June 2023: Pride Month

He was born Henry Joseph Dittmar on June 29, 1892 in Bavaria, and changed his name to “Henry Gerber” upon immigrating to the United States, where his family settled in Chicago. In 1917, he was briefly committed to a mental institution because of his homosexuality. He served in the U.S. Military for around three years in Germany during WWI and, while there, learned about Magnus Hirschfeld and the work he and his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee were doing to reform anti-homosexual German law. Gerber traveled to Berlin, which supported a thriving gay subculture, and absorbed Hirschfeld’s ideas. Inspired by Hirschfeld’s work, Gerber founded the Society for Human Rights in Chicago in 1924. The organization produced the first American publication for homosexuals, Friendship and Freedom.

Hart was a physician who studied and treated tuberculosis, notably developing the X-ray technique to identify cases, which saved countless lives. He also raised funds for TB research and for TB patients who couldn’t afford treatment. Hart was also a novelist on the side. He was assigned female at birth and became one of the first known people to have gender-reassignment surgery, when he had a hysterectomy in 1917. He lived the rest of his life as a man. He was married to his wife, Edna, from 1925 until his death, and the two were prominent members of their community in Connecticut.

During the Second World War, Alan Turing worked at Britain’s code-breaking center where he was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Using the computational “Turing Machine” methodology he invented in 1936, Turing is credited with breaking the Nazi “Enigma Code” which had been used to coordinate the U-boat juggernaut that sank hundreds of ships in the North Atlantic ferrying vital supplies to the European theater of the war. With supply lines finally opened, the stage was set for the successful D-Day landing at Normandy, turning the war to the Allies favor, leading to the defeat of Adolf Hitler. In 1947 Turing began to muse publicly about the concept of “machine intelligence” and, in 1950, published “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” where he first set out to devise what would come to be known as the “Turing Test” for Artificial Intelligence.

Ride was the first American woman to go to space. She was a physicist by training and was hired to be in the first class of NASA astronauts to ever include women. After two missions to space on the Challenger shuttle, during which she operated the robotic arm to set satellites into orbit, Ride left NASA. She used her fame from her time as an astronaut to promote science education, founding Sally Ride Science to encourage kids to go into STEM fields and writing several books for kids about space travel and the solar system.

Born in 1946 to Bombay-born Parsi parents living in Zanzibar, Farrokh Bulsara’s musical talent first revealed itself during his early years as a pupil at an English-style boarding school in India. His adoration of Jimi Hendrix led him to join a series of bands. The most promising, Smile, metamorphosed into Queen. His distinctive baritone voice, his ability to extend his three-octave vocal range with a variety of vibrato and distortion techniques, his strutting, seductive showmanship and his ability to connect with his audience made him one of the most thrilling rock performers of all time.

Stormé DeLarverie (pronounced “Stormy”) was born on December 24, 1920 in New Orleans, LA to a black mother and a white father. She worked security at Henrietta Hudson, a popular lesbian bar on Hudson Street as well as security at The Cubby Hole. More than merely a bouncer, DeLarverie considered the bar patrons as her “babies” and patrolled the streets as their defender with a straight-edge razor in her sock. At the Stonewall Uprising on June 27, 1969, DeLarverie reportedly threw the first punch. As the story goes, when the police raided the Stonewall Inn that night, DeLarverie witnessed three officers ganging up on one young man so she sprang to the victim’s defense. In June 2019, DeLarverie was one of the 50 inaugural “pioneers, trailblazers and heroes” who were inducted into the Stonewall National Monument’s National LGBTQ Wall of Honor.