Nine historical LGBTQ figures you need to know about

1. Chevalier d'Éon

The Chevalier d'Éon was an 18th-century French spy, a soldier in the Seven Years’ War, a diplomat and a trans woman. As a major diplomat in both Russia and England, d’Eon was appointed secretary to France’s ambassador to Russia, and was selected by Louis XV to be part of a spy organisation called Le Secret du Roi.

2. Anne Lister

You may already know quite a bit about Anne Lister if you watched the BBC drama Gentleman Jack which is based on Lister’s famous diaries. She was an English landowner, diarist and lesbian from Halifax, West Yorkshire. She is regularly referred to as ‘the first modern lesbian’ due to her self-awareness around her sexuality. She recorded her life and relationships with women in her diaries, which consist of roughly four million words with approximately 1/6th of this written in code.

3. Gladys Bentley

Gladys Bentley was a black lesbian Blues singer. Bentley was also a remarkable pianist, and a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance (an artistic, social and intellectual explosion of activity in Harlem, New York during the 1920s). Bentley was known for regularly performing in drag, flirting with women in the audience, and singing popular songs with the original lyrics replaced with her own raunchier words. During the McCarthy Era, she claimed to have been “cured” of homosexuality by religion and hormone injections.

4. Roberta Cowell

On 15 May, 1951, Roberta Cowell, a British World War II fighter pilot and racing car driver, was the first British trans woman to undergo gender confirmation surgery. Cowell’s surgery was performed by physician and trans man Michael Dillon.

5, 6 and 7. Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Stormé DeLarverie.

In 1969, a series of demonstrations by LGBTQ people erupted in response to a police raid of a gay bar – The Stonewall Inn – in New York City. This became known as The Stonewall Rebellion, or The Stonewall Uprising. These events triggered LGBTQ liberation work in the US and beyond. Key figures at Stonewall included trans women Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, and lesbian Stormé DeLarverie.

Alfred Kinsey

8. Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin was a vitally important figure in the black civil rights movement and close advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr. He was openly gay and a committed advocate of nonviolence. Historians have speculated that his marginalisation in the historical record could be a result of his sexuality. On 8 August, 2013, Present Barack Obama announced Rustin would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously. This is the highest award that can be given in the United States.

9. Alfred Kinsey

Alfred Kinsey, creator of The Kinsey Scale, was a bisexual researcher in the field of biology and sexology. The Kinsey Scale measures sexuality on a scale of 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual). First published in 1948, this research was groundbreaking as it suggested that sexuality is not binary, but is a spectrum and can change over time. The category of “x” was later added to the scale to represent asexuality, and others who may not experience sexual attraction.

To learn more amazing things about LGBTQ history, check out Radio 4's You're Dead To Me.