LGBTQ history in Rhode Island
Prior to the 20th century, the state was also home to the Public Universal Friend and Charley Parkhurst, both well-known individuals with ambiguous gender identities.
[3][4] The statute "Touching Whormongers" provided the death penalty for a number of offenses including sodomy, bestiality, fornication, and rape.
In 1798, the state again reworded the law, lightening the penalty for a first offense, reading that any person convicted of sodomy shall "be carried to the gallows in a cart, and set upon the said gallows, for a space of time not exceeding four hours, and thence to the common gaol, there to be confined for a term not exceeding three years, and shall be grievously fined at the discretion of the Court".
In 1973, the Commission on Jurisprudence of the Future recommended amending state law to remove the sodomy provisions, but this was rejected by the Rhode Island General Assembly.
At that time, the law applied to consensual and non-consensual acts, whether between heterosexual or homosexual partners, and whether conducted in private or public.
[5] Same-sex sexual acts between consenting adults in private have been legal in Rhode Island since anti-sodomy statutes were repealed in 1998.
[6][7][8] The Public Universal Friend, an American preacher who called themself genderless and did not use gendered pronouns, was born in Cumberland in 1752.
[2] Stagecoach drive Charley Parkhurst, who was assigned female at birth but presented as a man starting at the age of 12, lived in Providence from the mid 1820s until 1848, when he left for the Gold Rush in California.
[2][9] In the late 1960s through the early 1970s, lawyer and activist William Stringfellow lived with his partner, Anthony Towne, in Block Island.
[1] Rhode Island's local Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), founded in California by Troy Perry in 1968 as a ministry for gay and lesbian people, held its first service in 1973.
[1] In 1983, the Rhode Island Alliance for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights was founded,[1] and it began hosting blood drives for people with HIV.
[18] The same year, the CBC, a bath house on Weybosset Street in Providence, began offering HIV testing and AIDS risk reduction education.
[1] In August 1985, Governor Edward D. DiPrete issued an executive order banning discrimination against gay and lesbian employees of the state government.
[1] In 1995, an anti-discrimination bill protecting the LGBT community passed in the General Assembly, and was signed into law by Governor Lincoln C. Almond.
[2] In 2004, the Rhode Island Foundation published the "Meet the Neighbors" report, documenting the lives of the state's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, two-spirited, queer, and questioning residents.
[1] In 2015, Brown University announced a $100 million plan intended to increase diversity at its campus through 2025, including a goal to double the amount of faculty who are members of underrepresented groups, such as minorities, women, and LGBT people.
[39] In January 2023, Donnie Anderson was elected as the chair of the Rhode Island Democratic Women's Caucus, becoming the first trans woman to hold the role.
