For as long as there has been a place called Maryland, there have been people whom we would today see as fitting within the LGBTQ+ community.

As cities grew in the 19th century, newspapers began to offer tantalizing clues that all was not straight and narrow and that LGBTQ+ people were becoming more visible, finding each other, and building communities.

Join Enoch Pratt Free Library Librarians and Baltimore Heritage LGBTQ+ History Walking Tour Guides as we present the fascinating and fabulous history of our community going all the way back to the 1830s: from trans sailors to lesbian philanthropists, from the West Baltimore drag balls of the Jazz era to the repression and bar raids of the 1950s and 1960s, and ultimately to the 1970s and beyond, when activists formed Baltimore’s earliest organizations championing LGBTQ+ rights.