January 1 - California
In San Francisco, Jose Sarria founds the Imperial Court System in the United States. The ICA is a network of charitable organizations that use drag events to raise funds for gay, lesbian, and other groups.
National
Joe Johnson’s strips “MISS THING” and “BIG DICK” briefly run.
Oregon
The state’s sterilization law is amended to delete references to “sexual perverts” and “moral degenerates.”
Pennsylvania
Independence Hall in Philadelphia, picketers begin staging the first Reminder Day to call public attention to the lack of civil rights for LGBT people. The gatherings will continue annually for five years.
United States LGBT History for 1965
California
Vanguard was founded by Adrian Ravarour and San Francisco Tenderloin youth for gay rights.
Washington D.C.
The East Coast Homophile Organization launches the first of a series of protests in 1965 at the White House.
June 28 - Washington D.C.
The civil rights movement won new legislation outlawing racial discrimination, the first gay rights demonstrations took place in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, led by longtime activists Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings. The turning point for gay liberation came on June 28, 1969, when patrons of the popular Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village fought back against ongoing police raids of their neighborhood bar. Stonewall is still considered a watershed moment of gay pride and has been commemorated since the 1970s with "pride marches" held every June across the United States. Recent scholarship has called for better acknowledgement of the roles that drag performers, minorities, and transgender patrons played in the Stonewall Riots.
Utah
Ernest L. Wilkinson, President of BYU says in a talk that BYU did not intend to admit any homosexuals to campus. He continued, “if any of you have this tendency and have not completely abandoned it, may I suggest that you leave the university immediately after this assembly…we do not want others on this campus to be contaminated by your presence.”
President Lyndon Johnson
Utah
5 BYU students commit suicide. All had been interviewed “by the counselor to homosexual problems at that time Spencer W. Kimball…”
California
The largest confrontation yet between gay and lesbian people and the police occurs at a fund-raising ball in San Francisco, hosted by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH). Two hundred gay and lesbian partygoers at California Hall on Polk Street are met by vice squad officers stalking the premises and photographing partygoers in what the Mattachine Review called "one of the most lavish displays of police harassment known in recent times". Unbeknownst to police at the time, the event becomes a galvanizing force for gay activists in the Bay Area and establishes San Francisco as a locus for gay rights organization and as a haven for LGBT people. [Bullough, p. 75; d'Emilio, pp. 193-194] The state’s sterilization law is amended to delete references to “sexual perverts” and “moral degenerates.”
Washington D.C.
Twelve members of the Mattachine Society picket the White House in protest of government discrimination against homosexuals, particularly in the military and government service.
State equality and discrimination bills
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