual orientation. When he moved from Norwich City to Nottingham Forest in 1981, he became one of the first football players to fetch a £1 million transfer price. From then on until his retirement in 1997, he enjoyed varied degrees of success as a player.

He was questioned by authorities in 1998 after immigrating to the US when a seventeen-year-old kid accused him of sexual assault. On April 3, 1998, he was accused and a warrant was issued for his arrest in Howard County, Maryland, but he had already left his apartment. According to his suicide note, he went to England and committed suicide in London in May 1998 out of worry that he wouldn't receive a fair trial due to his sexual orientation. The intercourse was consented to, according to his suicide note. Fashanu entered the National Football Museum Hall of Fame in 2020. The Justin Fashanu Foundation was founded in his honor by his niece with the intention of eliminating prejudice in the football industry.

Detailed information:

Full name: Justinus Soni Fashanu

Date of birth: 19 February 1961

Date of death: 2 May 1998

Known for:

• Winning the BBC Goal of the Season award
  
• Appearing in a total of 103 senior games for Liverpool
  

Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS was a gay British mathematician and logician who made major contributions to the fields of mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and mathematical biology. Turing had a significant impact on the growth of theoretical computer science by formalizing algorithm and computation principles using the Turing machine, which is a model for a general-purpose computer. His contributions to theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence are largely regarded as his legacy. He earned a mathematics degree from King's College in Cambridge. He earned his PhD from Princeton University's mathematics department in 1938. Turing worked with the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), a British code-breaking facility that created Ultra intelligence, during the Second World War.

Computer science, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence were all revolutionized by him. Turing also created the first methodical approach for decrypting messages using the advanced German encryption machine known as "Tunny" that the British developed in 1942. At the time, homosexuality was illegal, and Turing was found guilty of "gross indecency," which barred him from ever again working at the Government Communications Headquarters. He was given a series of hormone injections to lower his desire, and at the age of 41, he committed suicide. His insights played a crucial role in the triumph of the Allies in World War II.

Detailed information:
Full name: Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS
Date of birth: 23 June 1912
Date of death: 7 June 195

Known for:

• Cryptanalysis of the Enigma
• Turing's proof
• Turing machine
• Turing test
• Unorganised machine
• Turing pattern
• Turing reduction
• "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis"

Early in the 20th century, Chinese-Canadian sexologist and LGBTQ activist Li Shiu Tong gained notoriety as German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld's covert partner. Born to affluent Chinese businessman Li Kam-tong in British Hong Kong, Li Shiu Tong grew up in Hong Kong while it was governed by the British. Additionally, he was the great-grandson of Qing leader and reformer Li Hongzhang. He enrolled at St. John's University in Shanghai to study medicine but left after his first year to continue his studies with Magnus Hirschfield, who became his mentor, teacher, and lover.

After Li passed away in 1993, his sexuality-related book was thrown out but was later found by an interested neighbor. This unpublished work was the culmination of decades of investigation into sexuality in many cultures. Compared to Hirschfeld, his findings are more in line with recent studies of LGBTQIA+ persons. Li demonstrated that bisexuality was far more prevalent than Hirschfeld had indicated, and he wrote about the importance and advantages of transgender identity in the human experience. He discovered that gay sexuality was far more prevalent than his forebears had projected, which is in line with the current rises in the percentages of people who identify as LGBTQIA+. In the end, his work was decades ahead of its time.

Detailed information:
Full name: Li Shiu Tong
Date of birth: 9 January 1907
Date of death: 5 October 1993
Known for:

• LGBTQ activist
• The Institute of S. Science in Berlin Book

Lili Ilse Elvenes, often known as Lili Elbe, was a transgender woman from Denmark who had sex reassignment surgery in the early 1900s. As Einar Wegener, her birth name, she achieved fame as a painter. She quit painting and changed her legal name to Lili Ilse Elvenes in 1930 after transitioning; she eventually took the last name Elbe. She passed away as a result of uterine transplant difficulties. Her semi-autobiographical story was released posthumously in the UK and the US in 1933 under the title Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex.

It is generally accepted that Elbe was born in Vejle, Denmark, in 1882, the son of spice trader Mogens Wilhelm Wegener and Ane Marie Thomsen. Her year of birth is occasionally given as 1886, which appears to be taken from a biography of her in which certain details have been altered to protect the identity of those concerned. According to information regarding her wife Gerda Gottlieb, Elbe was married in 1904 when she was still a college student, making the 1882 date more likely to be accurate. If the 1886 date were valid, Elbe would have only been eighteen. Elbe was allegedly intersex, however it has since been refuted. According to some stories, she may have had Klinefelter syndrome and already had rudimentary ovaries in her belly.

