Tim Fitzsimons

This year was the first time an openly gay candidate participated in a presidential debate, and both NBC’s debate in June and CNN’s debate this week included openly LGBTQ moderators. However, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer issues earned barely a mention during nearly 10 hours of debate over four nights involving 21 Democratic candidates for president.

On Night 1 of this week’s debate in Detroit, CNN anchor Dana Bash asked Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, about the student loan debt still held by him and his husband. Buttigieg dove into an answer about debt-free college. Aside from that, no LGBTQ-related questions or answers came up until Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, in his closing statement, reprised a past criticism and called President Donald Trump a “homophobe.”

On Night 2, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York was the first candidate to bring up the LGBTQ community in any significant way. In her opening statement, Gillibrand said her mother, one of only three women in her law school class, had “worked with gay couples for basic rights.”

“As a freshman senator, I was told you couldn’t repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ Even members of my own party told me it wasn’t convenient,” Gillibrand continued. “When are civil rights ever convenient? We stood up to the Pentagon and got it done — not impossible.”

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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee also made brief mention of the LGBTQ community when answering a question about how he would heal racial divides.

“I’ve never been a black teenager pulled over in a white neighborhood. I’ve never been a woman talked over in a meeting. I’ve never been an LGBTQ member subject to a slur,” Inslee said.

The absence of any direct question about the LGBTQ community from CNN moderators Dana Bash, Jake Tapper and Don Lemon did not go unnoticed.

“Questions about LGBTQ people weren’t included during either night of this week’s #DemDebate,” Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, tweeted Wednesday night. “This is unacceptable especially as the Trump administration continues to attack the lives of LGBTQ people.”

Sarah Kate Ellis✔@sarahkateellis

Questions about LGBTQ people weren’t included during either night of this week’s #DemDebate. This is unacceptable especially as the Trump administration continues to attack the lives of LGBTQ people. @glaad won’t let the media ignore LGBTQ issues in 2020 like they did in 2016.6087:32 PM – Jul 31, 2019Twitter Ads info and privacy172 people are talking about this

In the June debate hosted by NBC News in Miami, LGBTQ issues only came up in a significant way when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii was asked about her past anti-LGBTQ activities, like working for an organization led by her father that advocated for same-sex marriage bans and “gay conversion therapy.”

In response, Gabbard touted her vote for the Equality Act — a federal bill that would modify existing civil rights legislation to ban discrimination against LGBTQ people — and said that she held views when she was younger “that I no longer hold today.”

But Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey interjected after Gabbard’s response, saying, “This is not enough.”

“We do not talk enough about trans Americans, especially African American trans Americans, and the incredibly high rates of murder right now,” he said.

Tulsi Gabbard on why LGBTQ voters should trust her

JUNE 26, 201902:08

Over the course of three 2016 presidential debates between then-candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the LGBTQ community came up twice. In their third debate, in response to an opening question about the Supreme Court, Clinton said she felt strongly that the court “needs to stand on the side of the American people.”

“For me, that means that we need a Supreme Court that will stand up on behalf of women’s rights, on behalf of the rights of the LGBT community, that will stand up and say no to Citizens United, a decision that has undermined the election system in our country because of the way it permits dark, unaccountable money to come into our electoral system,” she said.

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Later in the debate, while attacking the Clinton Foundation’s Arab donors, Trump said: “You talk about women and women’s rights? So these are people that push gays off business — off buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly. And yet you take their money.”

During the vice presidential debates between Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, the Democratic nominee, and Mike Pence, Pence was never asked about his extensive anti-LGBTQ record as governor of Indiana and a member of Congress, which many advocates saw as a major “missed opportunity.“

On October 10, the Democratic presidential hopefuls will have an opportunity to directly address LGBTQ issues in a candidate forumhosted by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation and UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. The event, which will not be a debate but rather a forum in which candidates speak one by one, has yet to officially announce which candidates will participate.

In heavily Democratic New York City, the toughest part of political elections typically takes place in the primaries, long before the general election. Indeed, after Rep. José Serrano, a longtime congressman representing the southern Bronx, captured the Democratic nomination for New York’s 15th Congressional District in 2018, he went on to beat his Republican opponent with 96 percent of the vote; Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both won the district with over 90 percent of the vote.

