Hurston, an African-American woman from Eatonville, Fla., moved to New York City during the era of “The New Negro.” Her 1928 essay, “How it Feels To Be Colored Me,” based on her life in Eatonville, inspired contemporary and conceptual artists such as Glenn Ligon, whose work is rooted in his  experiences as an African-American and gay man living in the United States.

Hurston’s most famous novel is Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and her literary successors include Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

As a child, Laurent was incessantly taunted by his peers. As a result, he spent so much of his time alone and in his room, drawing, painting and designing dresses for his mother and sisters. He had it in his mind that it didn’t matter what others thought or said about him because he would be famous one day and prove them wrong.

At 17, Laurent presented his raw talent to the world in a dress design competition. He won first prize and caught the attention of Christian Dior, a leader of high fashion in France.

Dior gave Laurent a job on the spot as his assistant.

Laurent’s tasks at the House of Dior  included decorating the studio and designing accesories, but soon he began sketching for the Dior collection, season after season.

Following Dior’s death in 1957, Laurent, only 21 years old, became the head designer of the House of Dior.

In 1960, Laurent was called to serve time in the French Army  during the Algerian War. It was not long before fellow soldiers taunted Laurent and hazed him to the point where he found himself in a military hospital. It was there that he heard of the news that he had been fired by the House of Dior. Upon his discharge,  Laurent sued the House of Dior for breach of contract and then he opened his own house. This was a turning point in the history of fashion.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Yves Saint-Laurent revolutionized haute couture.

His homosexuality lled him to play with lesbian culture in his designs. The trend of androgeny in fashion only heightened as he feminized male clothing. He has even been noted as the designer who made the pantsuit for wearable for women.

Laurent’s sexuality was no secret to the the fashion industry nor the general public, but he never officially came out until 1991.

Laurent died of a brain tumor in 2008, but YSL Fashion is still a leader in high culture and he is honored worlwide.

Today’s leading designers credit Yves Saint Laurent as their mentor and inspiration.

But as a daughter of privilege – her dad was a powerful Democratic state senator, and she had all the benefits of a comfortable upbringing and a good education – Jenny Durkan also recalls what someone once told her: “You’re the most non-diverse diverse person I know.”

“I don’t think I can fully appreciate how important it is to many people to have someone in a role like this who is gay,” Durkan said this week in an interview with The Associated Press. “The more people are able to see people in situations where pretty soon that’s an invisible characteristic, the better it is for the entire community.”

Gay rights activists say her appointment reflects a growing acceptance in the U.S. as well as the attitude of President Barack Obama’s administration. Earlier this month, Obama nominated an openly gay police sergeant to be the U.S. marshal in Minneapolis; she would be the first openly gay U.S. marshal.

Lambda Legal, a national organization that promotes equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people, says it knows of no other openly gay U.S. attorneys in the nation’s 93 judicial districts.

“We see it as really sort of a respectful acknowledgment that it is important to have all sorts of people represented in government,” Lambda Legal spokesman Jason Perez Howe said.

Durkan, 51, has been named to the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee, where she will head a subcommittee on cybercrimes and intellectual property. The FBI is building a new cybercrime center in the old federal courthouse in Seattle, and the U.S. attorney’s office here has done novel work in prosecuting such cases.

Before being confirmed by the Senate a month ago, Durkan performed a wide variety of civil litigation and criminal defense work, and was active in bar associations. In 2002 she traveled to Morocco to train female candidates for parliament.

She has been Gov. Chris Gregoire’s personal attorney and confidante, and represented the Democratic Party when Gregoire’s 133-vote re-election win was confirmed in court.

Durkan has said she did some of her most satisfying work using lawsuits to force institutional reform – such as changes in how the King County Jail handles mentally ill prisoners after one who had been recently released stabbed a firefighter to death.

One month into her new job, she believes a similar approach could make the U.S. attorney’s office more effective in areas such as environmental regulation and corporate oversight – areas that received less attention as fighting terrorism became the Justice Department’s top priority after 9/11.

“Rather than just doing reactive cases where the government’s being sued, we have to start thinking about how we can use our affirmative powers to enforce the priorities of the department and the communities,” Durkan said.

To that end, she’s spoken with local prosecutors, state and federal agencies and the governor’s office about bringing those groups together to coordinate better responses to environmental crimes, for example.

“There’s no question terrorism remains the number one threat to this country, and we don’t want to minimize that,” she said. “But we’ve also seen in the last three years that there are other threats to our country and people’s well being. Financial crimes almost brought our country to its knees.”

Ultimately, she said, she hopes to be judged on how the U.S. attorney’s office handles those threats – not on her sexual orientation.

“In this region I don’t think it’s very remarkable that you have someone who is gay in a position of authority, because it’s woven throughout our culture and has been,” Durkan said. “In other parts of the country it might be, but I think a generation from now it will be a footnote.”

She is an avid supporter of civil rights, energy independence and renewable fuels, stem cell research and the woman’s right to choose.

Baldwin has been working vigorously in the fight for health care reform. She has voiced her opinion on how much the legislation affects the LGBT community, and advises everyone to pay much more attention to the universal health care debate.

Tammy Baldwin earned her law degree in 1989 from the University of Wisconsin Law School, but was first elected to political office in 1986.

