October 19: National LGBT Center Awareness Day October 15: National Latino HIV/AIDS Awareness Day September 27: National Gay Men's HIV/AIDS Awareness Day September 18: National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day Legalization of Same-Sex Marriage Anniversary May 24: Pansexual and Panromantic Visibility Day May 19: Hepatitis Testing Day & National Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day May 17: International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia March 31: Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV)Īpril 10: National Youth HIV & AIDS Awareness Day March 20: National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day March 10: National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day Many challenges remain for LGBTQ+ Roanokers and the City of Roanoke is committed to working with the LGBTQ+ community on tackling these challenges together.įebruary 7: National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day The city also witnessed the emergence of our first Black LGBTQ organization, the House of Expression, in 2019. City voters elected the first openly gay official in 2018 with the election of Joe Cobb to the Roanoke City Council. The twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence of new organizations and initiatives, including the region’s first LGBTQ+ community center, the Roanoke Diversity Center, which opened in 2013. This hate crime shook the city and opened a new chapter in our LGBTQ+ history. In September 2000, an anti-gay shooting at the Backstreet Café on Salem Avenue took the life of one person and wounded six others. The 1990s also witnessed the emergence of the region’s first gay youth groups, including OutRight. Meanwhile the city’s first unequivocally gay church, Metropolitan Community Church of the Blue Ridge, moved into their first permanent home in the late 1990s just down the street on Kirk Avenue from the city’s first explicitly gay bookstore, Out Word Connections.
In September of that year they put on the city’s first Pride festival in Wasena Park. In 1990 a coalition of gay and lesbian groups formed the Alliance of Lesbian and Gay Organizations (ALGO). Today, the Drop-In Center carries on this important work in our community. Out of these efforts emerged important organizations such as Blue Ridge AIDS Support Services (BRASS) and the Roanoke AIDS Project. Gay activist groups such as the Blue Ridge Lambda Alliance (BRLA) and the Roanoke Valley Chapter of the Virginia Gay Alliance (VGA) organized the earliest AIDS advocacy and care work. By the end of the 1980s, dozens of cases were recorded in the Roanoke Valley. The first local death from AIDS was reported in 1983.
They were followed in 1977 by the Free Alliance for Individual Rights (FAIR). The first gay liberation organization in the city, the Gay Alliance of the Roanoke Valley (GARV), was founded in 1971.