LGBTQ News Highlights of 2017

 

 

February 28 - Moonlight wins the Oscar for Best Picture, the first movie with a gay-theme to do so.

 

April 20 - A revival of Hello, Dolly! opens on Broadway, starring Bette Midler. (Who would go on to win the Tony for best Actress.)

 

 

May 24 - Taiwan becomes the first Asian nation to legalize same-sex marriage

June 14 - 38-year-old Leo Varadkar is named Ireland's first openly gay prime minister.

 

 

July 26 - 13 months after the Pentagon approved transgender persons serving in the US military, President Trump, without consulting the Pentagon, tweeted that they would be banned.

September 12 - Edie Windsor, the lead plaintiff in the 2013 US Supreme Court case United States v. Windsor, which successfully overturned Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act and was considered a landmark legal victory for the same-sex marriage movement in the United States., dies at the age of 88.

 

 

September 27 - The CDC releases a letter saying that persons who are HIV-positive who take their medications daily "and achieve and maintain an undetectable viral load have effectively no risk of sexually transmitting the HIV virus to an HIV-negative partner."

September  28 - The ground-breaking sitcom Will & Grace returns to NBC eleven years after its eight-season run ended.

October 30 - After years of being coy about his sexual orientation, actor Kevin Spacey comes out in response to allegations made by Anthony Rapp of sexual misconduct by Spacey when Rapp was 14 (in 1987).  Earlier in the year Spacey had hosted the year's Tony Awards.

 

 

November 7 - Lesbian Jenny Durkan is elected as Seattle's second LGBT mayor, succeeding gay mayor Ed Murray who stepped down six months earlier after multiple accusations of sexual abuse of minors.

 

 

November 14 - Australians vote in favor of same-sex marriage in an online poll in which 80% of voters participated.

 

To read highlights from previous years, click here.