Black LGBTQIA+ history is often presented as a sidebar — a short list of influential figures, a cultural reference, or a commemorative moment attached to broader movement timelines. That framing is incomplete. It overlooks the reality that Black queer and trans communities have helped shape the political frameworks, organizing strategies, and systems of care that made LGBTQIA+ rights movements possible in the first place.
This history is not about later inclusion. It is about early construction — often under conditions that demanded both survival and resistance.
Long before LGBTQIA+ rights were widely discussed in policy or mainstream culture, Black queer organizers were confronting overlapping systems of harm that did not allow for single-issue solutions. In 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian feminists, published a political statement that would come to influence decades of advocacy and organizing across movements.
In their statement, the Collective named what they described as interlocking oppressions — the reality that racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia do not operate independently of one another, but simultaneously and in ways that compound harm. This analysis did not emerge from academic abstraction. It was grounded in lived experience and movement participation, as members of the Collective had organized within civil rights, feminist, labor, and anti-war movements that often asked Black women and Black queer people to prioritize one axis of identity over another for the sake of unity.
The Collective rejected that demand. Their position was clear: liberation that fails to address those most impacted by overlapping systems of oppression will ultimately fail everyone.
Today, concepts such as intersectional analysis and coalition-based organizing are widely used in LGBTQIA+ advocacy. Yet these tools are frequently disconnected from their origins in Black feminist and Black queer political thought. This pattern — foundational contribution paired with marginalization — appears throughout the history of LGBTQIA+ rights organizing.
For example, Bayard Rustin, a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, played a central role in translating the moral vision of the civil rights movement into actionable strategy. Rustin introduced and scaled nonviolent protest tactics influenced by Gandhian philosophy and advised movement leaders across multiple campaigns.
Despite this influence, Rustin’s leadership was often deliberately obscured because he was openly gay. Opponents inside and outside the movement weaponized homophobia to undermine his credibility, and he was pushed into the background so that the movement could appear more “respectable” to dominant institutions. These decisions did not simply harm Rustin personally; they shaped whose leadership was visible and whose labor was considered expendable.
Respectability politics frequently narrowed the scope of movements by sidelining Black queer voices in pursuit of broader public acceptance. In doing so, movements sometimes erased the contributions of individuals who had helped build their strategic foundations.
Black trans organizing further illustrates how survival has always been central to LGBTQIA+ liberation work. In the early 1970s, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Their work emerged from the recognition that many trans people — particularly Black and brown trans women and gender-nonconforming youth — were excluded from both mainstream LGBTQ organizations and social safety nets.
STAR focused on providing housing and material support for trans youth experiencing homelessness. This was not symbolic activism. It was mutual aid as necessity — meeting material needs when institutions would not. The organization reflected an understanding that liberation must be lived in daily survival as much as in legal or cultural recognition.
Much of Black trans organizing has historically taken place outside formal institutions, driven by the immediate needs of communities that could not rely on existing systems for safety or support. Current conversations around community care, harm reduction, and grassroots support continue traditions that Black trans communities have sustained for decades.
Black LGBTQIA+ history is also embedded in cultural production and community-building. Ballroom culture, which developed in Black and Latinx queer and trans communities, created alternative systems of belonging for individuals who were often rejected by their families of origin and excluded from broader society.
Ballroom houses functioned as chosen families, offering mentorship, protection, and affirmation. Categories and competitions were not simply performance; they were ways of asserting identity, dignity, and worth in environments that routinely denied all three. These spaces provided recognition and stability in the absence of institutional support.
Today, ballroom’s cultural influence is widespread, yet it is often detached from its roots in survival and resistance. When ballroom is treated as an aesthetic without acknowledgment of its origins, the people who created it are rendered invisible once again.
Taken together, these histories challenge simplified narratives of the LGBTQIA+ rights movement. They demonstrate that progress did not emerge from a single moment or a single group, but from ongoing efforts by individuals and communities navigating layered oppression while building frameworks for collective survival.
In 2026, Black LGBTQIA+ communities continue to face overlapping systems of harm — racialized state violence, anti-trans legislation, economic inequity, and health disparities. The conditions that shaped earlier organizing have changed form, but not function.
Black queer and trans communities have consistently responded to exclusion by creating their own infrastructure: intellectual, cultural, and material. Coalition-building, mutual aid, chosen family, and intersectional analysis emerged from necessity, not abstraction.
This history also serves as a reminder that progress is not linear. Gains can be reversed. Visibility can increase while material conditions worsen. Representation alone does not ensure liberation.
Engaging Black LGBTQIA+ history responsibly requires more than celebration. It requires recognizing whose labor has shaped movement frameworks, naming those origins accurately, and resisting the urge to treat this history as inspiration without accountability.
Black LGBTQIA+ history is not a footnote to Black history or LGBTQIA+ history. It is part of the foundation both stand on.
By Mary Benton
Sources
Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977).
https://blackwomenintheblackfreedomstruggle.voices.wooster.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/210/2019/02/Combahee_River_Collective_Statement_1977.pdf
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books, 2017.
National Park Service. “Bayard Rustin.”
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/civilrights/bayard-rustin.htm
National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Bayard Rustin: Activist, Organizer, Intellectual.”
https://nmaahc.si.edu
Smithsonian Institution. “Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.”
https://www.si.edu/stories/marsha-johnson-sylvia-rivera-and-history-pride-month
New-York Historical Society. “Gay Power Is Trans History: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.”
https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/gay-power-is-trans-history-street-transvestite-action-revolutionaries
Bailey, Marlon M. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Livingston, Jennie. Paris Is Burning. 1990.
