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Magnus Hirschfeld
Born
The first organised legislative campaign for gay rights began in Berlin in 1897, when Hirschfeld, a physician, co-founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and launched a petition to the Reichstag to repeal Paragraph 175, the law criminalising sex between men. It gathered thousands of signatures, from Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann among others, and a Reichstag committee voted for reform in 1929 before the measure stalled. The Nazis destroyed his Institute for Sexual Science in 1933 and toughened the law. West Germany kept the Nazi version until 1969 and repealed the paragraph entirely only in 1994.
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Antony Grey
The 1957 Wolfenden Report recommended decriminalising private sex between men over 21, and then governments did nothing for a decade. Grey, who worked under that pseudonym to protect his family, ran the Homosexual Law Reform Society through most of those years, lobbying MPs and peers, briefing journalists and keeping the report's recommendation alive. The result was the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which applied only to England and Wales, set the age of consent at 21 and kept many prosecutions possible. Grey spent the following decades pushing for what it left out, a reminder that a landmark law can be a starting point.
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Leo Abse
Born
Abse, a Labour MP for Pontypool and a Cardiff solicitor, took the Wolfenden recommendation into the Commons as a private member's bill, while the Earl of Arran carried a parallel bill in the Lords. Home Secretary Roy Jenkins gave the bill government time, without which it would have died. Abse made concessions to get it through, including the higher age of consent and exclusions for the armed forces and merchant navy, and defended the result as what Parliament would accept. The 1967 act's mix of real change and hard compromise is the clearest example on this list of how legislative reform is actually bargained.
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Frank Kameny
Born
Kameny, a Harvard-trained astronomer, was fired from the Army Map Service in 1957 for being gay, and in 1961 filed the first petition to the US Supreme Court arguing that such dismissals violated civil rights. The court declined to hear it. He kept going with the Mattachine Society of Washington: the first organised pickets of the White House on gay rights in 1965, then sustained pressure that helped end the psychiatric classification of homosexuality as a disorder in 1973 and the federal Civil Service ban in 1975. Late in life he saw the District of Columbia repeal its sodomy law in 1993, a change he had pressed for since the 1970s.
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Harvey Milk
Born
Milk is the most famous name here, and his legislative record was short because his time in office was: eleven months on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors before his assassination in November 1978. In that time he sponsored the city's 1978 ordinance banning discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in housing and employment, and joined the statewide coalition that defeated the Briggs Initiative, which would have required California schools to fire gay teachers, by more than a million votes. That campaign, run by many organisers besides Milk, showed that a gay rights vote could be won at the ballot box.
More about Harvey Milk6
Jeff Dudgeon
The 1967 act did not reach Northern Ireland, and in 1976 police raided Dudgeon's Belfast home, seized his diaries and questioned him about his sex life. He took the case to Strasbourg, and in Dudgeon v United Kingdom in 1981 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that criminalising private sex between consenting men violated the right to private life, the first such ruling by an international court. Parliament decriminalised in Northern Ireland the following year, and the judgment became the precedent for later cases in Ireland and Cyprus. Dudgeon later served as an Ulster Unionist councillor in Belfast.
More about Jeff Dudgeon7
David Norris (politician)
Born
Norris, a Trinity College Dublin lecturer in English, challenged Ireland's Victorian laws against sex between men in the Irish courts, losing in the Supreme Court in 1983. His barrister, Mary Robinson, later president of Ireland, took the case to Strasbourg, and in Norris v Ireland in 1988 the European Court of Human Rights followed its Dudgeon ruling. The Irish government took five years to act, and the 1993 law, steered by justice minister Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, set an equal age of consent rather than the compromise many expected. Norris was by then a senator, and served until January 2024.
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Michael Cashman
Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 banned councils from "promoting" homosexuality, and the campaign against it produced the professional lobbying group that changed British law over the next 15 years. Cashman, then an EastEnders actor, co-founded Stonewall in 1989 with Ian McKellen, Lisa Power and others to work inside Westminster rather than outside it. Its patient lobbying fed into the equal age of consent in 2000, adoption rights, the repeal of Section 28 in 2003 and civil partnerships in 2004. Cashman then spent 15 years as an MEP working on EU anti-discrimination law, and sits in the Lords.
