In addition to establishing businesses, seeking higher education and professional careers, and participating in reform efforts such as women's suffrage, and otherwise defying the typical constraints defined by the female gender norms of the era, some had the freedom to form partnerships with other women, within or beyond the bounds of heterosexual marriage. For example, Katherine Lee Bates, who wrote “America the Beautiful” after visiting Colorado in 1893, lived with Katharine Coman of Wellesley College for twenty-five years. Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association who gave a rousing speech at the Fort Collins Opera House in 1893, was in a thirty-year relationship with Mary Garrett Hay. And Grace Espy Patton, an important local suffrage advocate and one of the first female instructors at the Colorado Agricultural College (now Colorado State University), was known for defying conventional gender stereotypes in her manner and dress. Modern speculation about Patton's relationship with a colleague has led some to believe she may have been the school's first LGBTQ+ professor, although this remains unconfirmed.

Despite widespread discrimination and anti-gay violence, LGBTQ+ communities grew along with the population of major cities around the county, including Denver, because they served as regional refuges for queer culture and created a critical mass of individuals seeking community with each other. In the early 1950s, pioneering organizations such as the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis sought to create “respectable” and “law-abiding” public identities as well as to unify the community in places other than bars that were subject to frequent police raids, but this movement largely benefited white middle and upper class people. Despite some commonalities, a hierarchy of privilege based on race, class, and gender expression continued to prevail within the LGBTQ+ community. A rural-urban divide for LGBTQ+ people meant that those living in smaller communities, such as Fort Collins, often had to travel to Denver in order to find community in bars and private social or political gatherings. In an environment of overt discrimination, it remained relatively common for some LGBTQ+ people to “pass” as straight by participating in heterosexual relationships, in the same way that some light-skinned African Americans could choose to pass as white.

LGBTQ+ History in the Late 20th Century (1970 – 2000)

The countercultural social movements that flourished in the late 1960s included the Gay Liberation Movement and Lesbian Feminism. The Stonewall Inn uprising in Greenwich Village (NYC) on June 28, 1969 was led by people of color and transgender people. It represented a changing tide of resistance to persecution that could be felt in bigger cities across America. Political and community organizing increased visibility of LGBTQ+ people and issues and inspired a wave of grassroots social and environmental movements across the globe. In 1971, Colorado became the third state to repeal its sodomy laws, making same-sex activity between consenting adults legal throughout the state. At the same time the state passed a public indecency law that banned PDA between same-sex couples, until the Colorado Supreme Court struck it down in 1974. 

As the grassroots movement began to grow around the state, CSU provided the earliest opportunity for LGBTQ+ people to organize in Fort Collins, with the founding in 1971 of Student Organization for Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals (SOGLB). The student-run group, one of the first LBGTQ+ student organizations in the country, met in a private location at first but was recognized as a formal organization by the university in 1975 and emerged as the Fort Collins Gay Alliance, with both students and community members involved and an office in the Lory Student Center. The work they did to educate local residents on and off campus and to unite the local queer community was critical and transformational.

An annual feminist conference at CSU provided public education workshops, including lesbian issues. In 1974, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, prominent national leaders as co-founders of Daughters of Bilitis, came to Fort Collins to serve as the workshop leaders. Frank Kameny of the Mattachine Society also visited Fort Collins to give a lecture on gay employment issues in the federal government. In the late 1970s, the Fort Collins Gay Alliance was offering coffee houses, advertised in the Coloradoan, and annual symposia at the university. The growing strength of LGBTQ+ organizing in Denver provided resources that connected people around the region and included the 1976 launch of Out Front Magazine, a publication that served Denver and the region. Advocates also established organizations to support LGBTQ+ individuals including the Gay Community Center, which opened in 1977 to help people come out and included one of the first support groups for transgender people, and the Gender Identity Center, which incorporated in 1980.

As more people began to come out—whether to family and friends or in their public lives—more social opportunities and visibility simultaneously emerged. In 1982, a transcontinental relay torch celebrating the Gay Games passed through Fort Collins on the way to San Francisco. The Denver Athletic Union and Fort Collins Gay and Lesbian Alliance worked together to bring it through Colorado, which had the largest contingent of athletes in that summer’s games. Other important regional developments included the founding of The Colorado Gay Rodeo Association in 1982, the Mile High Freedom Band in 1985, and a new statewide publication, Colorado Gay and Lesbian News. House parties, community dances, and bars continued to provide important opportunities to develop social ties and support. In the Fort Collins area, LGBTQ+ community dances hosted by the Fort Collins Gay and Lesbian Alliance and Tri-State Lambda were held at the Bellvue Grange and the Lincoln Center in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The events were publicized in Out Front Magazine and drew people from around the region, although they were not otherwise publicized as LGBTQ+ events to the wider community in order to protect the safety and privacy of the attendees. Individual allies, such as an employee at the Lincoln Center who provided key logistical support, were important in making those events happen. Other than the dances, the Fort Collins LGBTQ+ community held most social gatherings in private homes. That changed in 1983 when the Sagebrush Bar (later known as People’s Bar and then Nightingale’s) opened at 934 South Lemay. A 1985 Out Front Magazine profile of the gay community in Northern Colorado included interviews with Fort Collins residents who noted that visibility was growing in Fort Collins and the community was becoming more accepting. The Sagebrush Bar had to overcome some opposition in order to open but had exceeded the expectations of many. As a new social gathering space, it served as a nexus for opportunities such as the organization of a volleyball team that competed in the Denver league and the formation of a local Metropolitan Community Church congregation, which held services there. One of the bar owners noted improved cooperation and respectful interactions with Fort Collins police. The police officer assigned to the route that included the bar, as well as to the Lincoln Center dances, was another important ally for the community at that time. At the same time, the Fort Collins Gay and Lesbian Alliance was providing gay speakers for classes on campus and running a telephone hotline, support groups, an annual Gay Awareness Week, and community dances that drew hundreds of people from the region.

