Sylvia Rivera (1951-2002) was a genderqueer street activist who was harassed, brutalized and arrested by police before she and her fellow Stonewall patrons fought back in June 1969. Rivera’s activism did not start or stop at the Stonewall Inn. With Marsha Johnson, Rivera founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, a radical group that did everything from marching to setting up crash pads as an alternative to the streets. Rivera even scaled New York’s City Hall in a dress and high heels in order to gain recognition for some of society’s most vulnerable outcasts.

Born into a family of ex-slaves, accused of murder and incarcerated for 27 years, Joao Francisco dos Santos (1900-1976) was an infamous and controversial figure in his home of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was also a celebrated drag performer and capoeirista martial arts expert. Dos Santos has become an almost mythological figure representing the most marginalized and oppressed in society, including recently in the film Madame Satã.

Filmmaker, actor, writer and artist, John Waters (b.1946) is an iconic, transgressive cult figure. Known for frequently blending ‘high art’ and crude, trashy exploitation works, some of his best known films include Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Pink Flamingos, Hairspray and Pecker. Waters is also a politically active, vocal advocate of gay and lesbian rights.

Alberta singer K.D. lang (1961-) came out as a lesbian in a 1992 interview in the gay newsmagazine The Advocate, and then she appeared on the 1993 cover of Vanity Fair lounging in male drag in a barber’s chair with Cindy Crawford hovering over her. While there was public backlash to her coming out, some people were even more critical of her vegetarianism. Still, lang has cemented herself as a lesbian icon with her gender-bending hairstyle and clothes, but also with her unapologetic and unwavering confidence in her sexuality and political views.

Leslie Feinberg’s (1949-) first novel “Stone Butch Blues” (1993) is held as essential reading for queers. The novel, which won the Lambda Literary Award, tells the story of Jess Goldberg, a transgender individual growing up in a conservative town in New York and discovering the gay community in Buffalo during the 1970s and 80s. Despite popular belief, the fictional work is not autobiographical. Many queers have found solace and avenues for solidarity in Feinberg’s works of fiction and non-fiction, and in hir social justice, workers’ rights and trans activism.

Jill Johnston (1929-2010), was a longtime cultural critic for The Village Voice whose experimental prose style mirrored the avant-garde art she covered and whose book “Lesbian Nation,” spearheaded the lesbian separatist movement of the early 1970s. Johnston was particularly critical of the anti-lesbian liberal feminism of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and their followers. At a feminist meeting run by Friedan and Steinem, Johnson interrupted Steinem’s talk by jumping naked into a pool, derailing Steinem and distracting the media. Betty Friedan, watching the incident, muttered, “One of the biggest enemies of the movement.”

One of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas. He is most famous for his analysis of the workings of modern power in fields such as psychiatry, medicine,prisons, and human sexuality. When hospitalized for AIDS towards the end of his life,Foucault helped organize communities of self-care amongst hospital patients.

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet and social critic. His work uncovers the intersections of racial, sexual and class distinctions and the impact of their regulation on personal identity. Rejecting the racism and homophobia he saw in 1940s and 50s America, Baldwin lived most of his life as an expatriate in Paris.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was a prominent American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist. She was the author of dozens of books on a wide range of topics and in a wide range of genres, in both fiction and non-fiction. Together with her longterm partner, famed photographer Annie Leibovitz, Sontag was one of the most important New York public intellectuals in the twentieth century.

Audre Lorde (1934-1998) was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist.

Lorde criticised feminists of the 1960s for focusing on the particular experiences and values of white middle-class women. Lorde identified issues of class, race, age, gender, sexuality and even health — this last was added as she battled cancer in her later years — as being fundamental to the female experience. She argued that, by denying difference in the category of women, feminists merely passed on old systems of oppression and that, in so doing, they were preventing any real, lasting change.