Did you know that kissing can be a form of activism?
The first documented kiss-ins took place in 1970 in New York City during a gay liberation march commemorating the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.
In 1972, members of Gay Liberation Front put on the U.K.’s first gay Pride parade, which ended in a mass kiss-in. In 1973, the first national lesbian kiss-in protested the lack of female artists at the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts. And in 1976, LGBTQ2S+ organizations in Toronto staged a kiss-in protesting the arrest of two gay men who kissed each other at an intersection.
While the use of kiss-ins petered out after the late 1970s, they became an organizing strategy among ACT UP chapters in the U.S. and Canada in the late 1980s and early 1990s—including at the historic HIV/AIDS protest at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York.
While more recent kiss-ins have taken place from 2002 up until 2018, they have once again become a less common form of activism. But its history and impact should not be forgotten.
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