But Serrano is retiring, and when New York Democrats go to polls in the June 2020 primary for the 15th Congressional District, they will have the choice of two of the best-known and most dissimilar New York City Council members: Ritchie Torres and Ruben Diaz Sr.

Torres, 31, is the youngest member of the New York City Council and one of its five openly gay members. Torres said he’s throwing his hat in the ring for Congress because federal office is the best venue for pursuing his legislative passions of overhauling public housing and focusing on the issues of concentrated poverty.

“I’m a legislator at heart; I’m a fighter at heart,” Torres said, “and on the City Council, I chair the Committee on Oversight and Investigations, and I could easily imagine myself as an effective questioner or cross examiner in Washington, D.C.”

‘It’s personal’

Torres speaks with the confidence of someone who has already overcome much to be where he is. As the youngest member of the New York City Council and its only openly LGBTQ Afro-Latino member, he said he had to overcome homophobia in the Bronx to win his first election — and he blames fellow council member and current congressional opponent Ruben Diaz Sr.

Diaz, a 76-year-old Pentecostal minister, has made news outside his council district for a series of deeply homophobic remarks he has made over decades.

“I remember when I first ran,” Torres said. “I had no ties to the party machine. I had no ties to a political dynasty. I was a 24-year-old, Afro-Latino, gay kid struggling to fully come to terms with his sexual identity, and terrified to run as an openly LGBT candidate because of the homophobic culture that people like Ruben Diaz Sr. created in the Bronx.”

“It’s personal,” Diaz added. “He made the experience of running for public office more terrifying for me.”

But Torres won and became the youngest member of the council, where he sits in the Democratic caucus alongside both Ruben Diaz Sr. and speaker Corey Johnson, who is also gay. Earlier this year, Torres and Johnson worked together to strip Diaz of committee positions after he said that the New York City Council is “controlled by the homosexual community.”

The Diaz family is one of New York City’s political dynasties; Ruben Diaz Jr. is currently the Bronx Borough President and one of the city’s most popular elected officials. Ruben Diaz Sr.’s career spans the New York City Council and the New York State Senate — and were he to win the generally low-turnout Democratic primary next year, he would stand a solid chance of being elected to Congress as a Democrat running in a solidly Democratic district.

“My issue with him is that there’s a party for people like him: It’s the Republican Party,” Torres said. “He should be running in a Republican primary. He is a Trump Republican masquerading as a Democrat.”

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“He had the temerity to bring Ted Cruz to the South Bronx,” Torres said, also noting Diaz’s vote against New York’s 2011 same-sex marriage bill. “He has been a supporter of the Trump administration, Donald Trump himself. The contrast between the reverend and me could not be more pronounced. It is a choice between making history and turning the clock back.”

NBC News asked Ruben Diaz Sr. to respond to Torres’ assertions that he is a homophobic supporter of Donald Trump. Diaz responded with the following in an email: “While some people like to do the talk. I concentrate on the walk. This is what I do for the community,” Diaz wrote, and included a link to a press release about a charity event where he, along with the NYPD and a Catholic charity, gave free backpacks and school supplies to kids.

‘Champion of the urban poor’

Making history by being elected the country’s first Afro-Latino LGBTQ congressperson and one of the country’s youngest legislators, along with becoming the face of one of the nation’s poorest congressional districts, seems to be a role Torres would relish. He has made expanding access to affordable housing one of his main political fights.

“I feel like if I’m going to be a congressman who represents the South Bronx, I have to be the most visible and vocal champion of the urban poor and of working people,” he said. The district he is running to represent, NY-15, is the nation’s poorest in terms of median income.

“Most of the policies affecting health and housing are federal in nature — think of housing, section 8 public housing, low income housing tax credits, tax-exempt bond financing — all of those are federal programs, so if you are on a mission to fight racially concentrated poverty, if you are on a mission to lift the lives of working people in the poorest parts of our country like the South Bronx, then you have to be a policymaker on the national stage, because Washington, D.C., is where the rules are set,” Torres explained.

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Torres, who grew up in public housing, said to be a proper champion of the urban poor requires, in part, “a commitment to what I would call ‘social housing.’”

