For Washingtonian, a history of the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights in Washington, DC, timed for the 50th anniversary of annual Pride celebrations here. We tried to balance stories about the national struggle (protests, the passage of key legislation) with stories about the lives of queer people living in DC—historically a very welcoming city, and home to the first self-professed drag queen in the nation, William Dorsey Swann. Above is a photo by well-known documentarian Joan E. Biren of the Furies house, an intellectually productive lesbian feminist collective in Southeast Washington:

Many DC group-house residents have believed they would change the world—but the Furies Collective, based at 219 11th Street, Southeast, from 1971 to ’72, actually did. One of many communal-living experiments in 1970s Washington, the Furies were a group of 12 lesbian feminists, all radicals with extensive organizing backgrounds, plus three children and a cat named Baby Jesus. They shared everything, slept on an assemblage of mattresses on the floor, led political-theory workshops, taught mechanics classes to women, and published a regular newspaper, the Furies, which was sold at women’s bookstores across the country. “We are committed to ending all oppressions by attacking their roots—male supremacy,” they wrote in the first issue.

Photograph by JEB (Joan E. Biren)