Happy Pride Month, Joshua. I can hardly wait for the disrespect that is going to be heaped on me in this thread. I'll be reading the thread live this evening, if you'd like to call in.
To everybody about to step up and call me names, I have only this to say:
I would suggest that the King and Queen of Queers of the techno geek world for Pride Month should be Alan Turing, the gay mathematician, cryptographer, and a pioneer of computer science who broke the German "Enigma Code" and Lynn Conway, the transsexual computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, and transgender activist, who pioneered "Very Large Scale Integration" microprocessor technology enabling the global cellular network of today.
www.aaas.org
When I was around 8 or 10, Christine Jorgensen helped me understand myself.
News of one of the world's first successful sex changes involving both surgery and hormone therapy was announced in 1952 - exactly 60 years ago this weekend.
www.bbc.com
Caroline Cossey was a beacon of hope to my generation of gender bent kids as young adults that we could one day be a beautiful, successful and witty woman married to a rich, handsome devoted man. She is far and away the "Queen of Queens", born a few months before me, raised by parents who were supportive of her femininity when she was young and offered to pay for her surgery, but she wanted to pay for it herself and was working as an exotic dancer when she met a men who married her and paid for it. She fought hard for transgender rights in the UK and talks about it in this interview.
Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Storm DeLarvie started the struggle for queer equality . They all went on to create advocacy organizations that survive today and these three people should be beatified for their sacrifices in this world.
Too often, we ignore the historical record and stated words of those present at the riots in favor of myths. Why do they persist, and how can we complicate our understanding of a pivotal event in LGBTQ+ history?
www.them.us
When I came online in 1999, the first transgender role model I found was Lynn Conway. Her homepage, along with a few others, like Susans.org and Andrea James' TS Roadmap stand at the root of today's transgender community online. There are numerous young transgender adults whose stories I've been following since they were children, I'll post about later. Some grew up to be reasonably well adjusted adults, often achieving great success in the arts or technology, many who grew up to sell sex and some who are total train wrecks. One suffered a mental breakdown after a botched GRS and killed herself and one grew up to become a State Senator.