The push for LGBTQ equality began long before Stonewall – The Washington Post

In 1951, it was out of this populist milieu that a group of former communists built on their experiences opposing fascism to form Mattachine, an organization explicitly advocating for gay rights. In 1954, a writer in ONE Letter, a movement newsletter, described its founders as “young communists with a rage to get out and do something active like picketing and get themselves clobbered and perhaps laid.” In one of its earliest actions, Mattachine teamed up with the Los Angeles chapter of the Civil Rights Congress, an organization with deep connections to the U.S. Communist Party, to protest the entrapment of five Mexican American boys arrested in Echo Park.