August 2, 1981: PFLAG is founded in Los Angeles by Adele Starr. Today PFLAG has 200,000 members in 500 affiliates nationwide.
August 2, 2005: the California Supreme Court rules that businesses must treat the state's domestic partnerships in the same way they treat ordinary marriages.
August 3, 1982: Michael Hardwick is arrested in his Atlanta home while having sex with another man. The arrest led to Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 Supreme Court decision which held that private, consensual sex between gay men was not protected by the Constitution. This decision was reversed in 2003, when the court ruled, in Lawrence v. Texas, that adults had a fundamental right to engage in private, consensual gay sex.
August 8, 1973: the American Bar Association calls for the repeal of state laws barring homosexual acts between consenting adults.
August 12, 2004: the California Supreme Court rules that the 3,995 same-sex marriages that took place in San Francisco earlier that year are illegal and void.
August 15, 1981: The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo's groundbreaking book about gays in film, appears in bookstores.
August 22, 1966: The first national convention of gay and lesbian groups gathers in San Francisco. Originally called the National Planning Conference of Homophile Organizations, it later became the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations.
August 22, 2005: the California Supreme Court rules that gays and lesbians who are non-biological parents of their children have the same legal rights as heterosexuals who are non-biological parents.
August 28, 1981: The Centers for Disease Control announces that cases of Kaposi's sarcoma are inexplicably increasing across the United States, and more than 90 percent of the cases affect gay men.
August 28, 1982: The first Gay Olympics (changed later to Gay Games, after a lawsuit) opens in San Francisco.
* Information courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society
