A rising number of organizations were founded beginning in the mid-20th century. In 1946, the CultuurenOntspannings Centrum (COC) was established in Amsterdam. The Mattachine Society (reputedly derived from a medieval French society of masked players, the Société Mattachine, to represent the public “masking” of homosexuality) was the first major male organization in the United States, founded in 1950–51 by Harry Hay in Los Angeles, while the Daughters of Bilitis (named after Pierre Lous’ Sapphic love poems, Chansons de Bilitis) was a leading female organization, founded in 1955 by Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin in San. Furthermore, the United States witnessed the publishing of One, a national LGBT journal that won a Supreme Court judgment in 1958 allowing it to mail the magazine through the postal service. In the United Kingdom, in 1957, a commission chaired by Sir John Wolfenden issued a groundbreaking report (see Wolfenden Report) recommending that private homosexual liaisons between consenting adults be removed from the criminal law’s domain; a decade later, Parliament implemented the recommendation in the Sexual Offences Act, effectively decriminalizing homosexual relations for men aged 21 and older (further legislation lowered the age of consent first to 18 [1994] and then to 16 [2001], the latter of which equalized the age of sexual consent for same-sex and opposite-sex partners). The homosexual rights movement was beginning to achieve legal triumphs, notably in Western Europe, but it was in the United States that the single defining event of LGBT activism happened. The Stonewall Inn, a homosexual club in New York City’s Greenwich Village, was stormed by police in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969. A disturbance involving over 400 people lasted 45 minutes and continued on subsequent evenings. Gay Pride festivities have become an annual event in June, not just in the United States but also in a number of other countries, to remember “Stonewall” (Gay Pride is also held at other times of the year in some countries). Gay political groups grew in the 1970s and 1980s, mainly in the United States and Europe, and extended to other regions of the world, but their relative number, power, and success—as well as authorities’ tolerance—varied greatly. The Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the United States, Stonewall and Outrage! in the United Kingdom, and dozens of other groups in Europe and internationally, began lobbying for legislative and social reforms.

In Coventry, England, the transnational International Lesbian and Gay Association was created in 1978. Its new headquarters in Brussels help to coordinate international activities to promote human rights and combat discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people. In the United States, homosexual activists gained support from the Democratic Party in 1980, when the party added a sexual orientation plank to its nondiscrimination provision. This support, along with efforts by homosexual activists encouraging gay men and women to “come out of the closet” (National Coming Out Day was founded in the late 1980s and is currently observed on October 11 in most countries), encouraged gay men and women to run for office. Jerry DeGrieck and Nancy Wechsler of Ann Arbor, Michigan, were the first openly homosexual government employees in the United States. Both DeGrieck and Wechsler were elected to the city council in 1972 and came out while on the job; Wechsler was succeeded on the council in 1974 by Kathy Kozachenko, who campaigned openly as a lesbian and became the first openly homosexual person to gain office after coming out.

Harvey Milk, an American homosexual rights activist, was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977; the following year, he was slain. In 1983, Gerry Studds, a Massachusetts congressman, became the first member of the US Congress to openly declare his homosexuality. Barney Frank, a member of the United States House of Representatives from Massachusetts, came out in the 1980s while serving in Congress; Frank remained an influential member of that body and the Democratic Party far into the twenty-first century. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin was the first openly homosexual politician elected to both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the United States (1998). (2012). Annise Parker was elected mayor of Houston, America’s fourth-biggest city, in 2009, making it the first openly homosexual politician to be elected mayor in the United States. Openly homosexual politicians have also had success outside of the United States. Glen Murray, the first openly homosexual politician to govern a significant city in Canada, was elected mayor of Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1998. Large European towns were also fertile ground for openly homosexual politicians, such as Bertrand Delano in Paris and Klaus Wowereit in Berlin, both of whom were elected mayors in 2001. During the 1990s and 2000s, the number of openly homosexual politicians rose rapidly at both the municipal and national levels, with Jóhanna Sigurardóttir becoming Iceland’s first openly gay prime minister in 2009. Elio Di Rupo, who became Prime Minister of Belgium in 2011, was her successor. Openly homosexual politicians have had little success in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including major victories in national legislatures by Patria Jiménez Flores in Mexico (1997), Mike Waters in South Africa (1999), and Clodovil Hernandez in Brazil (2006). Since the 1970s, the topics that homosexual rights organizations have focused on have changed by time and location, with different national organizations pushing policies that are relevant to each country’s context. Antisodomy legislation, for example, did not exist or was repealed very quickly in certain nations, notably in Scandinavia, although the situation was more complicated in others. Because of the strong federal history in the United States, the fight to remove sodomy prohibitions began at the state level. Bowers v. Hardwick, a 1986 decision by the United States Supreme Court, maintained Georgia’s antisodomy legislation; 17 years later, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court reversed itself, thus invalidating the antisodomy law in Texas and 12 other states. Since the 1970s, other major issues for the gay rights movement have included: combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic and promoting disease prevention and research funding; lobbying the government for nondiscriminatory policies in employment, housing, and other aspects of civil society; ending the ban on gay and lesbian individuals serving in the military; expanding hate crimes legislation to include protections for gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals; and securing m (see same-sex marriage). In 2015, Democratic President Barack Obama was re-elected. Barack Obama signed legislation repealing the United States military’s 1993 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which allowed gay and lesbian individuals to serve in the military if they did not disclose their sexual orientation or engage in the homosexual activity; the repeal effectively ended the military’s ban on homosexuals. In 2013 (Obergefell v. Hodges), the Supreme Court acknowledged the freedom of same-sex couples to marry, and in 2020, the Court declared that terminating an employee for being gay, lesbian, or transgender was a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964), which outlawed sex discrimination (Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia).