On this day in queerstory: US prepares to remove homosexuality from the DSM

For many LGBTQIA+ people, December is a season of contradictions — celebration entwined with reflection, joy mixed with remembrance. And December 11 has long been one of those layered days. Each year, it seems to gather a surprising number of flashpoints: political, cultural, artistic. Today’s look back moves through courtrooms, cinemas, and activist circles, tracing a pattern that is unmistakably queer.

We start in 1973, a pivotal year for the United States — and for queer people globally. On December 11, newspapers were abuzz with anticipation: the American Psychiatric Association was only two days away from voting on whether homosexuality should be removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Activists, many of them young, radical, and unshakeably loud, had spent the year staging “zaps,” interruptions, and emotional testimonies in front of the nation’s most conservative medical institutions. Though the official decision came on December 13, it was December 11 when internal APA memos leaked to the press, signalling that change was imminent. For many queer Americans — especially gay and lesbian activists who had been labeled “sick” by the state — this was the first real sign that the psychiatric establishment might finally be cracking.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, London’s Gay Liberation Front was making news of its own. On December 11, 1971, the Evening Standard ran a now-iconic front-page headline about the GLF’s escalating campaign against police harassment. The Metropolitan Police had doubled down on entrapment, targeting queer men in pubs, lavatories, and cruising grounds. The GLF responded in trademark style: flamboyant, unapologetic, impossible to ignore. That weekend saw a wave of “kiss-ins” erupting across the city — part protest, part performance art, and wholly revolutionary in their refusal to shrink. December 11 became something of a cultural tipping point, marking the moment queer visibility in the UK decisively shifted from defensive to confrontational.

Jumping forward, film history also finds a queer thread on this date. On December 11, 1998, the independent film Edge of Seventeen — a tender, messy, very gay coming-of-age story set in 1984 Ohio — premiered in several European festivals before its US release the following year. The film would go on to become a touchstone for queer millennials, notable for featuring a lead character whose sexuality unfolds not as a tragedy, but as a beautifully awkward process of discovery. Reviewers that week praised it for doing something radical for its time: letting queer teenagers be complicated humans rather than convenient metaphors.

On the African continent, another milestone quietly unfolded on December 11, 2005, when South Africa’s Civil Union Bill passed through its final parliamentary debates. Just weeks later it would make South Africa the first nation in Africa — and the fifth in the world — to legalize marriage for same-sex couples. Queer activists in Johannesburg and Cape Town spent the evening of December 11 in impromptu street celebrations, many aware that they were standing at the edge of a global shift. They were right: the bill helped accelerate debates across the Global South about constitutional equality, bodily autonomy, and the legal recognition of queer families.

And threading through all of this history is a quieter, ongoing story: World AIDS Day commemorations, which continue their ripple into mid-December. On December 11, 1989, ACT UP chapters in New York, San Francisco, and Paris held coordinated protests against pharmaceutical delays and discriminatory healthcare policies. Though not an official date for demonstrations, December 11 became part of a week-long global action that helped pressure drug manufacturers to speed up access to AZT and early combination treatments. Many activists from that year still describe it as the moment international coordination became a defining feature of AIDS activism.

Taken together, December 11 isn’t just a footnote in queer history — it’s one of those quietly influential days when movements gathered momentum, stories began shifting, and queer lives claimed a little more space in the public narrative. From psychiatric liberation to protest-as-performance to legislative triumphs, today carries the echoes of people who refused silence.