More about Michael Cashman9
Rodney Croome
Tasmania was the last Australian state to criminalise sex between men, with penalties of up to 21 years. Croome and Nick Toonen of the Tasmanian Gay and Lesbian Rights Group took a complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee, which ruled in Toonen v Australia in 1994 that the law breached the international covenant on civil rights. The federal parliament passed a privacy law in response, and the state finally repealed its law in 1997. Croome went on to lead Australian Marriage Equality's early years and to campaign for Tasmania's pioneering apology and expungement of old convictions.
More about Rodney Croome10
Simon Nkoli
Born
South Africa's 1996 constitution was the first in the world to ban discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, and Nkoli is a large part of why. Tried for treason alongside anti-apartheid leaders in the Delmas trial of 1985 to 1988, he was openly gay throughout, which pushed fellow defendants and the ANC to treat gay rights as part of the freedom struggle. He founded the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand and helped organise Johannesburg's first Pride march in 1990. The National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality, which he helped build, then used the equality clause in court to strike down the sodomy laws in 1998, the year he died.
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Waheed Alli, Baron Alli
Born
When Labour tried to equalise the age of consent after 1997, the House of Lords was the main obstacle, and Alli, made a life peer in 1998 as the first openly gay member of the Lords, became the bill's chief advocate there. The Lords rejected it repeatedly, and the government used the Parliament Act to pass it in 2000. Alli went on to lead Lords debates on repealing Section 28, on adoption by same-sex couples in 2002, and in 2010 won an amendment allowing civil partnerships to be registered in willing religious premises. His work shows how much of this law was won or lost in the upper chamber.
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Boris Dittrich
Born
On 1 April 2001 the Netherlands became the first country to open civil marriage to same-sex couples. Dittrich, a former judge and Democrats 66 member of the Dutch parliament, put the motion to the lower house in 1996 asking the government to prepare a law, and kept pressing through the coalition's negotiations. The groundwork came from others too: a 1990 test case brought with the backing of the gay magazine Gay Krant, and legal scholars such as Kees Waaldijk who drafted the arguments. The Dutch law became the template that Belgium, Spain and Canada studied within a few years.
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Volker Beck (politician)
Born
Beck, a Green member of the Bundestag from 1994 to 2017, worked on both ends of Germany's change. He helped draft the 2001 Life Partnership Act, which created registered partnerships under the Social Democrat and Green coalition, and spent the next 16 years filing and refiling bills to open marriage itself, while the Constitutional Court gradually forced equal treatment of partners in tax and pensions. On 30 June 2017, after Angela Merkel allowed a free vote, the Bundestag passed marriage equality on Beck's last sitting day. The same year it quashed convictions under Paragraph 175, another long-running Beck demand.
More about Volker Beck (politician)14
Christine Burns
Burns, a business consultant who had been a Conservative Party activist, became the political strategist of Press for Change, the British trans campaign group founded in 1992. Its pairing of court cases with Whitehall lobbying paid off after the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Goodwin v United Kingdom in 2002 that Britain must legally recognise trans people's acquired gender. Burns and colleagues such as Stephen Whittle then worked with ministers and officials on the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which created gender recognition certificates. In 2025 the UK Supreme Court ruled that "sex" in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex, narrowing how those certificates apply.
More about Christine Burns15
Mary Bonauto
Born
Bonauto, a lawyer at GLAD in Boston, built American marriage equality one state court at a time. She was co-counsel in Baker v State in 1999, which led Vermont to create the first civil unions, and lead counsel in Goodridge v Department of Public Health, which made Massachusetts the first state to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples in May 2004. She then led the challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act in New England, and in April 2015 argued the core marriage question before the Supreme Court in Obergefell v Hodges; the picture shows her arriving at the court that morning.
More about Mary Bonauto16
Pedro Zerolo
Spain went from criminal laws against homosexuality under Franco to full marriage equality and adoption rights in 2005, ahead of most of Europe, and Zerolo was the hinge between the movement and the government that did it. As president of Spain's federation of LGBT groups in the 1990s he lobbied for partnership laws, then joined the Socialist Party's leadership and made marriage a firm commitment in its 2004 manifesto. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's government passed the law within a year, despite large Catholic-backed protests. The Constitutional Court upheld it in 2012 against the People's Party's challenge.