She was one of 133 members of the House to vote against the invasion of Iraq and in 2008 she was a superdelegate to Hillary Clinton.

Today, Baldwin lives in Madison, Wisc., with her partner Lauren Azar. She is one of three openly gay members of Congress.

Mirren won for her depiction of Leo Tolstoy’s wife in Michael Hoffman’s “The Last Station,” while Meryl Streep picked up a career achievement award.

The winning movie, “Brotherhood,” takes a hard look at the neo-Nazi group that the leading character, Lars, joins after leaving the army. The group carries out raids on homosexuals, but Lars and his mentor in the group, Jimmy, begin a love affair that they try to keep secret.

“Brotherhood” is the first feature film by Nicolo Donato, a 35-year-old who previously worked as a fashion photographer.

The jury handing out the awards was headed by Oscar-winning director Milos Forman.

The best actor award went to Italy’s Sergio Castellitto, who played a single parent and blue-collar worker dreaming that his son will become a boxing champ in the movie “Alza la Testa.”

The festival paid homage to Streep through the career award and a retrospective of her work. Her cooking flick “Julie & Julia,” in which she plays Julia Child, was shown out of competition and was chosen to close the festival.

At the award ceremony, a black-clad Streep was presented with the career achievement prize by Giuseppe Tornatore, the Italian director who won an Oscar for best foreign film with “Cinema Paradiso.”

Her financial career began in 1980 when she became an account executive at Merill Lynch. Only a few years later, she became vice president of investments at Prudential Bache Securities.

In 1987, she resigned from the position and decided to launch her own business, the Suze Orman Financial Group.

The financial guru skyrocketed to instant fame and praise with the release of her 1997 book, 9 Steps to Financial Freedom and a year later, she published The Courage to Be Rich. Both books became best-sellers.

In February 2007, Orman came out as a lesbian, revealing that she had been with her partner Kathy Travis for seven years.

Orman expressed concern that life partner Travis would not receive monetary support from Orman’s several million-dollar estate upon her death.

The Rachel Maddow Show first aired on television in 2008.  She was first seen as a guest political analyst on MSNBC and CNN, and first heard on her syndicated radio show, The Rachel Maddow Show, in 2005.

Rachel Maddow was born in California and came out as a lesbian when she was a teenager. When in college at Stanford University, she was one of only two openly gay freshmen, according to her university paper.

At Stanford, Maddow majored in public policy and she was an AIDS activist.

In 1995, she received a Rhodes Scholarship to travel to Oxford for graduate studies at Lincoln College. She earned her doctorate degree in political science with a concentration in prison reform and AIDS.

Post World War II, while living in Paris, Foucault developed a fascination with the confines of what is normal and socially acceptable.

His work in literature, history and philosophy were critical studies of social institutions; and later in his life, he analyzed  the history of human sexuality.

His work has had a major influence on the understanding of lesbian and gay heritage.

In 1948, Foucault made a suicide attempt that was allegedly the result of guilt towards his increased awareness of his homosexuality. However, his new sense of self led to ground-breaking work in the study of sexuality.

His writing, Discipline and Punishment (1975) dissected sexual conformity in the 19th century, when it was the people who regulated behavior, forcing the idea of normality onto one another.

Herculine Barbine (1978) examined a 19th century hermaphrodite and how medicine, then and now, attempts to fix one’s sexual identity, not allowing the range of sexual diversity to take its course.

His last work before his death in 1984 was published in three volumes. The History of Sexuality (1976-1984) explored the nature of desire and challenged its boundaries and channels for expression. He revealed that in the 19th century, attempts to repress sexuality only perpetuated it.

Foucault’s work allowed individuals to consider the ideas of homosexuality and heterosexuality as notions that were confining, forcing individuals to claim a particular identity.

His work was also liberating for those who identified with him and those who also challenged “normality” in all realms of society.

Hirschfeld was a homosexual, born to Jewish parents in Germany.

He founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897  to defend gay rights and to repeal a section of the German imperial penal code of 1871, paragraph 175, which criminalized sex between men.

In 1919, he opened the Institute for Sexual Science and became a highly recognized public speaker and writer.

In 1921, he formed a congress for sexual reform which led to the World League for Sexual Reform. Throughout his campaigns in the 1920s, he was attacked many times but continued to lead the way for gay rights.

In 1930, he began his international tour for the league. During that time, he was forced into exile, but had already made up his mind that he would not return to Germany.

When the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, they repeatedly attacked Hirschfeld and interrupted his lectures.

In May 1933, the Nazis raided the Institute and destroyed all of the research that Hirschfeld  had collected over the years in a bonfire.

The Nazis put an end to the homosexual emancipation movement and destroyed all documentation that would reveal how many homosexuals were killed in the Holocaust.

In 1934, the Nazis stripped Hirschfeld of his German citizenship and year later he died of a heart attack in France.

A mayor of San Fransciso has informally allocated Hirschfeld’s birthday, May 14, as “Magnus Hirschfeld Day,” in honor of him.

She is a board member for the Equal Justice Society and the executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

NCLR is an organization that advocates civil rights for the LGBT community through public policy and public education.

Kendall received her law degree from the University of Utah College of Law in 1988.

She began practicing corporate law but diverted to civil rights advocacy.

Kate and her partner live in San Franciso, CA.