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Quiz: Do you and your kids know this Pride month history trivia?

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Crowd celebrating Pride Month. Rainbow pride flag.
Tristan B / Unsplash

You may be celebrating Pride with your family, but how much do you and your kids know about the history of Pride?

From key advancements in gay rights to courageous LGBTQ+ heroes over the years, LGBTQ+ history is a little known but central part of understanding where our society came from and where it’s going.

Curious kids (and adults!) might want to know more about famous LGBTQ+ heroes in history, where the “gay rainbow” symbol comes from, when same-sex marriage became legal, when was the first Pride parade, or why June is Pride month. Plus, GLSEN’s research has shown that learning about LGBTQ culture and history in school leads to LGBTQ students feeling safer at school and hearing less frequent homophobic and transphobic comments.

Quiz for families on LGBTQ+ rights, movement, and history

Let this Pride month history trivia quiz guide you towards some answers — and fodder for further research, learning, and inspiration. Happy Pride!

LGBTQ/Pride quiz
1. What was the first state in the United States to officially allow same-sex marriages?
Answer: C) In 2003, a Massachusetts court decided that the state should allow gay and lesbian couples to legally marry. Official same-sex marriages in Massachusetts began in 2004. The next states to follow suit were Connecticut in 2008 and Iowa in 2009. However, a federal law called the Defense of Marriage Act (signed into law in 1996) meant that the United States government would not recognize same-sex marriages, so gay married couples in those states still couldn’t access the full benefits and protections that straight married couples could. This finally changed when the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional, and then in 2015 prohibited all states from banning same-sex marriage.
2. Who were the Daughters of Bilitis?
Answer: C) The Daughters of Bilitis were the first known lesbian rights group in the United States, founded in 1955 in San Francisco. In 1956 the group started publishing The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian periodical in the country. The group’s name came from a French collection of poems called Songs of Bilitis, which featured a female character named Bilitis who had a romantic relationship with the female Greek poet Sappho.
3. The Stonewall uprising in New York City, led by many LGBTQ heroes including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, is one of the most famous events credited for advancing the LGBTQ movement. It occurred in June of what year?
Answer: B) In June of 1969, about 200 gay, lesbian, trans, gender non-conforming people and others were gathered at the Stonewall Inn in downtown New York City to socialize. Among them were transgender rights activists Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and ​​Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. The police arrived to raid the bar and arrest “cross-dressing” patrons. These types of violent police raids were very frequent whenever the gay and trans community tried to gather. But this time, the patrons decided to fight back and resist the unfair treatment. Thus the Stonewall riots (or uprisings) began, drawing a bit of media attention and inspiring others to join the LGBTQ movement’s protests.
4. What was the dance form created by Black and Latino trans, gay and queer young people in the Harlem Ballroom scene during the 1980s?
Answer: B) Voguing was invented and popularized in the 1980s by performers who were active in the Drag Ball scene in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. The Drag Ball scene centered around gender-creative fashion and dance competitions that took place between “Houses,” which were tight-knit families formed by trans, gay and queer people of color who supported each other through barriers such as homophobia and transphobia, youth homelessness, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
5. The original rainbow-striped Pride flag to represent the LGBT community was created by Gilbert Baker and Lynn Segerblom in the late 1970s in San Francisco. How many colors did it have?
Answer: B) The very first rainbow flag made to represent the gay community had eight colors: hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet. Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office, asked his friend Gilbert Baker to design a symbol to represent the gay community. Baker worked with his friend Lynn Segerblom (aka Faerie Argyle Rainbow) to design the rainbow-striped flag, which debuted at the Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco in 1978. In the years that followed, manufacturing difficulties led to two of the colors being dropped, resulting in the six-color rainbow Pride flag that persisted over many decades.
6. Alvin Ailey was a very influential figure in Black, queer, and arts history. What was Ailey’s art form?
Answer: C) Alvin Ailey is known for transforming the world of modern dance with his choreography and leadership. He was born in a small town in Texas in 1931, and became interested in different forms of dance and music at a young age. Ailey experienced a lifetime of racism and homophobia, but found his way as a dancer, choreographer, and music teacher, and at the age of 27 he founded Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, one of the first professional dance companies where dancers of all races and backgrounds were welcome. Many of his works, such as “Revelations,” are still widely performed today.
7. Where was the march now recognized as America’s first Pride parade held in 1970?
Answer: C) New York’s Christopher Street Liberation Day march in June 1970 was an organized public protest right in the middle of Manhattan to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. More than 2,000 people marched, despite the threat of police conflict and risks to their personal safety, social lives, and careers. A sister march was held in Los Angeles, and the event inspired sister marches around the world.
8. Who was the first known LGBTQ astronaut in the history of NASA’s space exploration?
Answer: A) Sally Ride was the first American woman to go to space. She was also the first gay astronaut to go to space! Not that that has much to do with the actual job of being an astronaut — which was one reason she kept her private life completely out of public media until her death. After she died in 2012, her sister Bear Ride, a minister who was openly and publicly gay, wrote, “My sister was a very private person. Sally had a very fundamental sense of privacy, it was just her nature. … People did not know she had pancreatic cancer, this is bound to be a huge shock. … Most people did not know that Sally had a wonderfully loving relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy for 27 years. … I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them.”
9. Under which U.S. President did the government conduct the “Lavender Scare,” a mass firing and intimidation of thousands of gay and lesbian employees?
Answer: C) In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which directed the government to investigate and remove gay and lesbian employees from the federal government. The policy was justified by the false belief that gay men and lesbians “posed a threat to national security because they were vulnerable to blackmail and were considered to have weak moral characters.” About 5,000 employees were publicly exposed as gay, and fired or otherwise pushed out of their jobs. Called the Lavender Scare, it went hand in hand with the Red Scare, a 1950s campaign that aimed to criminalize people based on their possible association with communism.
10. In what year did the first former NFL football player come out as gay?
Answer: A) In 1975, Dave Kopay (a running back who had played pro football from 1964 to 1972) decided to come out in a newspaper interview in The Washington Star because he wanted to speak out about homophobia in the NFL. He later said in his memoir, “Because of my homosexuality I can’t get a job as a coach.” Kopay wanted to become a positive role model even though it was risky. He wrote, “If some of us don’t take on the oppressive labels and publicly prove them wrong, we’ll stay trapped by the stereotypes for the rest of our lives.” Decades later, in 2021, Raiders lineman Carl Nassib made NFL history as the first active NFL player to come out as gay.

Joanna Eng is a staff writer and digital content specialist at ParentsTogether. She lives with her wife and two kids in New York, where she loves to hike, try new foods, and check out way too many books from the library.

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