LGBT+ history: From erased voices to visible movements

When we talk about LGBTQ+ history, the documented struggle for identity, rights, and visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people across time. Also known as queer history, it’s not just about milestones like Stonewall—it’s about the quiet acts of resistance, the erased records, and the people who refused to disappear. This isn’t a story of linear progress. It’s a patchwork of suppression, coded language, and sudden bursts of courage.

Take bisexual erasure, the persistent denial or invisibility of bisexuality within both straight and LGBTQ+ spaces. For decades, people who loved more than one gender were told they were confused, going through a phase, or not "real" LGBTQ+ people. Research and media reinforced this, making it harder to find community or even accurate data. Then there’s lesbian history, the systematic removal of same-sex female relationships from archives, literature, and public memory. Letters were burned, diaries were censored, and love between women was rewritten as friendship. Even when they were visible—like in ancient Greece or 1920s Harlem—they were later scrubbed from textbooks. And while gay liberation, the movement that exploded after the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, demanding dignity and legal rights changed the world, it didn’t include everyone equally. Transgender people, nonbinary folks, and people of color were often pushed to the edges of their own movement.

What you’ll find here isn’t a sanitized timeline. It’s the messy, real, often painful truth—how medicine once called same-sex desire a disease, how Victorian norms locked women into silence, how ancient Etruscans saw sex as sacred, and how modern laws still fail to protect people in housing or at work. These stories aren’t just history. They’re the reason why someone today can walk into a clinic, hold their partner’s hand, or say their name without fear. The fight didn’t end with marriage equality. It’s still here—in the archives being reopened, in the laws being challenged, in the quiet acts of living openly.