LGBT+ rights: History, erasure, and the fight for visibility

When we talk about LGBTQ+ rights, the social, legal, and cultural struggle for equality by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. Also known as queer rights, it is a movement built on visibility, resistance, and the refusal to be silenced. This isn’t just about marriage or bathroom laws—it’s about who gets to exist without fear, who gets remembered in history, and who gets to define their own identity.

Behind every legal win, there’s a story of erasure. Bisexual erasure, the tendency to ignore, deny, or invalidate bisexual identities. Also known as biphobia, it’s not just prejudice—it’s a systemic silence that makes half the LGBTQ+ community invisible. And Stonewall uprising, the 1969 police raid on a New York gay bar that sparked modern LGBTQ+ activism. Also known as Stonewall Riots, it wasn’t the first protest—but it was the moment people stopped running and started fighting back. These aren’t footnotes. They’re the foundation. Meanwhile, gay liberation, the radical movement that demanded not just tolerance but full social and political equality. Also known as LGBTQ+ liberation, it rejected assimilation and demanded change on its own terms. That same energy is still alive—in archives fighting to recover lost lesbian histories, in trans teens claiming their names, in queer elders who survived decades of criminalization.

What you’ll find here isn’t a polished timeline. It’s the messy, raw, often hidden truth. You’ll read about how Victorian doctors called masturbation a disease, how police raided gay bars for decades, how feminist thinkers rewrote female pleasure, and how ancient cultures celebrated sexual diversity long before modern laws tried to ban it. These aren’t just old stories—they’re the roots of today’s fights. The same forces that silenced women’s orgasms, erased bisexuality, and punished queer love are still shaping laws, media, and medicine. But so are the people who refused to stay quiet. This collection pulls back the curtain on who really made the change—and why it still matters.