“Whether it’s public housing, or project based Section 8, or mandatory inclusionary housing, or rent regulated housing, there should be a national strategy for maximizing the amount of social housing in the United States,” Torres explained. He also said he’s in favor of using federal funding “to mandate land-use reforms, even if it means rethinking single family zoning,” a growing political movement on the left known as “upzoning” that seeks to increase residential density, reduce carbon emissions and increase affordable housing by banning the type of land-use regulations that ban apartment buildings and require homes to be separated by land.

The AOC Effect

Since the winner of the Bronx Democratic primary is expected to be the winner of the general election, Torres’ path to Washington could be similar to his newly elected Congressional neighbor, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents NY-14.

Ocasio-Cortez also ran an insurgent campaign to defeat a more entrenched, older politician, and won, taking advantage of low-turnout Democratic primary votes and relying on a strong ground organization to deliver voters to the polls on primary day.

“In the end, I’m confident that Bronx voters are going to want an established fighter, and this is a change moment,” Torres said. Even so, “if the race were held today, he would win,” Torres said of Diaz.

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That’s in part, he said, because of the paradoxical nature of NY-15. Torres has to win the primary in order to win the election, and Diaz is in some ways an establishment candidate — at least in terms of name recognition. Even so, Torres said, Ruben Diaz Sr. “is a homophobe and he has a long documented record of homophobia.”

“I think a lesson learned from AOC’s win is that a charismatic messenger with a compelling message can matter more than money and machine,” Torres said.

But unlike Ocasio-Cortez, Torres has money, if not yet a machine: He’s been fundraising since April and said he has raised more than “all combined by two-fold,” referring to his primary opponents’ hauls thus far.

“So the reverend has the name, but I have the record — and the resources,” Torres said.

In May 1933, the Nazi-sympathizing German Student Union entered Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin.

Hirschfeld’s expansive library of sexual and gender studies was confiscated and later burned in the streets of the German capital, one of many book burnings in Nazi Germany that would decimate the records of this pioneering institute.

Some of the Institute’s records were of the countless sexual and gender minorities who passed through its doors between 1919 and 1933, and even earlier, when Hirschfeld ran the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the institute’s predecessor and world’s first LGBTQ rights organization.

“The Nazis tried to destroy information about that group by burning the books and magazines and photographs that were in that amazing institute,” independent historian Jonathan Ned Katz, founder of OutHistory.org, said.

However, despite the Nazi’s best efforts and thanks to Katz’ research, the name of one of the earliest activists for homosexual rights in America has been revealed: Rev. Karl Schlegel, a German who immigrated to the United States in the late 19th century. (He was also known as Carl or Charles while living in America.)

Based on newly unearthed records that have been uploaded to OutHistory’s website, it appears Schlegel both harbored same-sex attractions and advocated on behalf of homosexuals, bisexuals and asexuals over 100 years ago.

Born in Germany in 1863, Schlegel immigrated to the United States in 1878 at age 15 and later preached as a minister. According to OutHistory.org, an August 1903 edition of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’s journal said that Schlegel visited the committee “numerous” times and “aims at an association of his Uranian fellow ministers as well as the founding of a subcommittee in New York.”

“Uranian” is an English translation of the early German word for homosexual: urning.

“Schlegel apparently considered other homosexual Protestant ministers good candidates for his U.S. emancipation organizing,” Katz wrote.

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Between September and November of 1903, during a trip to Germany, Schlegel was arrested for an alleged sexual offense and later released. “Hopefully this unpleasant incident will be without further fateful consequences for him professionally,” the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’s journal wrote at the time.

In 1905, after being dismissed from his position at the First German Reformed Protestant Congregation in New York City, Schlegel relocated to New Orleans. The Times-Picayune announced his first sermon on March 27, 1905.

But less than a year later, in December 1906, the New Orleans Presbyterian Church was investigating Schlegel for unnamed “rumors.”

The church elders met and charged Schlegel with multiple counts of disseminating and defending “the naturalness and lawfulness of Sodomy, otherwise called ‘Homosexuality’ or ‘Uranism,’” according to Presbyterian Church records from that time. Schlegel pleaded not guilty, and the Presbyterian Church proceeded to trial. Entered into evidence was a German language copy of the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediate Types, the annual publication of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. The panel found Schlegel guilty.

Church records quote him as saying on Jan. 29, 1907: “Let the same laws for all the intermediate stages of sexual life: the homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals, asexuals, be legal as they are now in existence for the heterosexuals, that is, they should be under punishment: First, if they use compulsion. Second, if they are found to offend publicly. Third, if they use or misuse children, are dangerous and corrupting and will lead only to evil.”

