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Quentin Crisp (25 December 1908 – 21 November 1999), born Denis Charles Pratt, was an English writer and raconteur. He became a gay icon in the 1970s after publication of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, brought to the attention of the general public his defiant exhibitionism and longstanding refusal to remain in the closet.

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Joan Chandos Baez (born 9 January 1941 in Staten Island, New York) is a Mexican- American folk singer and songwriter known for her highly individual vocal style. Many of her songs are topical and deal with social issues.

She is best known for her hit " Diamonds & Rust" and her covers of Phil Ochs' " There But For Fortune" and The Band's " The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" (a top-five single on the U.S. charts in 1971) …

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James Robert Baker (18 October 1946 – 5 November 1997) was an American author of sharply satirical, predominantly gay-themed transgressional fiction. A native Californian, his work is set almost entirely in Southern California. After graduating from UCLA, he began his career as a screenwriter, but became disillusioned and started writing novels instead. Though he garnered fame for his books Fuel-Injected Dreams and Boy Wonder, after the controversy surrounding publication of his novel, Tim and Pete, he faced increasing difficulty having his work published.

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Alan Greg Rogers (21 September 1967 – 27 January 2008) was an ordained pastor, a US Army Major and Intelligence Officer, a civil rights activist in the gay, lesbian and bisexual military community and the first known gay combat fatality of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The subsequent coverage of his death in the media sparked a debate over the effect of the military's " Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" (DADT) policy and what information should be included in the biography of a gay military person killed in action.

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Camille Anna Paglia (born 2 April 1947 in Endicott, New York) is an American author, teacher, social critic and dissident feminist. Since 1984 Paglia has been a Professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published in 1990, became a bestseller.

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Candy Darling (c. 24 November 1944 – 21 March 1974) was a pre-operative transsexual Warhol superstar who starred in Andy Warhol's films Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971).

Candy Darling was born James Lawrence Slattery in Forest Hills, New York, son of Theresa Phelan, a bookkeeper at Manhattan's Jockey Club, and James (Jim) Slattery, who was described as a violent alcoholic.

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Julian Eltinge (14 May 1881 – 7 March 1941), born William Julian Dalton, was an American stage and screen actor and female impersonator. After appearing in the Boston Cadets Revue at the age of ten in feminine garb, Eltinge garnered notice from other producers and made his first appearance on Broadway in 1904. As his star began to rise, he appeared in vaudeville and toured Europe and the United States even giving a command performance before King Edward VII.

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Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH, CBE (born 25 May 1939), is an English actor of stage and screen, the recipient of the Tony Award and two Academy Award nominations. His work has spanned genres from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He is known to many for roles such as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy and as Magneto in the X-Men films.

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Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS /ˈtjʊərɪŋ/ (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, logician and cryptographer.

Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. He provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine.

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Harvey Bernard Milk (22 May 1930 – 27 November 1978) was an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Politics and gay activism were not Milk's early interests; he did not feel the need to be open about his homosexuality or participate in civic matters until around age 40, after his experiences in the counterculture of the 1960s.

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Larry Kramer (born 25 June 1935) is an American playwright, author, public health advocate and LGBT rights activist. Kramer began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London, where he worked with United Artists and wrote the screenplay for Women in Love in 1969.

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Frederick John Inman (28 June 1935 – 8 March 2007) was an English actor who was best known for his role as Mr. Humphries in Are You Being Served?, a British sitcom in the 1970s and 1980s. Inman was also well known in the United Kingdom as a pantomime dame.

Born in 1935, Inman made his stage debut aged 13. He worked in retail in London as a young adult and after four years left to earn his Equity Card. He made his West End debut in the 1960s, and his television debut in an episode of Two In Clover in 1970. After a successful pilot of Are You Being Served?, Inman played the camp Mr. Humphries in the sitcom from 1972 to 1985.

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Natalie Clifford Barney (31 October 1876 – 2 February 1972) was an American expatriate who lived, wrote and hosted a literary salon in Paris. She was a noted poet, memoirist and epigrammatist.

