THE LATE EIGHTIES

While the U.S. administration still grappled with gay rights issues and AIDS funding, those same topics found themselves a new place in pop culture, lifting LGBT life into the national spotlight.

• France prohibits job discrimination against gays and lesbians
• The first memorial to gay Holocaust victims is dedicated
• The United States Supreme Court overturns an Oklahoma law that banned "public homosexual conduct or activity" by teachers in state public schools
• New York City's Harvey Milk School holds its first classes
• Desert Hearts and the film version of A Chorus Line are released in theaters
• Rock Hudson reveals that he has AIDS, dying just three months later
  > > News report: Rock Hudson's Mystery Illness
• Harvey Milk assassin Dan White commits suicide
• Cleve Jones conceives of what will become the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt

• Parting Glances is released in theaters
• The second Gay Games, Triumph '86, kicks off in San Francisco, California
• In Bowers v. Hardwick, In Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court upholds Georgiaís law forbidding sex between men, ruling that there is no fundamental constitutional right to "engage in sodomy"
• The Reagan administration implements a plan to screen out HIV-positive immigrants
• The U.S. Justice Department announces an end to its policy of asking prospective prosecutors whether they are gay
• Gay leaders meet for the first time with Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to brief him on AIDS issues
• Roy Cohn dies of AIDS complications
• Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, Jr. publicly proclaims "solidarity with the gay and lesbian movement"

• The first drug to combat HIV/AIDS, AZT, is approved in the U.S.
• U.S. congressman Barney Frank comes out as a gay man
• Homomonument, a memorial to persecuted homosexuals, opens in Amsterdam
• The Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights occurs, with the first public display of Cleve Jones's NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt
• Liberace dies from AIDS
• ACT UP stages its first major demonstration, 17 protesters are arrested
Larry Kramer on the beginnings of ACT UP
• The house of Ricky, Robert, and Randy Ray, three hemophiliac boys who contracted HIV from blood product transfusions, is burned down in Arcadia, Fla., in a suspected arson
• Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On is published
• Maurice and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing are released in theaters

• The Metropolitan Community Church celebrates its 20th anniversary
• Actor Ian McKellen comes out as a gay man
• George Bush is elected president
• Canadian parliament member Svend Robinson comes out
• National Coming Out Day is founded in the United States
• The nation's first lesbian sorority, Lambda Delta Lambda, forms at UCLA
• Divine, the tranvestite muse of director John Waters, dies at age 42
Movie trailer for Female Trouble
• Mother Teresa announces plans to open an AIDS hospice in Memphis, Tenn.
• At a Republican fund-raiser, Sen. Orrin Hatch refers to the Democratic party as "the party of homosexuals"

• Stonewall, the preeminent U.K. lobbying group for the rights of LGBT people, is founded
• Nevada legislators propose prison terms for gays or bisexuals who, regardless of their HIV status, donate blood or organs
• Controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe dies due to complications from AIDS
• Denmark is the first country in the world to enact registered partnership laws akin to a marriage for same-sex couples
• Burroughs-Wellcome, the British manufacturers of AZT, announce that some strains of HIV have become resistant to the drug
• New York State's highest court rules that two gay people can constitute a family
• Despite a scandal involving his relationship with hustler Steve Gobie, U.S. epresentative Barney Frank easily wins reelection

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