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The church judges responded by calling his views “evil and only evil” and finding him “totally disqualified for the office of the Christian ministry” and “do prohibit him from exercising any of the functions thereof.” By January 1907, Schlegel was jobless thanks to his LGBTQ activism.

Schlegel returned to New York, and by 1912, the New York Herald wrote that he had become a “spiritualist,” a religious movement that communicates with spirit popular at the time.

Schlegel died July 25, 1922, in New York City. He is buried at grave number 18004 at the Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

“I aspire to picnic there and say hello to the Rev. Schlegel and thank him for his early emancipation activities,” Katz told NBC News.

Katz said he hopes that this is “just the beginning” of learning about Schlegel’s life, and he encouraged members of the public with more relevant information to reach out to him at OutHistory.

After a string of successful general and special elections, the number of LGBTQ elected officials in the U.S. today stands at 698 — the highest number ever, and an increase of nearly 25 percent over last year, according to the Victory Institute, which tracks openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer elected officials.

The data was released as part of Victory’s 2019 Out for Americareport; in last year’s report, there were 559 out LGBTQ officials.

Some of the most well-known LGBTQ officials to take office this year are Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. All are Democrats.

“Some of it is that more out people are running, some of it is that more out people are getting elected, and then more people who are in office are coming out,” Victory Institute President and CEO Annise Parker, the former mayor of Houston, told NBC News. “So it’s becoming much more acceptable, so the numbers are going up every day.”

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However, Parker noted that for all the increase in representation, the LGBTQ community remains severely underrepresented in raw terms. The 698 out LGBTQ elected officials make up only 0.13 percent of all elected officials nationwide. Gallup estimates that the LGBTQ community is roughly 4.5 percent of the population. 

“Unfortunately, even though this is the highest number we have ever had, we need to elect nearly 23,000 more to achieve parity in elected office,” Parker said.

The number of black LGBTQ elected officials rose from 30 to 43, Latino LGBTQ officials rose from 58 to 74, and transgender elected officials rose from 13 to 20.

“It is time for our first trans member of Congress, our first LGBTQ governor of color, and our first LGBTQ American president,” Parker said in a statement. She called for LGBTQ people to be elected “to every school board, to every city council and to every state legislature.”

Stacy Feintuch, a mother of two in suburban New Jersey, said she didn’t know what was wrong when her oldest daughter, Amanda, 17, began to withdraw.

“I confronted her and said, ‘You need to talk to me,’” Feintuch said: “She said, ‘It’s not what you think. I’m fine, it’s not that.”

“I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you.’”

Feintuch said her mind raced: “Is she pregnant? Is she in trouble?” Finally, Amanda buried her head in her pillow and said, “I’m gay.”

“I was just dumbfounded, just shocked. It wasn’t even a thought in my head,” Feintuch said. “I said, which ended up being the absolute wrong thing to say, ‘Why do you think this?’ She started screaming at me.”

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“I said: ‘Take a breath, I didn’t mean anything by it. I love you. I’m shocked, I just want to talk to you about this.”

Amanda calmed down and, fortunately, they talked.

While Feintuch considers herself an accepting person, she still faced some immediate stress and shock when her child came out to her. That’s not uncommon. A new study conducted by researchers at George Washington University found that most parents of lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth have difficulty adjusting after their kids come out.

The study says it is one of the first to systematically examine the experience of parents raising lesbian, gay and bisexual children. David Huebner, one of the study’s lead authors and a public health professor at George Washington University, said his team approached the study with a question: “Can we identify the families that most need intervention to support the families and protect the kids?”

The study found that African American and Latino parents have a harder time accepting their lesbian, gay and bisexual children, as do the parents of children who come out at a later age.

The study, which surveyed a much larger sample size than previous studies, confirmed smaller studies that showed parents’ negative reactions tend to ease over time; the first two years are the hardest for parents.

There were no significant differences in reactions between mother and father, the age of the parent, or the gender of the child. The study did not examine the reactions for the parents of transgender children.

