Thirty-two years ago today – Monday, October 3, 1994 – the first-ever public event (as far as I know) for the nascent and then-named Lesbian and Gay History Month took place at Lucas Hall 100 at the University of Missouri at St. Louis (UMSL), where I was a nighttime graduate student in history while serving as a daytime teacher at St. Louis County’s Mehlville High School.
We gathered that evening for a film festival, set for the first four Mondays of October, and viewed two documentaries about the personal histories of LGBTQ+ people across the country: Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (1984) and Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977).
The 1984 and 1977 documentaries screened at the first public event of the new History Month, on October 3, 1994.
The UMSL film festival was the finish line of a year-long sprint to take LGBTQ+ History Month from conception in the fall of 1993 to reality in the fall of 1994. The new history month was modeled after the world’s first history month — February’s Black History Month, founded as Negro History Week in 1926 — and after Women’s History Month, founded in 1978 as Women’s History Week.
The 1990s, of course, were a different world for LGBTQ+ people — DADT and DOMA, for example. That decade was also technologically primitive. Few had online access or an email address. I had neither. Getting the two-page Lesbian and Gay History Month proposal out to every LGBTQ+ organization of the period required a postal address, a Word processer with printer, an envelope and stamp, and a trip to the U.S. Post Office. Waiting at my Eiler Street apartment for a return letter took days, sometimes weeks.
All received correspondence was eagerly opened and every endorsement of the plan was a great victory, especially when Gerber/Hart Gay and Lesbian Library and Archives (founded in 1981) agreed in the early summer of 1994 to serve as the event’s first institutional home, thanks to then-Board president Kevin Boyer.
Even with the indispensable resources of Gerber/Hart, the first year (naturally) was a small affair with only pockets of participation. Three decades later, witnessing how organically LGBTQ+ History Month has evolved within the LGBTQ+ community is thrilling.
Venerable and historic institutions organize events and flood social media with supportive images, such as the ones below posted over the last couple of days (LRTB, left to right, top to bottom): Gay Men’s Health Crisis (founded in 1982), the Trevor Project (1998 — whose profoundly beautiful nine-panel History Month social media post provided the title for this essay), PFLAG (1973), HRC (1980), Lambda Legal (1973), the Victory Fund (celebrating its 35th anniversary this year!), GLAAD (1985), and GLISTEN (founded as GLSTN in 1990 by Kevin Jennings, a member of the first National History Month Coordinating Committee, which also included Johnda Boyce, Kevin Boyer, Saralyn Chestnut, Jessea Greenman, Torey Wilson, and me).
Social media posts for the October 2026 LGBTQ+ History Month (LRTB): Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Trevor Project, PFLAG, HRC, Lambda Legal, Victory Fund, GLAAD, and GLISTEN.
These days, the month-long event is regularly endorsed by many non-LGBTQ groups, too, some represented below in social media posts for this 2026 celebration (LRTB): ACLU, Essex County (New Jersey), Houston Public Library, Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, Safe Place International, JSTOR (offering over 50 free articles on LGBTQ history), Fayetteville (Arkansas) Public Library, and the St. Louis City Department of Health.
Social media posts for the October 2026 LGBTQ+ History Month (LRTB): ACLU, Essex County (NJ), Houston Public Library, Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, Safe Place International, JSTOR, Fayetteville (Arkansas) Public Library, and St. Louis City Department of Health.
From the start, colleges and universities were seen as natural settings for the October celebration (and one of the reasons I placed the occasion within the academic calendar) — and higher education has never disappointed. Every year, more post-secondary schools than I can count make big plans for October. The University of Illinois at Carbondale, for example, with a university-sponsored LGBTQ+ History Month dating back to 2004, hosts two dozen or more events every October. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has organized a large LGBTQ+ History Month Dinner since 2003. The selection of higher education social media posts below (from the past couple of days) reveal the color and diversity of events (LRTB): University of Illinois at Carbondale, Washington University, Brandeis, University of Oklahoma, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Utah State University, Syracuse University, and Colorado State University.
Social media posts for the October 2026 LGBTQ+ History Month (LRTB): University of Illinois at Carbondale, Washington University (St. Louis), Brandeis, University of Oklahoma, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Utah State University, Syracuse University, and Colorado State University.
Like Pride Month, History Month has also gone international. Since the illustrious Sue Sanders and Paul Patrick co-founded LGBT+ History Month United Kingdom, with first commemoration in February 2005, and always exquisitely done, the idea has spread to two dozen additional locations around the world, including many that also celebrate in October (in order of inaugural celebratory year): Romania, Australia, Nordic Rainbow, Canada, Armenia, Geneva, Southeast Asia, Cuba, and Uganda. (To read the histories of all known history months, and for social media and website links for these groups, click here or on the image below.)
List of current history months, compiled by the International Committee on LGBTQ+ History Months (ICoHM) in 2026.
October is the perfect time to slow down and prepare for the festive occasions that mark the year’s end. This month is made even more special by the many LGBTQ+ lectures, book clubs, readings, films, and other events — both serious and playful — that give us an opportunity to remember the past and those who lived there, to celebrate the present and the ones we care about, and to navigate together the choppy waters of this tumultuous chapter of LGBTQ+ history.
Rodney Wilson is the founder of LGBTQ+ History Month USA and the co-founder of the International Committee on LGBTQ+ History Months.
