In 1985, the Los Angeles Times commissioned a groundbreaking poll on attitudes toward gay and lesbian people. At the time, 64% of respondents said they would be very upset if their child was gay or lesbian. In 2024, that number dropped to 14%.

In the new project Our Queerest Century, the LA Times examines the contributions of LGBTQ Americans over the last 100 years. LA Times staff writer Kevin Rector launches the series with a personal essay about how queer people have shaped America.

Rector shared more on "LA Times Today" with host Lisa McRee.

What You Need To Know

  • The LA Times examines the contributions of LGBTQ Americans over the last 100 years in a new project called Our Queerest Century

  • In 1985, the LA Times commissioned a poll on attitudes toward gay and lesbian people

  • At the time, 64% of respondents said they would be very upset if their child was gay or lesbian, and that number dropped to 14% in 2024

 

Rector explained that queer activism goes beyond Stonewall to the 1920s. 

"In 1924, a man named Henry Gerber started what is now known as the first gay rights organization in the U.S. He had lived abroad in military service in Germany, in the Weimer era, in between the two World Wars. That was a really bright spot in queer history. Queer people had bars and publications and institutions studying queer issues that the Nazis destroyed. When Gerber came back to the U.S., he launched this organization, which was short-lived. It ended with his arrest, and he had to pay a bunch of his life savings to get out of this litigation. So it was sad, but it also marked a beginning to a new phase in American history where more and more queer people made themselves known," Rector said.

The Times project seeks to point out that the contributions of queer people are "baked into who we are as a country, as a culture," Rector explained. 

"Queer people have always been leading artists. They've not only made their own art, they've impacted their counterparts' art. They've been leading actors in all sorts of rights movements, civil rights, women's rights, feminist movements, disability rights. We see the queer aesthetic everywhere we go in fashion, in makeup, what we see in the mirror. Queer people have always been a really important part of this country, and their contributions are everywhere," he said. 

Rector's personal essay kicks off the project. He wrote about what it was like growing up as a gay person in the 1980s and 1990s. He spoke about attitudes toward the LGBTQ community now.

"In more recent years, I've seen the tremendous progress that queer people have made and that queer kids get to live in. And then in recent years, there's been a lot of backlash. There has been a push by a lot of folks on the conservative right to erase queer people, to hide kids away from anything that has to do with queer people or culture, to ban mentioning being gay in schools, banning books. So at a moment in our culture, in our country where there is an effort to erase people, I wanted to say in my essay that it is important for kids to know that it's okay to be LGBTQ," Rector shared.

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