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In general, acceptance seems to be growing rapidly for lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. “We see improvement in people’s respect for LGBT rights, we’ve seen political progress, concrete political progress, and we have also seen attitudes shifting at the population level,” Huebner said. “I think for parents, when you’re confronted with your own child who you love so fiercely, I think that reaction in that moment is a very personal one, and it’s one that’s hard to predict from public opinion.”

After Amanda came out, Feintuch told her daughter that she worried her life would become more difficult after having struggled with depression in high school. “I was hoping that now your time would get easier, and your life would get easier, and it scares me that it would be more difficult.”

“She’s like: ‘It’s not like how it was when you were growing up. There’s a lot of kids in my school who are gay. Its not a big deal,’” Feintuch said. “I had to get it through my head first, and get it through my mind: ‘This is how her life is going to be, and it’s going to be fine.’”

“It was about a year until Amanda was like, OK, definitely 100 percent, and then she had a girlfriend and then I saw it all come together.”

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Huebner said his study is the first to measure these reactions and that previous studies of the parents of LGBTQ youth mostly recruited from accepting and friendly environments, like PFLAG, an organization for the parents of LGBTQ people.

“I think we have made a huge improvement here — 80 percent [of survey respondents] had never been to a support group, had never talked to a therapist,” Huebner said. “These were parents who had never before been heard from in research.”

Still, Huebner pointed to some potential oversights: “There’s reason to believe we are missing two groups of people: those super rejecting people, and those parents who were so immediately accepting that they also didn’t need the resources.”

Huebner hopes that this will allow advocates to devise materials so parents can better prepare themselves to accept and love their kids.

“Parents have the power to protect their kids, their LGBT kids, from all sorts of threatening forces,” Huebner said. “We know that when parents are supportive of their LGBT kids those kids have less depression and fewer risk behaviors.”

This year New York City will host dueling pride marches on the same day: the official NYC Pride March and the activist-run Queer Liberation March.

The schism that resulted in two separate events on June 30, the last Sunday of LGBTQ Pride Month, is the product of a longstanding political disagreement within the community: whether pride is a demand for acceptance and integration into broader society or whether it’s a radical demand for the liberation of all LGBTQ people.

For those paying attention, this tension has been on full display during the past two NYC Pride Marches — while the roots of the broader debate go back decades.

In 2017, activists used a “lockdown” technique to halt the official march in front of the Stonewall Inn to protest the presence of corporations and uniformed police. The NYPD was forced to arrest12 activists outside the Stonewall, where a police raid in 1969 helped spawn the modern LGBTQ rights movement — a raid that the department only apologized for this year.

Then, before last year’s march, a group of activists calling themselves the Reclaim Pride Coalition delivered a set of demands to Heritage of Pride, the nonprofit that has produced the NYC Pride March since 1984.

Reclaim Pride told Heritage of Pride that if it wanted to allow police to participate, the officers had to be out of uniform and unarmed. The activist group also demanded that there be no barricades along the sidewalk of the march, to ease congestion and allow passersby to join the massive annual event. Reclaim Pride also demanded that a “resistance contingent” be given a place near the front of the march to highlight the LGBTQ community’s opposition to the Trump administration’s policies.

“Reclaim Pride Coalition believes that HOP’s management of the annual NYC Pride March, resulting in commercial and police saturation of the March among other unacceptable characteristics, has led to decades long conflict with and the alienation of many individuals and groups within the NYC LGBTQ community,” the group wrote last year.

When Heritage of Pride responded to those demands a month before the 2018 NYC Pride March, Reclaim Pride activists were incensed: The march was shortened, the route was reversed and no changes were made to the presence of police officers or barriers. In addition, Heritage of Pride distributed wristbands for officially sanctioned marchers.

This year, with the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising and the addition of WorldPride to the city’s events, millions of additional people are expected to descend on New York City the last weekend of June. And Reclaim Pride will be holding its first Queer Liberation March — a separate, police-free, anti-corporate, unsanctioned event that will take place just hours before the official NYC Pride March.by TaboolaSponsored StoriesKELLEY BLUE BOOK10 Longest-Range Electric Cars of 2019 SENIOR LIVINGSonoma Apartments May Have Seniors Packing Their Bags

Organizers from both groups spoke to NBC News about their views on Pride. They represent a historic divide that was present even before the Stonewall uprising of 1969: whether the LGBTQ rights movement is a revolutionary one or one seeking integration into the American body politic.

