Pioneering LGBTQ rights advocate Lilli Vincenz dies at 86
LGBTQ rights activist, psychotherapist, and documentary filmmaker Lilli Vincenz, who played an important role in helping to organize groundbreaking gay rights protests outside the White House and Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in the 1960s, died June 27 of natural causes at her residence in an assisted living center in Oakton, Va.
She was 86. Vincenz is believed to be the first known lesbian to participate in a gay rights protest in front of the White House in April 1965, when she joined pioneering gay rights leader Frank Kameny, seven other gay men, and a bisexual and straight woman in a first-of-its-kind White House protest calling for equal rights for homosexuals.
The protest took place about two years after Vincenz also is believed to have been the first lesbian to join the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1963, which was D.C.’s first significant gay rights organization co-founded by Kameny and gay activist Jack Nichols in 1961.
The Mattachine Society of Washington led the 1965 White House protest and other 1960s era gay protests in D.C. According to a biographical write-up on Vincenz by lesbian historian Lillian Faderman for the current Mattachine Society of Washington that was reconstituted years later by D.C.
