Date: May 19th
Category: Hidden Histories | DEI Spotlight | Resistance & Identity
History doesn’t always tell the whole story — especially when it comes to the rebels who loved differently, lived defiantly, and often fought from the shadows.
This May, as part of our Resistance & Resilience series, The Time Traveller’s Guild shines a light on the LGBTQ+ individuals who defied more than empires. They resisted societal norms, legal persecution, and often their own invisibility in the archives — and yet, their courage helped shape movements, save lives, and alter the course of history.
Some carried guns. Some carried banners. Some simply carried on, when the world told them not to.
🏳️🌈 1. Magnus Hirschfeld – Germany’s Forgotten Sexologist
A pioneer of LGBTQ+ rights and sexual science in Weimar Germany, Hirschfeld founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin in 1919. It offered safe spaces, surgeries, and advocacy — decades ahead of its time.
The Nazis destroyed his archives in 1933. But his legacy lived on through global queer activism.
📚 “Justice through science” was his motto. And he meant it.
💄 2. Marsha P. Johnson – The Street-Level Revolutionary
A drag queen, activist, and front-line force in the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, Marsha P. Johnson co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and spent her life fighting for homeless queer youth and trans rights.
💬 When asked what the ‘P’ in her name stood for, she famously replied: “Pay it no mind.”
📖 3. Stormé DeLarverie – The Spark Behind Stonewall?
A Black lesbian drag king and performer, Stormé was reportedly one of the first to fight back during the Stonewall riots. She patrolled New York as a self-declared “guardian of the lesbians” and embodied intersectional resistance long before it had a name.
🕶️ Rebel with a fedora and a brass knuckle sense of justice.
🥀 4. Roger Casement – The Irish Rebel with a Scandalous Diary
A diplomat turned Irish nationalist, Casement exposed human rights abuses in the Congo and Peru before joining the Easter Rising cause. His private diaries, which detailed relationships with men, were used to smear him after arrest — but he remains a national hero in Ireland today.
✍️ His words were redacted, but not erased.
🧵 5. Chevalier d’Éon – The French Spy Who Lived Between Worlds
One of history’s earliest documented gender nonconforming figures, d’Éon lived the first half of life as a man and the second as a woman — while working as a diplomat, soldier, and spy under Louis XV.
🎭 D’Éon blurred gender and espionage in one dazzling cravat.
🔍 Why These Stories Matter
These rebels weren’t just fighting regimes — they were resisting the very idea that people like them didn’t exist in history. To celebrate them is to challenge erasure. To remember them is to resist forgetting.
🏛️ Where to Honour Their Legacy
- 📍 GLBT Historical Society Museum, San Francisco
- 📍 Schwules Museum, Berlin
- 📍 Bishopsgate Institute Archives, London – Holding UK LGBTQ+ protest ephemera
- 📍 New York Public Library – Queer history and activism collections
🛍️ “Love Is a Resistance Act” Collection
Fly your colours and your courage with:
- “Invisible Rebels” quote T-shirts
- Totes featuring rainbow quills and revolutionary roses
📚 Want to Know More?
- The Deviant’s War by Eric Cervini
- Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day by Peter Ackroyd
- Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg
- LGBTQ+ Archives at the Bishopsgate Institute
💬 Guild Shoutout: #InvisibleRebels
Whose story has inspired you? Share art, quotes, or photos with #InvisibleRebels and tag @TimeTravellersGuild — we’ll feature our favourites in our end-of-month Pride Resistance Roundup.
