On this day in queerstory: radical newspaper ‘Furies’ is published

On December 4, history tends to remember the marquee political dramas of the day — elections, treaties, scandals. Less often highlighted is the quieter but no less transformative story of how queer artists, activists, and organizers seized the cultural stage and refused to let their narratives be sidelined. But on this date, across decades and continents, LGBTQ+ people found ways to push back against erasure, and, in some cases, bend the world just far enough to let more of us in.

One of the most striking examples came on December 4, 1971, when the first issue of Furies, the feminist newspaper produced by the legendary lesbian separatist collective The Furies, hit the streets of Washington, D.C. The publication was bold, unapologetically queer, fiercely intellectual, and at times so incendiary that even the broader women’s liberation movement didn’t quite know what to do with it. But its debut marked a cultural shift — a refusal to let lesbian politics be tucked neatly into the margins of feminism or treated as an inconvenient footnote.

The Furies themselves lived communally, worked collectively, and published material that would go on to shape later lesbian feminist thought. Their work was messy, imperfect, and often controversial — but it was theirs, and it pushed ideas about gender, power, and sexuality into public discourse in ways that would ripple for decades.

Meanwhile, halfway across the world and several decades later, another December 4 milestone was unfolding in a vastly different register. In 2006, South Africa — already the first country in the world to constitutionally prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation — saw its newly enacted marriage equality law take full effect. On this date, same-sex couples across the country began legally marrying, and the first full wave of ceremonies poured out of Johannesburg and Cape Town with a mix of joy, disbelief, and political clarity. South Africa became the first nation in Africa to open marriage to same-sex couples, a landmark that still stands out on a continent where criminalization remains widespread.

Those weddings reverberated globally. They were cited during legal debates in Europe, quoted by activists in Latin America, and used as evidence in U.S. court filings that marriage equality was achievable beyond the geopolitical boundaries of the West. The symbolism — queer couples marrying openly under a constitution built after the fall of apartheid — was impossible to ignore.

But not all December 4 battles were won so cleanly. On this date in 1990, amid the worst years of the AIDS crisis in the United States, ACT UP chapters across the country intensified demands that the federal government expand drug trials and speed access to experimental treatments. The sense of urgency was overwhelming: too many funerals, too few resources, and a public health bureaucracy that moved at a glacial pace while entire communities were being gutted.

ACT UP’s work on this day wasn’t tied to a single iconic action but rather a relentless series of phone banks, teach-ins, hospital confrontations, and media disruptions — the unglamorous grind that forced a national reckoning. The activism of that winter directly contributed to expanding the parallel track drug approval process, which eventually became a defining feature of how HIV medications reached the people who needed them.

Today, December 4 sits quietly on the calendar: no rainbow flags, no parades, no instant associations. Yet woven through its history are three strands of queer resistance — grassroots organizing, cultural reimagining, and global policy change. A radical newspaper in Washington reframed lesbian identity. Couples in South Africa walked into courthouses and rewrote marriage law across continents. Activists in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and dozens of smaller cities fought for a future where HIV treatment would not be a luxury.