June is LGBT Pride Month – and while we celebrate all of our LGBT listeners and family this month, we also wanted to take a minute and honor those who helped pave the way in Louisiana!

In the 1970’s the first meeting of the Big Easy Metropolitan Community Church was held, which was the first LGBT-affirming Christian congregation in New Orleans was help in the UpStairs Lounge.    However, on June 24, 1973, an arson attack on the club which provided room for the congregation to meet ended in 32 deaths from burning and smoke inhalation. The attack, which was never officially solved by New Orleans police, was a historical marker for LGBT people in Louisiana, as memorialization of the victims by local clergy proved just as difficult as finding proper burials for the dead.

In 1989, Forum for Equality, Louisiana’s largest LGBT rights lobby organization, was established. Other organizations formed by alumni of the Gertrude Stein Society include the Louisiana Gay Political Action Caucus (1980), the State Gay Conference (1981), the New Orleans Gay Men’s Chorus and a local chapter of P-FLAG (both in 1982), and the NO/AIDS Task Force (1983).

In 1993, the Louisiana Electorate of Gays And Lesbians (LEGAL) was founded. LEGAL was a statewide non-profit organization dedicated to the equal rights of Louisiana’s lesbians and gay men. The organization, which supported a full-time lobbyist at every session of the Louisiana Legislature through 1998, was instrumental in passing the state’s hate crime law, inclusive of penalty enhancements for crimes motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation^[5] – the first in the Deep South – and defeating an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment.^[6] The group would also bring a decade’s worth of challenges to the state’s sodomy law.

In 1997, Louisiana became the first state in the Deep South to pass a hate crimes law which covered sexual orientation.^[8] That same year, New Orleans mayor Marc Morial signed into law a domestic partnerships registry for same-sex couples resident in the city and for city workers.

Here are some famous LGBT Pioneers and Notable People from the Bayou State:

• Ellen DeGeneres (born in Metairie), actress, comedian and talk-show host
• Don Lemon (born in Baton Rouge), CNN anchor
• Kevyn Aucoin (born in Shreveport), make-up artist and photographer
• Bryan Batt (born in New Orleans), actor
• Poppy Z. Brite (born in New Orleans), writer
• Mary Gauthier (born in New Orleans), folk singer-songwriter.
• Tony Kushner, playwright and screenwriter, raised in Lake Charles as a child
• Randy Price (Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana), lead anchor at WHDH-TV from 1998 to 2009 and WCVB-TV since then. Considered the U.S.’s first openly gay newscaster
• Blaine Stewart (born in New Orleans), journalist, began career at WDSU and WWL-TV,
• Van Cliburn (born in Shreveport), pianist, winner of first quadrennial International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow