Upstate IHS

I have supported the Equal Rights Amendment for more than 50 years, and I have long been clear that no one should be discriminated against based on their s*x. We, as a nation, must affirm and protect women’s full equality once and for all.

On January 27, 2020, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The American Bar Association (ABA) has recognized that the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment. I agree with the ABA and with leading legal constitutional scholars that the Equal Rights Amendment has become part of our Constitution.

It is long past time to recognize the will of the American people. In keeping with my oath and duty to Constitution and country, I affirm what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: the 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their s*x.

LGBT History Highlight Day 28: Lillian Faderman

Lillian Faderman is an American historian whose books on le***an history and LGBT history have earned critical praise and awards.

Faderman was born in New York during World War II and raised by her mother and aunt, Latvian Jewish immigrants who worked in the garment industry. The remainder of her family died in Europe during the Holocaust. Her family moved with her to Los Angeles where, with her mother's encouragement, Lillian took acting classes. Before she graduated from Hollywood High School, she married a gay man much older than herself—a marriage that lasted less than a year. Faderman began acting and modeling and discovered the underground gay bar scene. She bravely came out as a le***an in 1956 during the Lavender Scare, a challenging period for gay Americans that was closely tied to McCarthyism.

Faderman went on to study at UC Berkeley. Using pseudonyms such as Gigi Frost, Faderman did n**e modeling and made softcore n**e film loops which paid for her education. After graduating from Berkeley, Faderman co-led the creation of Fresno State University’s Gender Studies department. There, she combined her experiences as a working-class le***an, literature obsessive, and former stripper to craft curricula that demanded space for the overlooked and erased. She then attended UCLA and became an English professor at California State University Fresno. Toward that end, she co-edited her first published work, an anthology of multi-ethnic literature for the college classroom. Released in 1969, it was one of the first anthologies of its kind.

Although Faderman longed to write about s*xual minorities & homophobia in the 1960s, doing such work proved to be difficult. In the 1970s, however, as feminism entered serious academic discourse, Faderman became one of the first academics to publish books about female same-s*x relationships. A pioneering authority on LGBT history and literature, Faderman has written 11 books.

Among other recognition, she has received six Lambda Literary Awards, two American Library Association Awards, and several prestigious lifetime achievement awards for her scholarship, including the James Brudner Award from Yale University. The New York Times honored her books “Surpassing the Love of Men” (1981), “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers” (1991) and “The Gay Revolution” (2015) on its list of Notable Books of the Year. The Guardian named “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers,” about le***an life in the 20th century, one of the Top 10 Books of Radical History and “The Gay Revolution” one of the Six Top Books of LGBT Life.

Faderman retired in 2007 and serves as a historian in residence for the Lambda Archives of San Diego. Recently, she has worked to document q***r bars & clubs that defined her youth in LA in a project known as ‘Q***r Maps LA.’

She has a son, Avrom, and lives with her partner of more than 45 years, Phyllis Irwin.

LGBTQ History Highlight Day 26: Joyce Hunter

Joyce Hunter is a gay pioneer who helped organize the first National March on Washington for Le***an and Gay Rights and cofounded the first public high school for LGBTQ students.

Hunter, growing up in the Bronx, New York, survived a difficult early life. She was born in a home for u***d mothers to her Orthodox Jewish mother who was 16. Her father was African American. She spent much of her childhood, ages 5 to 14, in an orphanage before leaving and returning to live with her parents. After spending her 18th birthday in a psychiatric hospital, Hunter began seeing a therapist because she ‘didn’t want to be gay’ and their suggestion was to get married; and so she did. She married and became a mother in her 20s. She remained married for 13 years before finally leaving but had relationships with women throughout that time. By her 30s she had established herself as a trailblazing LGBT activist.

Joyce started her advocacy with Le***ans Rising at Hunter College. She was the ‘non-student’ face of the group in order to protect the future careers of the students involved. In the 1970s, based on the black civil rights movement, activists sought to create a national march on Washington for le***an and gay rights. In the summer of 1978, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk assumed leadership of that vision. After his assassination in November 1978, approximately 300 activists, Hunter included, convened the Philadelphia Conference to fulfill Milk’s dream of a march on the National Mall. On October 12, 1979, more than 100,000 activists attended the National March on Washington for Le***an and Gay Rights. The demonstration helped define a national civil rights movement.

Also In 1979, Hunter became a founding member of the Hetrick-Martin Institute in New York, created chiefly to serve at-risk LGBT youth. As the Institute’s director and clinical supervisor of social work, she helped create a counseling program, a drop-in center, and an outreach project. In 1985 with the Hetrick-Martin Institute and Steve Ashkinazy of the Stonewall Democratic Club, Hunter cofounded the nation’s first LGBTQ high school, the Harvey Milk High School, in New York City’s East Village. The same year, as a co-leader of the Coalition for Le***an and Gay Rights, Hunter helped successfully lobby the New York City Council for a gay and le***an nondiscrimination ordinance—one of the first municipal ordinances of its kind in the nation.

Hunter has served as Human Rights Commissioner of New York City and on the New York State Governor's Task Force on Le***an and Gay Concerns. She founded the Women’s Caucus of the International AIDS Society. She is an assistant clinical professor of sociomedical sciences in psychiatry and psychiatric social work and a research scientist at the HIV Center at Columbia University. She conducts HIV behavioral research and is the principal investigator of a community-based HIV prevention project for LGBT students.