Despite the growth of LGBTQ+ visibility and community in the 1980s, lack of anti-discrimination laws left LGBTQ+ community members vulnerable to oppressive daily conditions because their full human rights were still being denied. But gay culture and political influence slowly gained momentum. Denver’s first Hispanic mayor, Federico Peña, was an ally and raised concern about occupancy laws that discriminated against LGBTQ+ families who were not legally recognized. In 1987, many Colorado residents traveled to Washington, D.C. to participate in the National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. The following year, Colorado residents participated in the first National Coming Out Day on October 11, 1988. That same year, the Fort Collins Gay and Lesbian Alliance, Human Relations Commission, and Civil Rights for Individuals sought a local anti-discrimination ordinance. Despite the support of several Council members, including Mayor Larry Estrada, the effort failed, but Denver became one of first cities in the country to adopt an anti-discrimination policy that included gays and lesbians in 1990.

But while Amendment 2 was the law, LGBTQ+ residents experienced even greater incidents of violence, vandalization, and harassment. In Fort Collins, anti-gay crimes occurred at the People’s Bar in 1991, and Nightingale’s Bar in 1994.  The City’s Human Rights Office revived in 1994 and directed by Alma Vigo-Morales, began hosting multicultural retreats in coordination with CSU, and additional community resources and opportunities for visibility and solidarity also emerged in 1994: A Quiet Corner Bookstore, catering to the LGBTQ+ community, opened at 803 E Mulberry, and the Lambda Community Center, which was an outgrowth of the campus organization and started meeting in the home of CSU professor and Peace Corps founder Dr. Maury Albertson and Dr. Audrey Olsen Faulkner, who was an important ally and social justice advocate in the community. The Lambda Center moved to 1437 E Mulberry in the early 1990s, and later to 149 West Oak Street, Suite 8. The center provided many important services but struggled financially. When it folded, it was replaced briefly with a satellite office of Denver’s LGBT Community Center of Colorado. The Rainbow Chorus, established in 1992 as an alliance project of gay and straight members in response to Amendment 2, rehearsed weekly at the Foothills Unitarian Church on Yorktown Avenue and performed three major concerts per year at the Lincoln Center.

The persistent threat to life and liberty for LGBTQ+ residents in the region were made strikingly clear in October 1998 following the tragic murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Beaten by two men and left for dead, Shepard was transported to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins where he later died of his injuries from the anti-gay hate crime. The hospital created a website to provide updates on his condition, and more than 815,000 people visited it from around the world. The murder put a spotlight on the region and Wyoming’s failure to enact anti-hate crimes legislation, and because Fort Collins was the location of his death the city was briefly the epicenter of LGBTQ+ rights issues in America. Shephard’s murder galvanized significant public support across the country for LGBTQ+ individuals and began turning momentum against discriminatory laws and behaviors. Even as awareness was changing nationally, the Fort Collins community was still restricting the rights and safety of LGBTQ+ residents. In the spring of 1998, a voter referendum overturned the Fort Collins City Council’s unanimous approval to add sexual orientation to the city’s non-discrimination law covering employment, housing, and public accommodations.

Civil rights activists earned some important victories in the new century. In 2007, LGBTQ+ people in Colorado gained the right to adopt children, and the state’s Employment Nondiscrimination Act included protections for sexual orientation and gender status. The following year, Governor Bill Ritter signed the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, providing protections in housing and public accommodation for LGBTQ+ residents and banning conversion therapy on minors. In 2013, the Colorado Civil Union Act passed, and the city’s first civil union licenses were issued at the Larimer County Courthouse Offices. In 2014, gay marriage was legalized in Colorado, and the Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court decision made it legal in all fifty states in 2015. Colorado elected its first openly gay governor, Jared Polis, in 2018. As of 2019, transgender people in Colorado can change the gender on their birth certificate by request. And in 2020, 22 years after the murder of Mathew Shepherd, Colorado became the eleventh state to abolish the gay panic defense, so that defendants accused of hate crimes can no longer blame their violent actions on the identity of the person they attacked.