We Owe So Much To Lesbians

The history of queer liberation has a naming problem.

We talk about Stonewall without mentioning that Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were trans women. We celebrate Pride without acknowledging that the first Pride was a riot. And we talk about the AIDS crisis without nearly enough mention of the lesbians who showed up, held hands, donated blood, and stayed.

Let's fix that.

In the 1980s and early '90s, when gay men were dying by the thousands and the government refused to acknowledge it, lesbian activists didn't retreat into their own community. They organized. They showed up to ACT UP meetings and hospital bedsides. They formed blood drives at a time when lesbians were statistically the lowest-risk group for HIV, donating specifically so gay men could have transfusions. They gave time, money, and emotional labor to a crisis that was consuming a community they loved.

It wasn't performative. It wasn't for credit. Most of them never got credit.

But the work they did helped save lives, build institutions, and establish a model of queer solidarity that we still benefit from today. The LGBTQ+ Center in New York. The AIDS quilt. The community health infrastructure that exists in queer neighborhoods across the country. Lesbian hands are in all of it.

This isn't about creating a hierarchy of suffering or deciding who suffered most. It's about accuracy. It's about naming the people who built the floor we're standing on.

The pattern has continued. Lesbian organizers have been at the center of queer legal battles, trans rights advocacy, and reproductive justice movements for decades — often without being named or centered in the story afterward. The labor is absorbed. The credit disperses. The erasure happens slowly, then all at once.

So the next time someone implies that lesbian issues are separate from "the community," remember: there is no community without the people who stayed when it cost them something.

We owe them the truth. We owe them the credit. We owe them everything.