Dr Kevin Fenton is a public health physician and infectious disease epidemiologist. He has served as London Regional Director at the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, Regional Director of Public Health at NHS London, statutory health adviser to the Mayor of London, and President of the UK Faculty of Public Health.

He has been a vocal advocate for the LGBTQ+ community and has worked extensively to address health disparities. He has helped develop HIV prevention policies and programmes in London, including the Fast-Track Cities initiative, which aims to end new HIV infections, prevent HIV-related deaths and end the stigma linked to HIV.

Oliver Sacks was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science and writer. He is best known for his books on neurological conditions, including Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

His work treating patients with encephalitis lethargica using the drug L-DOPA became the basis of Awakenings. He championed a humane approach to medicine that saw the mind and body as deeply connected, and his writing continues to inspire new generations of doctors and researchers.

Sophia Jex-Blake was an English physician, teacher and feminist. She led the campaign to give women access to university education when she and six other women, known as the Edinburgh Seven, began studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869.

She was the first practising female doctor in Scotland and one of the first in the UK and Ireland. She helped found two medical schools for women, in London and Edinburgh, at a time when no others trained women.

Jex-Blake is widely believed to have been in a relationship with Dr Margaret Todd, who wrote a biography of her life after her death in 1912.

Stormé DeLarverie (1920–2014) was an American performer and gay civil rights icon. According to Stormé and many eyewitnesses, her scuffle with police was the spark that ignited the Stonewall uprising in 1969.

Born in New Orleans, she performed and hosted at the Apollo Theater and Radio City Music Hall. She was known as the “guardian of lesbians in the Village” and “the Rosa Parks of the gay community”.

At Stonewall, she was roughly escorted from the bar to a police wagon. After being hit with a baton for saying her handcuffs were too tight, she fought back, spurring the crowd to action.

Phyllis Akua Opoku-Gyimah, known as Lady Phyll, is a British political activist, co-founder of UK Black Pride and executive director of the Kaleidoscope Trust.

She co-founded UK Black Pride in 2005, which promotes unity among Black people of African, Asian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern and Latin American descent who identify as LGBT, along with their friends and families.

In 2016 she publicly turned down an MBE in protest at anti-LGBT laws introduced under the British Empire that are still in place in many countries today.

With Rikki Beadle-Blair and John R Gordon, she edited Sista!, a 2018 anthology of writing by LGBT women of African and Caribbean descent with links to the UK.

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) was an American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian and civil rights activist.

She described herself as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” and dedicated her life and talent to confronting racism, sexism, classism and homophobia. Her poems are known for their technical mastery and emotional power.

Her poetry and prose deal with civil rights, feminism, lesbian identity, illness and disability, and Black female identity. She was one of the first to speak about these issues so openly, raising awareness of the injustices faced by LGBTQ+ people, Black people and women.

Justin Fashanu (1961–1998) was an English footballer who played for many clubs between 1978 and 1997. He became the first professional footballer to come out publicly as gay.

He faced intense prejudice throughout his career and died by suicide in 1998. In 2020 he was inducted into the National Football Museum Hall of Fame.

His legacy inspired the Justin Campaign, which works to end homophobia in football and support LGBTQ+ players.

On 1 July 1972, Ted Brown walked through central London, stopped at Trafalgar Square for a kiss and made history.

He helped organise the UK's first official Gay Pride march, where more than 2,000 people marched through the capital before holding a mass kiss-in. One of the first Gay Liberation Front activists, he campaigned for an equal age of consent and spoke out against police brutality.

His work on the representation of LGBT people in the media and against abusive policing makes him a key figure in both British civil rights history and LGBT history.

Allan Horsfall (1927–2012) was a British gay rights campaigner and founder of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE).

Founded in 1969, CHE was one of the first organisations to campaign for LGBTQ+ rights in the UK. At its height in the mid-1970s it had more than 130 local groups across England and Wales and over 5,000 members, changing thousands of lives by encouraging self-respect and confidence through coming out.

CHE gave talks to police, social workers, doctors and teachers, and helped lead to the founding of LGBT Switchboard, the counselling organisation Friend, Gay News, Gay Sweatshop theatre group and the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA).

Gilbert Baker (1951–2017) was an American artist, gay rights activist and designer of the rainbow flag in 1978, now a worldwide symbol of LGBTQ+ pride.

He created banners for gay rights and anti-war marches and was described by California state senator Scott Wiener as someone who “helped define the modern LGBT movement”.

Baker refused to trademark the flag, seeing it as a symbol that belonged to the whole community.

ABilly Jones-Hennin was born in St John's, Antigua, in 1942. In 1978 he helped launch the National Coalition of Black Gays, later the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, the first national advocacy organisation for Black gay and lesbian people.