Landscapes, interior settings, still lifes, and portraits were all featured in Elbe's work. She passed very shortly after undergoing the fifth of five extremely experimental procedures to replace her male genitalia with feminine sex organs. In Elbe's case, gender identity was first treated as distinct from sexual orientation, making it the first known instance of gender confirmation surgery.

Detailed information:
Full name: Lili Ilse Elvenes
Date of birth: 28 December 1882
Date of death: 13 September 1931
Known for:

• Greek Youth, 1903
• Poplars along Hobro Fjord, 1908
• Study with figures

Iceland's former prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, is an Icelandic politician who presided over the country from 2009 until 2013. She got involved in the labor movement and served as an official. She was a member of parliament from 1978 to 2013, and from 2007 to 2009, she served as Iceland's Minister of Social Affairs and Social Security. When she was unsuccessful in her quest to lead the Social Democratic Party in 1994, she raised her fist and said, "Minn tmi mun koma!" ("My time will come!"), a slogan that quickly gained currency in Iceland.

On February 1, 2009, she was elected prime minister, becoming the first female prime minister of Iceland and the first openly LGBT leader in history. She was ranked among the top 100 women in the world by Forbes. Since 1978, she has represented Reykjavk districts in Iceland's parliament, the Althing, and has been re-elected eight times in a row. As Iceland's longest-serving member of Parliament, Jóhanna stated in September 2012 that she would not run for reelection and would instead leave politics. Samtökin '78, or Association '78, a gay alliance in Iceland that was established to fight for the rights of sexual minorities both in Iceland and abroad, has honored her achievements with a badge of honor medal.

Detailed information:

Full name: Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir

Date of birth: 4 October 1942

Known for:

• Prime minister of Iceland from 2009 to 2013
• The world's first openly LGBT head of government

Malcolm Michaels Jr., commonly known as Marsha P. Johnson, was a self-described drag queen and an American gay liberation activist. Johnson, a well-known and outspoken supporter of homosexual rights, was a key participant in the Stonewall rebellion in 1969. Johnson was always upfront about not being present when the riots started, despite the fact that some people have wrongly claimed that Johnson started the disturbances. Along with his close friend Sylvia Rivera, Johnson co-founded the radical activist organization Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.). Johnson was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front.

Performing onstage with the drag performance group Hot Peaches and posing for Andy Warhol made Johnson a well-known personality in New York City's homosexual and art communities. Due to his friendly demeanor on the streets of Greenwich Village, Johnson earned the nickname "mayor of Christopher Street". Johnson worked with ACT UP as an AIDS activist from 1987 until 1992. In 1992, Johnson's corpse was discovered floating in the Hudson River. The NYPD initially (and quickly) declared the case to be a suicide; however, controversy and outrage soon followed, prompting a reopening of the case as a potential homicide.

Detailed information:
Full name: Malcolm Michaels Jr.
Date of birth: 24 August 1945
Date of death: 6 July 1992
Known for:

• Gay liberation and AIDS activist, performer with the Hot Peaches and the Angels of Light

Anti-apartheid, homosexual rights, and AIDS campaigner Simon Tseko Nkoli was from South Africa. Nkoli was born in Soweto to a family who spoke seSotho. Nkoli joined the United Democratic Front and the Congress of South African Students to become a young activist against apartheid. He joined the predominantly white Gay Association of South Africa (GASA) in 1983. Nkoli said in a letter to his lover Roy Shepherd from jail in 1985 that "GASA has done nothing for me since I was arrested", despite the fact that he also stated that "certain individual members of GASA are seeing me" and that "I will remain a member of Gasa always".

The following year, he expressed his frustration with GASA's lack of support in a letter, saying he was "absolutely mad to read about me being arrested on 'irrelevant' issues to gay related matters". Nkoli spoke in protests in favor of rent-boycotts in the Vaal townships. In 1984, he was arrested and tried for treason together with twenty-one other political figures in the Delmas Treason Trial, sometimes known as the Delmas 22, which also included Popo Molefe and Patrick Lekota. He contributed to the African National Congress's change of heart towards LGBT rights by coming out while incarcerated. 1988 saw his release from jail after being found not guilty. He organized South Africa's first-ever Homosexual Pride march in Johannesburg and was the country's first openly gay activist to meet Nelson Mandela. He developed HIV and died at the age of 41.

Detailed information:
Full name: Simon Tseko Nkoli
Date of birth: 26 November 1957
Date of death: 30 November 1998
Known for:

• The first gay activists to meet with President Nelson Mandela
• Founder of the Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand (GLOW)
• A member of International Lesbian and Gay Association board

Harvey Milk, a 1930-born American, first worked for a Wall Street investing business after serving in the U.S. Navy. Even though he came out as homosexual at a young age, he didn't come out publicly until much later in life. Early in the 1970s, Milk settled in San Francisco and became a prominent political leader for the LGBT community. When he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, he became the first out homosexual public official in the United States.

