Jews & Pride Month

Milk was America’s first openly gay elected politician, and grew up in a secular Jewish home with values such as Tikkun Olam. He is also credited with popularizing the rainbow Pride Flag. Milk said, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door,” he concluded. In his most famous speech, delivered before a crowd of thousands on San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day, he urged the crowd to “end the conspiracy of silence”. “Come out to your parents, your relatives,” he implored gay men and women.

Kameny has been referred to as "one of the most significant figures" in the American gay rights movement. In 1957, Kameny was dismissed from his position as an astronomer in the U.S. Army's Army Map Service in Washington, D.C., because of his homosexuality, leading him to begin "a Herculean struggle with the American establishment" that would "spearhead a new period of militancy in the homosexual rights movement of the early 1960s." Kameny formally appealed his firing by the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Although unsuccessful, the proceeding was notable as the first known civil rights claim based on sexual orientation pursued in a U.S. court.

A fierce advocate for youth and “gender outlaws,” Kate Bornstein is a Jewish transgender author, playwright, performance artist and gender theorist. Born Albert Bornstein, Kate was raised in a Conservative Jewish community in New Jersey. She is best known for her groundbreaking books Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, My Gender Workbook, and Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws. Her many plays and performance pieces explore queer identity and the rigid binary system of gender and sexuality that reinforce homophobia and transphobia.

Newman is a prolific writer, poet, and human rights activist. She is the author of over 60 books and edited collections including the groundbreaking children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies, the first children’s book to portray lesbian families in a positive way, and the award-winning short story A Letter to Harvey Milk. Newman’s writing often explores lesbian identity, Jewish identity, and the intersection and collision between the two. She has received many literary awards

Kushner wrote Angels in America, a play which examines the complexity of gay life and relationships in the 1980s. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award for best play and the Drama Desk Award for outstanding play. It has been a prominent part of the American cultural lexicon for more than two decades.

But Kushner didn’t stop and rest on his laurels. In addition to writing screenplays for films like “Munich” and “Lincoln,” he has since written defenses of gay idealism and spoken publicly about the AIDS crisis.

As a Harvard Law student in 1983, Wolfson wrote a thesis on the legal basis for same-sex marriage, well before the topic had been seriously considered anywhere around the world. His book “Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality and Gay People’s Right To Marry” earned him a spot on the Time 100 list in 2004. The Freedom to Marry nonprofit, which he formed in 2003, would go on to be credited with driving the Supreme Court’s decision last year to protect same-sex marriage in every state. Wolfson’s successful strategy was to change the way people think about same-sex marriage — to convince them that it was a matter of constitutionally protected freedom.