John Amaechi

Former English basketball player John Amaechi led a sports career that had him playing for teams in both the United Kingdom and the United States. His employers included Orlando Magic and the New York Knicks (his statistics on US teams are offered in depth here); at one point he famously declined a contract with the Los Angeles Lakers out of loyalty to the Magic. When he came out as gay following his retirement from basketball he became one of the highest level athletes to have done so. At the time of this posting Amaechi is applying his psychology degree to his life coaching and charity work; however, he does still contribute to the world of professional basketball by way of the occasional op-ed.

Amaechi’s personal website is here and his Twitter feed is here.

Merce Cunningham

From childhood tap dancing lessons to pioneering the integration of computers and dance (such as his webcast series Mondays with Merce), choreographer Merce Cunningham spent his whole life on the move. His work was defined by innovations, the most famous of which was his partnership with composer John Cage. The two men met when Cunningham was first beginning to create his own independent works and remained romantically and artistically involved for nearly fifty years until Cage passed away. As part of their collaboration the two pioneered a new relationship between music and dance that suited Cunningham’s abstract, narrative-less style: separating the two entirely to the point where Cunningham’s dancers would rehearse in silence. Their shared love of chance and Cunningham’s original steps were controversial, but the end result was a lifetime of accolades for Cunningham and posthumous recognition of his invaluable contributions to the modern dance scene.

John Cage

Although American composer John Cage is best known now for 4’33” (a piece lasting the listed duration during which the performer produces no intentional sound, and which has its own TEDx. talk), he first found his musical footing as a dance accompanist, adding percussive pieces to a “prepared” piano. His love of unusual projects took him through the philosophical 4’33” and into music composed through the flip of a coin. He employed the same chance-based approach in his paintings and other works as well.

At least some of Cage’s fruitful, creative career can be credited to his romantic and professional partnership with modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham. While Cage never officially came out, he described his relationship with Cunningham thusly: “I cook and Merce does the dishes.”

Joseph Genaro

Joseph Genaro, the gay guitarist, co-front singer, and co-lyricist for the punk rock group the Dead Milkmen, has been creating his own brand of eccentric music since the 1980s. As part of the elaborate mythology band members constructed around the Milkmen Genaro has employed a number of pseudonyms including Joe Jack Talcum, the namesake of his personal music website. Following several years with the Milkmen Genaro struck out on a solo career and performed with other groups like The Low Budgets; since then, the Milkmen have reunited minus one member, and Genaro has returned to recording with them while still pursuing other projects.

Although he does not perform it live anymore following the death of the original lyricist, the Milkmen’s repertoire includes the song “Stuart“, which has an unusual queer-related conspiracy theory at the center of it.

Rudolf Nureyev

Rudolf Nureyev was one of several world caliber gay and bisexual ballet dancers to come out of the Russia/the Soviet Union in the 20th century. He is credited with establishing an elevated role for male ballet dancers who had previously been used more as a support system for the female leads.In addition to numerous modern dance and ballet pieces, Nureyev had roles in several films, as well as a comedic guest appearance on The Muppet Show. Although he was raised in the Soviet Union he impulsively defected while on tour in France, an incident which led to a decades-long grudge from the KGB that kept him from returning to his home country until he was dying from AIDS and in a poor state to perform.

It is uncertain whether Nureyev would be better described as gay or bisexual. His on and off partner of 25 years was a fellow dancer, a Dane named Erik Bruhn, but he did have heterosexual relationships in his younger years.

Hastiin Tłʼa

Hastiin Tłʼa (sometimes written as Hosteen Klah) was a master Navajo weaver and medicine man who was instrumental in preserving records of traditional rituals through his contact with anthropologists and pioneering work in translating the sacred art of sandpainting into other media. Although sources seem to disagree on whether he was gay or intersex, Tłʼa fit into the broader category of nádleeh (“one who changes”) and was permitted to learn both weaving (normally for women) and singing (normally for men). He became a master of both, and was invited to host an exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Because of the difficulty he experienced in locating suitable apprentices, Tłʼa took to preserving his chants and sandpainting by integrating the symbols into his weaving and permitting outside observers to draw and paint them, a practice that was – and still is in places – considered heretical. Much of his work is stored with the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, which he helped co-found.

Bayard Rustin

American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, onetime advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the head organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was nearly deemed too controversial to lead his own protest march. A gay pacifist with a history of communist beliefs who had done time for violating the Selective Services Act, Rustin’s inclusion in the movement as a public figure was a sensitive proposition, even though he had been the one to popularize nonviolent protests as a tactic. He was among the first to make the Journey of Reconciliation alongside fellow gay man Igal Roodenko, but following his arrest for homosexual acts, he was fired from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, one of the sponsoring organizations. A documentary chronicling the tension between his achievements and his status as an eternal outsider was later produced to some acclaim. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.

Igal Roodenko

Gay American peace activist Igal Roodenko played a part in protesting some of the 20th century’s most famous conflicts, from segregation to the Vietnam war. He was stationed with Civilian Public Service in lieu of military deployment during World War II, but his hunger strike and refusal to work in protest of government mail censorship led to his imprisonment; the resulting appeal became one of four to be heard by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled against him and his fellow litigants. Undaunted even after his prison term, he struck out on the Journey of Reconciliation where he was again arrested and awarded triple the sentence of his black counterparts because the judge objected to “Jews from New York” joining with black riders in solidarity.

Roodenko passed away in 1991 after decades spent with the War Resisters League and other pacifist organizations. An in-depth audio interview with Roodenko is archived here.

Frank Mugisha

Ugandan activist Dr. Frank Mugisha’s first achievement was coming out to his family as a teenager. Although the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014 would not be passed for nearly two decades, Uganda still retained archaic statutes from British colonial rule that criminalized sex between men. While attending university he started the student group Icebreakers Uganda to support queer Ugandans in the process of coming out. Since then, he has taken over leadership of Sexual Minorities Uganda, an organization working to reverse the stigma against homosexuality, and been honored with international recognition for his openness in a country that briefly had a law on the books making homosexual conduct punishable by life imprisonment or death. Among Mugisha’s current projects is a lawsuit against Scott Lively, an evangelical minister who is alleged to have violated international human rights laws through his orchestration of the Anti-Homosexuality Act. Mugisha was named one of 2014’s “40 Under 40” by the Advocate.

His Twitter feed is available here; his Facebook page is available here.

Chuck Palahniuk

Gay American transgressive fiction author Charles Michael “Chuck” Palahniuk is best known for his novel Fight Club (which is difficult to describe due to the prohibition on talking about it), but his full canon lists over a dozen books at the time of this posting, along with a pack of short stories and three film adaptations. He will occasionally do public readings, often of a chapter in the book Haunted called “Guts,” and he keeps a running tally of the number of listeners who faint due to its gore. As peculiar as their subject matter often is, his works are, as he puts it, “about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people”.

His Twitter page can be found here; his Facebook page is here; and his fan-made website is here.