Today's activists are motivated by Milk's revolutionary political viewpoint. At a time when the political environment was extremely unfriendly toward the LGBTQIA+ community, he spoke up for homosexual rights and succeeded in bringing many LGBTQIA+ persons out of the closet and onto the streets. But like many others who stood up for what they believed, he was murdered in 1978 at the age of 48 by a former employee. Ten days before his assassination, Milk recorded a recording of himself saying, "All I ask is for the movement to continue, and if a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door", knowing the risks and virtually foreseeing this conclusion.

Detailed information:

Full name: Harvey Milk

Date of birth: 22 May 1930

Date of death: 27 November 1978

Known for:

• Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Known for quotes like “Hope is never silent”

African American activist Bayard Rustin served as a key figure in the civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights movements. In front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on the morning of August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed nearly 250,000 marchers participating in the March on Washington. And as Dr. King spoke, another guy was working behind the scenes as a crucial component of the movement. Bayard Rustin was there. He was the one who mentored Dr. King, planned the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and persuaded Dr. King to embrace nonviolence as a way of life.

Rustin was an African American activist and pioneer in the struggles for LGBT rights, socialism, civil rights, and nonviolence. During the stifling restrictions of the pre-Stonewall period, he made the decision to be out about his sexuality while pursuing social justice activities that put him in the public view. He was gay, which is the only explanation for why he stayed in the background and is now less well-known than other figures from the civil rights struggle.

Rustin was a gay man who frequently served as a powerful advisor to civil rights leaders behind the scenes owing to criticism over his sexual orientation. He started speaking at events as an activist and defender of human rights in the 1980s, when he started acting as a public spokesman for LGBT issues. Rustin joined other union leaders in embracing doctrinal neoconservatism later in life while still committed to defending workers' rights, and (after his passing) President Ronald Reagan hailed him. Rustin received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously from President Barack Obama on November 20, 2013.

Detailed information:
Full name: Bayard Rustin
Date of birth: 17 March 1912
Date of death: 24 August 1987
Known for:

• Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Interracial primer, New York: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1943
• Interracial workshop: progress report, New York: Sponsored by Congress of Racial Equality and Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1947

Adeline Virginia Stephen, later known as Virginia Woolf, was born in 1882. She was an English novelist and essayist who is now regarded as one of the most important modernist writers of the 20th century. Despite the fact that she wed the author Leonard Woolf in 1912, several biographers have come to the conclusion that Woolf was sexually attracted to women. Virginia Woolf had an affair with English author Vita Sackville-West in 1922 that lasted for the most of the 1920s. "Much preferring my own sex, as I do", Woolf said in a letter to a friend around that time.

Orlando, a fantasy biography in which the titular hero's life spans three centuries and both genders, was the gift that Woolf gave Sackville-West in 1928. In the 1970s, Orlando came out of the closet as a lesbian book, and it is still out now as reviewers continue to identify and laud its lesbian methods. Many years before society would come to accept same-sex relationships and almost a century before the law would, it makes fun of "compulsory heterosexuality" and fights bigotry.

Woolf struggled with mental illness her entire life. She made at least two suicide attempts while being institutionalized many times. According to Dalsimer (2004), she suffered from symptoms that today would be classified as bipolar disorder, but there was no effective treatment available to her while she was alive. Near the age of 59, Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse at Lewes in 1941.

Detailed information:

Full name: Adeline Virginia Stephen

Date of birth: 25 January 1882

Date of death: 28 March 1941

Known for:

• Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando (1928)
• A Room of One's Own (1929)
• The Waves (1931)

French dancer, singer, and actress Josephine Baker (born Freda Josephine McDonald) was of American descent. Her professional life was mostly focused in Europe, particularly in her adopted France. She was the first black woman to play the lead role in a major motion picture, Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant's silent film Siren of the Tropics from 1927.

Josephine Baker was a well-known Jazz Age entertainer who identified as bisexual and worked throughout her life to advance equality for LGBT people, women, and people of color. Baker, who was born in 1906, didn't have a good childhood. She endured physical and sexual assault as a teen, seen and experienced extreme prejudice, and had periods of homelessness. As a result, after Baker reached the top and emerged as one of the most prominent African-American artists on French stages, she lent her voice and influence to the cause of civil rights. After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Coretta Scott King offered her a leadership position within the movement, and she ended up speaking at the 1963 March on Washington.