More about Pedro Zerolo17
Barney Frank
Born
Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat in the House from 1981 to 2013, became in 1987 the first member of Congress to come out voluntarily, and he was a legislator first: he cared about votes counted, not statements made. He helped carry the 2009 hate crimes act and the 2010 repeal of "don't ask, don't tell", and pushed employment protections for decades. In 2007 he backed a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that dropped gender identity to win more votes, angering trans activists; it passed the House and died in the Senate. He died in May 2026, aged 86, and his pragmatic method is still argued over.
More about Barney Frank18
Lohana Berkins
Born
Argentina's 2012 Gender Identity Law let people change the sex on their documents by simple declaration, with no diagnosis, surgery or court order, the first national law to do so. Berkins, a travesti activist who left home in Salta as a teenager, founded the Association for the Struggle for Travesti and Transsexual Identity in 1994 and spent the following years documenting police harassment and building alliances with feminist and human rights groups. Those alliances carried the bill through Congress. In 2021 Argentina passed a public-sector employment quota for trans people named after her and fellow activist Diana Sacayán.
More about Lohana Berkins19
Edith Windsor
Born
When Windsor's wife, Thea Spyer, died in 2009 after more than 40 years together, the federal government taxed her estate as if they were strangers, because the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act refused to recognise their Canadian marriage. The bill was over $363,000. Windsor, a retired IBM programmer then in her eighties, sued with lawyer Roberta Kaplan. In United States v Windsor in 2013 the Supreme Court struck down the act's definition of marriage, opening federal benefits to married same-sex couples and supplying much of the reasoning for Obergefell two years later. Congress formally repealed the act in 2022.
More about Edith Windsor20
Evan Wolfson
Born
Wolfson argued for same-sex marriage in a law school paper in 1983, when most gay rights groups thought it a distraction, and was co-counsel in the Hawaii case that first put the question before a state supreme court in 1993. Hawaii's voters then overrode that case with a 1998 constitutional amendment, one of many setbacks. In 2003 he founded Freedom to Marry with an explicit plan: win enough states through courts, legislatures and ballots, grow public support to a majority, then ask the Supreme Court to finish the job. After Obergefell in 2015 the organisation closed, having done what it was set up for.
More about Evan Wolfson21
Katherine Zappone
Born
Zappone and her wife Ann Louise Gilligan married in Canada in 2003 and asked the Irish tax authorities to treat them as married. Refused, they sued, and lost in the High Court in 2006, but the case made marriage a live political question and fed the campaign that produced civil partnership in 2010. Zappone entered the Seanad in 2011 and campaigned through the 2015 referendum, when Ireland became the first country to approve same-sex marriage by popular vote, by 62 per cent. Credit is shared widely: the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, Marriage Equality and the Yes Equality coalition ran the ground campaign.
More about Katherine Zappone22
Alex Greenwich
Born
Australia's 2017 route to marriage equality was unusual: a national postal survey, which many campaigners opposed as an invitation to a hostile debate. Greenwich, national convenor of Australian Marriage Equality and co-chair of the Yes campaign, ran it anyway, and 61.6 per cent voted yes on a turnout of nearly 80 per cent. Parliament passed the Marriage Amendment Act within weeks. As the independent member for Sydney in the New South Wales parliament he has since carried state laws himself, including the 2024 ban on conversion practices.
More about Alex Greenwich23
Chi Chia-wei
Born
Chi came out publicly in Taiwan in 1986, under martial law, and that year asked the legislature to recognise same-sex marriage; he was jailed for several months soon afterwards. For three decades he kept filing applications and petitions. His case, joined with a petition from the Taipei city government, produced Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748 in May 2017, in which the constitutional court gave the legislature two years to legalise same-sex marriage. Voters rejected changing the civil code in 2018 referendums, so lawmakers passed a separate act in May 2019, making Taiwan the first place in Asia to do so.
More about Chi Chia-wei24
Menaka Guruswamy
Born
India's Section 377, a colonial-era law against "carnal intercourse against the order of nature", was struck down by the Delhi High Court in 2009 in a case brought by the Naz Foundation, then restored by the Supreme Court in 2013. Guruswamy, with Arundhati Katju, represented the students, alumni and professionals of the Indian Institutes of Technology among the new petitioners, arguing that the law violated their dignity and equal citizenship. In Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India in September 2018 a five-judge bench unanimously decriminalised consensual sex between adults. Marriage remains a matter for Parliament: the Supreme Court declined to legalise it in 2023.
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