In 1924 the first gay rights organization, the Society for Human Rights, formed in Chicago. By 1951 Harry Hay started the Mattachine Society, which was the first sustained national gay rights movement in the United States. The Stonewall Riots of 1969, considered to be one of the most important moments in the fight for gay rights, were the result of a police raid of a bar named the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Up until 1973 homosexuality was considered to be a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association when it was officially removed from the list of disorders. While individual city’s gay rights movements started in the mid 1920’s, it was not until 2000 that civil unions were first recognized by any state and not until 2004 that Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. Barack Obama is the first sitting U.S. president to have officially been in favor of same-sex marriage. Nineteen different countries currently have legal same-sex marriage nationwide, with the Netherlands being the first country to legalize it in 2004. In the private sector, Trevor Burgess became the first openly gay CEO of a publicly listed bank in 2014 when C1 Financial, based out of Florida, IPO’d on the New York Stock Exchange. In the same year, Apple’s Time Cook became the first and only openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company after speaking out about his sexual orientation in an article that appeared in Bloomberg.
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