RECLAIM PRIDE’S VIEW

Natalie James, a co-founder of the Reclaim Pride Coalition, said the reason New York needs the Queer Liberation March is because of what Stonewall really was about.

“What was different about Stonewall, in terms of New York City leading up to that time, was the massive response to the brutality,” James said. “People fought back, and they fought back not just for one day, for multiple days.”

The barriers now set up by police for crowd-control purposes prevent passersby from joining the march, James said. During the first pride march in 1970, called Christopher Street Liberation Day and held on the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, marchers shouted, “Off of the sidewalks, into the streets!” — and people listened. By the time marchers entered Central Park, the event’s last stop, the crowd stretched for blocks.

We’re not going to change the world again if we just sort of go along with the program.

MARTHA SHELLEY GLF FOUNDING MEMBER

Several veterans of the early LGBTQ movement agree with James and have thrown their support behind the Queer Liberation March, including Fred Sargeant, one of the organizers of the first pride march, and the activist Martha Shelley.

“I can see the Heritage of Pride point of view, that they need money to pull off a huge party and all that sort of thing,” Shelley told NBC News. “I’m also seeing from the Reclaim Pride point of view that we’re not going to change the world again if we just sort of go along with the program.”

Shelley, a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front, which was founded right after the Stonewall raid, said she is dividing her time between the dueling groups.

“I am going to be the Gay Liberation Front spokesperson at the Heritage of Pride rally on Friday night,” she explained. “And then on Sunday, I’ll be marching with Reclaim Pride.”

When she speaks Friday, Shelley said she’s coming with a political message: “We have to deal with a vast economic inequality and corporate control of our political and economic system.”

“When Gay Liberation Front started, we were a tiny little group of raggedy-ass kids,” Shelley said. “We were, with one or two exceptions, all under 30. We didn’t have careers to lose, and yet we changed the world.”

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During its brief existence from 1969 to 1973, the Gay Liberation Front reached out to all sorts of other revolutionary liberation groups, including the Black Panthers, according to Shelley.

“The previous gay organizations were kind of single-issue groups and weren’t making those alliances,” Shelley added, referring to integrationist groups like the Mattachine Society, which had staged an annual, lightly attended picket protest in Philadelphia.

“By doing that — by changing the attitudes on the left first — we eventually changed the entire culture,” Shelley said.

HERITAGE OF PRIDE’S VIEW

Heritage of Pride contends that there is no way to pull off the massive NYC Pride March — which is expected to draw an estimated 4.5 million people this year — without police, barricades and some level of corporate partnership.

“I understand on some level where Reclaim Pride is coming from, but I also have been an event organizer in New York City and I understand that to do a large-scale event like our march, logistically, you can’t do it without barricades,” Sue Doster, director of strategic planning at Heritage of Pride, told NBC News. “You can’t do it without police, and in New York City, if you get a permit for an event of this scale, you automatically get police, you automatically get barricades.”

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Doster said that even though the parade’s corporate presence is a far cry from the small group of marchers that first stepped off from the Stonewall Inn in 1970, it is particularly meaningful for people all around the world — particularly those in homophobic countries where LGBTQ people are still demanding basic rights. Doster recounted a discussion she had with an LGBTQ activist from Kenya: “She said to me, ‘Seeing what you do in the United States, even before I came here, seeing the pictures, gives me and my friends hope, because for us it shows us how it can be.’”

When Doster started volunteering with Heritage of Pride in the 1990s, “we literally cut out letters and made our own banners,” she said. “Now, of course, we have mass-produced banners that are vertical on light poles down the entire route — very, very different.”

“When we were making our banners, we actually hung them ourselves,” she added. “We climbed the ladders with ropes and duct tape and attached them to the top of light poles all along Christopher Street.”

Now, the packs of protesters verbally harassing marchers as they paraded past St. Patrick’s Cathedral have been replaced by supportive spectators packed 10 deep on sidewalks along the entire route, according to Doster.

“And the truth of the matter is, regarding sponsors, Pride has gotten more and more expensive over the years,” Doster explained. “A lot of our attendees really want big names, and that is expensive. It’s a balancing act, and I think we at Heritage of Pride are very conscious that it’s the community’s, so that it’s not T-Mobile’s event or TD Bank’s event.”