Detailed information:
Full name: Freda Josephine McDonald
Date of birth: 3 June 1906
Date of death: 12 April 1975
Known for:

• Vedette, singer, dancer, actress,
• Civil rights activist
• French Resistance agent

In the midst of Harlem's intellectual, social, and cultural Renaissance, James Baldwin was born there in 1924. In the middle of the 20th century, he was an American writer, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist who wrote on racial, sexual, and social divisions in Western culture. Although not always, Baldwin's characters are African Americans, and homosexual and bisexual males typically serve as the main characters in his books. Many others classify him as intersectional and claim that because he is black and homosexual in America, he is the reason the term even exists. Baldwin had a significant impact on the LGBTQIA+ community through his work, and most black homosexual authors of literary fiction and nonfiction have been affected by him in some way.

His legacy has persisted since his passing, and his works have been successfully adapted for the big screen. I Am Not Your Negro (2016), a documentary that was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Academy Awards, is an enlarged version of the unfinished novel Remember This House. If Beale Street Could Talk, one of his books, was turned into the Oscar-winning, Barry Jenkins-produced movie of the same name in 2018. Baldwin was a well-known and contentious public personality and orator in addition to being a writer, particularly during the American civil rights struggle.

Detailed information:

Full name: James Baldwin

Date of birth: 2 August 1924

Date of death: 1 December 1987

Known for:

• Go Tell It on the Mountain
• Giovanni's Room
• Notes of a Native Son

David Hockney OM CH RA, an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer, was born on July 9, 1937. He is regarded as one of the most influential British painters of the 20th century because of his significant role in the 1960s pop art movement. David Hockney, one of the finest living artists, has spent his whole career being openly homosexual and examining the nature of gay love in his portraits. In 1979, he helped create the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Hockney viewed persecution as a challenge to shock and upend heteronormative norms rather than a danger, and his work "made an impact when it counted", according to a Guardian story.

In 1967, the year that homosexuality was legalized in Britain, Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, a painting he created in 1966, received the John Moores prize. It stands for bravery and a hope of love. Hockney continues to have an impact on many LGBTQIA+ artists and others since it is not as simple to paint things and feel as content and guilt-free as he did.

Detailed information:
Full name: David Hockney OM CH RA
Date of birth: 9 July 1937
Known for:

• Painting
• Drawing
• Printmaking
• Photography
• Set design
• A Bigger Splash
• Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy
• Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)
• Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool
  

Irish poet and dramatist Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin. He wrote in several genres during the 1880s until emerging in the early 1890s as one of London's most well-known playwrights. The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays and epigrams, as well as the details surrounding his meningitis-related early death at age 46 and criminal conviction for gross indecency for consenting homosexual activities in "one of the earliest celebrity trials", are what people will remember him for most.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, is his best-known work. He married Constance Lloyd in 1884, and the two eventually had two kids. He wasn't content, which was the sole issue. At the time, homosexuality was against the law, and he was openly gay. By 1893, he had a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, a young man who was characterized as attractive and spoiled. All of that changed, though, when the man's father learned. In "one of the earliest celebrity prosecutions", Wilde ultimately faced a criminal conviction for gross indecency for voluntary homosexual encounters and incarceration, serving time from May 25, 1895, to May 18, 1897. In terms of his influence on LGBT rights and society, as well as the literary world, Wilde's legacy is significant.

Detailed information:
Full name: Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Date of birth: 16 October 1854
Date of death: 30 November 1900
Known for:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• The Importance of Being Earnest

Another amazing woman who continues to influence the LGBTQIA+ community as well as many artists today is Frida Kahlo. She is regarded as one of the best artists in Mexico, if not the entire globe. When Kahlo was eighteen years old and involved in a streetcar accident in 1925, she was impaled by an iron railing that smashed through her pelvis, causing horrendous injuries. At that point, Frida decided to focus only on painting, particularly self-portraits, instead of continuing her studies in medicine. She married her true love, the painter Diego Rivera, in 1929, but their union was not a conventional one because they both had extramarital relationships.

Kahlo had relationships with both men and women, including her husband's mistresses, and was openly bisexual. She certainly loves and is drawn to ladies in her picture Two Nudists in a Forest. In the feminist movement of the 1970s, Frida Kahlo was "rediscovered", and she was lauded as an inspiration for women's strength and creativity. Kahlo's artistic output went mostly undiscovered until the late 1970s, when art historians and political activists rediscovered her work. She had established herself as a significant character in art history by the early 1990s, and was also viewed as a symbol of Chicanos, the feminist movement, and the LGBTQ+ community. Feminists have praised Kahlo's work for what they see to be its uncompromising portrayal of the feminine experience and form, and her work has received praise from throughout the globe as a symbol of Mexican national and indigenous traditions.

Detailed information:

Full name: Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón

Date of birth: 6 July 1907

Date of death: 13 July 1954

Known for:

• Henry Ford Hospital (1932)
• My Birth (1932)
• Self-portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (1932)
• Memory, the Heart (1937)
• What the Water Gave Me (1938)