He helped mobilise the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979 and helped organise the first National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference at Howard University.

During President Jimmy Carter's administration, he was part of the first delegation of gay people of colour to meet representatives of the US President.

Cliff Arnesen was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1948 and joined the US military at 17. Instead of being sent to Vietnam, he was discharged because of his sexuality and subjected to humiliating treatment that left lasting scars.

In 1988 he became president of the New England Gay and Lesbian Veterans. In 1989 he became the first openly bisexual veteran in US history to testify before members of Congress.

In 1990 he co-founded the National Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Veterans of America, now American Veterans for Equal Rights. Including “bisexual” in the name was vitally important to him. The group campaigned against the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy until it was repealed.

Josephine Baker (1906–1975) was an American-born French entertainer, French Resistance agent and civil rights activist.

The singer, actress and dancer was so celebrated in Paris that she was known simply as “Josephine” or “La Baker”. She used her fame to protest against segregation, and she had relationships with both men and women.

She is remembered today as an important figure in bisexual history.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873–1954), known as Colette, was a French author.

Her first husband persuaded her to write the semi-autobiographical Claudine novels, which included descriptions of same-sex attraction but were published under his name. After their divorce she lost access to the profits and became a music hall performer.

She had relationships with both men and women, most notably with the performer Mathilde de Morny, known as Missy, who lived as a man. A kiss they shared on stage caused a riot that police had to break up. Colette was one of the first writers to write openly about same-sex relationships.

Marsha P. Johnson (1945–1992) was an American gay liberation activist and self-identified drag queen who is remembered as a transgender rights pioneer.

An outspoken advocate for gay rights, Johnson was one of the prominent figures in the Stonewall uprising of 1969. She was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) with her close friend Sylvia Rivera.

From 1987 to 1992, she was an AIDS activist with ACT UP.

Sylvia Rivera (1951–2002) was an American gay liberation and transgender rights activist and community worker in New York.

With close friend Marsha P. Johnson, she co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which helped homeless young drag queens, gay youth and trans women.

She was active with the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, fighting not only for gay rights but for the inclusion of drag queens and trans women like herself in the movement. She was just 17 at the time of Stonewall.

Laurence Michael Dillon (1915–1962) was a British physician and the first trans man to undergo gender-affirming surgery in the UK.

In 1939 he began taking testosterone, at a time when its effects were poorly understood. When word spread about his transition, he moved to Bristol and took a job at a garage, where he went on to drive recovery vehicles and work as a fire watcher during the Blitz.

He had at least thirteen surgeries between 1946 and 1949, and went on to qualify as a doctor.

Riki Anne Wilchins (born 1952) is an American activist whose work focuses on gender and how it affects people's lives.

Wilchins is credited with helping popularise the term “genderqueer” in the mid-1990s, and has written widely about combating discrimination and violence caused by gender stereotypes.

In 1995 Wilchins founded the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC). It began by focusing on the transgender community and grew to support anyone facing discrimination or violence because of their gender identity or expression.

Georgina Somerset (1923–2013) was a British dentist, author and former Royal Navy officer.

She was the first openly intersex person in the UK and the first intersex woman to be married in the Church of England.

In 1960 she was issued a new birth certificate recording her sex as female. She wrote two books, Over the Sex Border (1963) and her memoir A Girl Called Georgina (1992), about her life as an intersex woman and her campaign for intersex recognition.

Lisa Orlando was a radical feminist active in the second wave of feminism, who campaigned for the rights of lesbian and bisexual women.

In 1972 she co-wrote The Asexual Manifesto, one of the earliest published writings describing asexuality as an identity.

Her work helped lay the foundations for asexual visibility and the recognition of ace people within the LGBTQIA+ community.

Daniel Quasar is a non-binary artist and graphic designer known for designing the Progress Pride flag.

In 2018 Quasar redesigned the rainbow flag to include the colours of the transgender flag, along with black and brown stripes to represent LGBTQ+ communities of colour, those living with AIDS, those lost, and the stigma surrounding them. The chevron shape represents moving forward.

The flag is now flown above official buildings in cities around the world, including London, New York, Boston and Sydney.

Brenda Howard (1946–2005) was an American bisexual rights activist and sex-positive feminist, often known as the “Mother of Pride”.

She helped plan and took part in LGBT rights actions for more than three decades. She was an active member of the Gay Liberation Front and chaired the Gay Activists Alliance's Speakers Bureau after Stonewall.

She worked with the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights to pass New York City's gay rights law in 1986, was active in ACT UP and Queer Nation, and in 1987 helped found the New York Area Bisexual Network. She also worked on the 1987 and 1993 Marches on Washington.