October 7, 1955
Allen Ginsberg gives a riotous public reading of his poem Howl - a protest against conformity and a celebration of sex, gay and straight -- at Six Gallery in San Francisco. On the basis of one line in particular -- "who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy" -- customs officials seize 520 copies of the poem being imported from the printer in London. Charges of obscenity are brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poem's new domestic publisher. October 8, 1904
Addressing the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Berlin, women's rights leader Anna Rueling urges feminists to unite with "Uranian" women and men in the fight for social reform.
More than 600 lesbians, gay men and their supporters are arrested on the steps of the United States Supreme Court in the largest civil disobedience protest in the history of the gay and lesbian rights movement.
October 26, 1988
The European Court of Human Rights rules that laws in Ireland criminalizing sex between men are in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights after the court is petitioned by David Norris, an MP in the Dáil Éireann (Assembly of Ireland).
October 27, 1970
Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) members stage a sit-in at Harper's magazine's Park Avenue offices to protest a September 1970 cover story, titled "The Struggle for Sexual Identity," in which editor Joseph Epstein, lamenting homosexuals as "an affront to our rationality" and homosexuality as "anathema," states, "If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth."