Barney's salon was held at her home on Paris's Left Bank for more than 60 years and brought together writers and artists from around the world, including many leading figures in French literature along with American and British Modernists of the Lost Generation.

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Romaine Brooks (1 May 1874 – 7 December 1970), born Beatrice Romaine Goddard, was an American painter who specialized in portraiture and used a subdued palette dominated by the color gray. Brooks ignored contemporary artistic trends such as Cubism and Fauvism, drawing instead on the Symbolist and Aesthetic movements of the 19th century, especially the works of James McNeill Whistler.

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Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, poet and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day.

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H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle) (10 September 1886 – 27 September 1961) was an American poet, novelist and memoirist best known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington. The Imagist model was based on the idioms, rhythms and clarity of common speech, and freedom to choose subject matter as the writer saw fit. H.D.'s later writing developed on this aesthetic to incorporate a more female-centric version of modernism.

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Ann Bannon ( pseudonym of Ann Weldy) (born 15 September 1932) is an American author who wrote six lesbian pulp fiction novels from 1957 to 1962 known as The Beebo Brinker Chronicles. The books' enduring popularity and impact on lesbian identity has earned her the title "Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction". Bannon was a young housewife trying to address her own issues of sexuality when she was inspired to write her first novel.

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Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is a British actor, writer, comedian, author, television presenter and film director. With Hugh Laurie, as the comedy double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and the duo also played the title roles in Jeeves and Wooster. Fry played the lead in the film Wilde, was Melchett in the Blackadder television series and is the host of the panel comedy trivia show, QI.

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Matthew Richard Lucas (born 5 March 1974) is an English comedian, writer and actor. He is perhaps best known for his acclaimed work with David Walliams in the television show Little Britain and spoof interview series Rock Profile, as well as for his portrayal of the surreal scorekeeping baby George Dawes in the Reeves and Mortimer comedy panel game Shooting Stars. In May 2007, Lucas was placed 8th in the list of the UK's 100 most influential gays and lesbians, in fields as diverse as entertainment, business, politics, and science, by the British newspapers The Independent and the Daily Mail.

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Heinz Heger was the pen name used by Josef Kohout (1917 – March 1994), an Austrian concentration camp survivor. Kohout had been imprisoned for his homosexuality, which the German penal code's Paragraph 175 made criminal. He is known best as the author — under the Heger pseudonym — of the 1972 book Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel ("The men with the pink triangle"), one of very few autobiographical accounts of the treatment of homosexuals in Nazi imprisonment.

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John Maurice Scott (1948 – 1 July 2001) was the Director General of the Fiji Red Cross. He received a Red Cross award for his role during the 2000 Fijian coup d'état after George Speight had seized parliament on 19 May 2000 and taken Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and his government hostage. Scott was initially the only outsider allowed to see the hostages and later oversaw their release. John Scott was murdered in Suva along with his partner, Gregory Scrivener, in an apparent homophobic attack with a possible political motive.

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Constantine P. Cavafy (April 29, 1863 – April 29, 1933) was a renowned Greek poet who lived in Alexandria, Egypt and worked as a journalist and civil servant. Cavafy was instrumental in the revival and recognition of Greek poetry both at home and abroad. He published 154 poems, many of which had overtly homosexual themes; dozens more remained incomplete or in sketch form. His most important poetry was written after his fortieth birthday.

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Herman Bang (April 20, 1857 – January 29, 1912) was a Danish writer and a major proponent of Modern Breakthrough, the strong movement of naturalism which replaced romanticism in Scandinavia near the end of the 19th century. In 1880 he published his novel Haabløse Slægter (Families Without Hope). The main character was a young man who had a relationship with an older woman. The book was considered obscene at the time and was banned. During a lecture tour of the United States he was taken ill on the train and died in Ogden, Utah.

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Federico García Lorca (5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936), one of Spain's most prominent poets to this day, was also a dramatist and theater director. He achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. His poetry collections include Canciones ("Songs", 1927) and Romancero Gitano ("Gypsy Ballads", 1928), the latter being his best-known book. García Lorca is thought to be one of the many thousands who were executed by Fascists at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.