Therapy that seeks to change minors’ sexual orientation or gender identity is now illegal in Colorado. Gov. Jared Polis, the first openly gay man ever elected governor in the U.S., signed the ban into law on Friday.

“Colorado has joined a growing list of states that have banned so-called conversion therapy. It’s a horrific practice that has long been widely-discredited by medical and mental health professionals and has scarred many survivors for life,” Polis said in a statement emailed to NBC News. “Today Colorado took an important step forward in recognizing our diversity as a strength. These bills truly underscore the idea that Colorado is a state where everyone can be their true selves and live the life they want.”

Colorado is now the 18th U.S. state — and the fourth this year — to ban the controversial practice. Just this week, Maine’s governor signed a ban.

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Research shows so-called conversion therapy, which treats being gay or transgender as a mental illness, increases the risk of suicide, drug abuse and depression among teens. A long list of health associations, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association, have spoken out against the practice, which is also known as “reparative therapy” or “ex-gay therapy.”

In the statement shared with NBC News, Polis said he’s thrilled to launch LGBTQ Pride Month in June by outlawing what he called a “tortuous practice” harming children.

Polis also signed into law on Friday a bill making it much easier for transgender Coloradans to update the gender on their birth certificates, identification documents and driver’s licenses.

Daniel Ramos, executive director of One Colorado, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy group, applauded the “strong bipartisan support” both bills received, which he said “further demonstrates that LGBTQ equality should be a nonpartisan issue.”

“Colorado will continue to make history as our country’s first openly gay Governor, Jared Polis, signs our pro-equality agenda into law to send a strong message that Colorado is a state that is open to all,” Ramos continued.

According to Michael Williams, much better known as “Sister Roma,” the story of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence began in San Francisco on Easter Day of 1979. Back then, just a year before the city’s gay community was struck by the AIDS epidemic, four friends found themselves fed up with what Roma called the “Castro clone look.”

“Gay men in San Francisco in the 70s all presented very masculine, leather jackets, moustaches, sort of like the Marlboro Man, you know?” Roma told NBC News. “So they were very fed up with that, and they thought, ‘Let’s put on these nun’s habits and sort of go out and screw with people and see what happens.’”

As they strolled from the Castro to the city’s gay beach, Roma said, “everywhere they went the reaction was just insane — people had never seen anything like men, most of them with facial hair, in nun’s habits.” They realized they were onto something, so they came up with a name for their group: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Now four decades later, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were clearly ahead of their time, and many of their campy “dragtivism” tactics have inspired others, Roma said. “Little did they know it, but these four queers who went out in these nuns habits actually changed the world,” she said.

“One of the original sisters was Bobbi Campbell, who was Sister Florence Nightmare, who was a registered nurse,” Roma said.

Campbell became well known across America as the self-designated “AIDS poster boy,” a role he took on in an effort to destigmatize the disease.

“The sisters took a very pragmatic, responsible attitude towards the virus, and said, ‘We need to protect the community,’” Roma said. “So the sisters produced a safer sex pamphlet called Play Fair that we still produce today, that was the world’s first-ever safer sex pamphlet.”

In the early 1980s, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence hosted some of the world’s first fundraisers for AIDS victims, many of whom faced financial ruin as the then-unknown pathogen ravaged their bodies. “The sisters were at the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS before anyone knew what the disease was,” Roma said.

At each anniversary every 10 years, the sisters have had a different focus. In 1989, Roma launched the “stop the violence” campaign, which addressed an uptick of homophobic hate crimes in San Francisco at that time.

“In 1989, queer people were still really fighting for equality and just desiring to be recognized as equal people in the world,” Roma said. “So it was a very basic fight, and we were also crippled with HIV and AIDS, which many people saw as a disease that was killing all the right people.” That year, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence also became an official nonprofit organization.

For their 20th anniversary in 1999, the Sisters closed Castro Street for a massive celebration. “That seemed like a no-brainer to us, but apparently it was quite a major issue for a lot of people in San Francisco, who still at the time … thought that we were very sacrilegious,” Roma said. But support from local politicians got them through the day, and they hosted their street fair, where the Sisters emceed a “hunky Jesus” competition that continues to this day.

Because of publicity generated by the opposition, “it was one of the largest celebrations that we had, probably ever in our history,” with around 20,000 to 30,000 people filling Castro street, Roma said.