Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
State equality and discrimination bills
National
Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness is published. As a result, homosexuality becomes a topic of public conversation in both the United States and England.
President Calvin Coolidge
Michigan
Unpublished novel left at death of University of Michigan grad Avery Hopwood leaves hints of the playwright's homosexuality.
Oregon
Harriet Speckart, former lesbian lover of Marie Equi, dies of a cerebral hemorrhage in Seaside, Oregon at age 44.
Oregon
Prominent labor radical Elizabeth Gurley Flynn suffers a physical breakdown in Portland and receives medical care from Dr. Marie Equi. The two women begin living together in Equi’s SW Portland home and continued to do so throughout the Depression in a close, sometimes intimate, relationship.
Oregon
The Oregon Supreme Court unanimously interprets the state’s broad sodomy law to include as sodomy the consensual masturbation of another person. In 1921, the penalty of sodomy was lowered to 1–10 years imprisonment. The same year, a constitutional amendment prohibiting oral sex (namely "the act of copulating the mouth of one person with the sexual organ of another") was passed, retaining the 15-year imprisonment as a penalty without regard to sexual orientation. Finally, a third act gave free rein to the government to prohibit and restrict any sexual activity, stating that "any act...which openly outrages public decency" would be punished.
United States LGBT History for 1928
Harriet Speckart
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