Larry Kramer, born in 1935, is a public health expert, author, and playwright. His works include the screenplay for the 1969 film Women in Love and his controversial book about the New York gay scene in the 1970s, Faggots.

Kramer’s activism and expertise made him one of the leading figures during the AIDS epidemic in the USA during the 1980s and 90s. Kramer co-founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 19782, which was at the time the world’s largest organisation supporting people with AIDS. He went on to co-found ACT-UP, a key player in the movement, and in 2001 created the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University.

Sandy Stone is a media and academic theorist, performance artist, and author. As a trans woman she is thought to be one of the founders of the academic discipline of transgender studies.

One of Stone’s greatest moments was after she was targeted by transphobic scholar Janice Raymond, whose essay The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male attacked Stone for “destroying the womanhood with ‘male energy’”. Stone shot back to this abuse with The Empire Strikes Back in 1983, a phenomenal rebuttal that advocated for the experiences of trans people and their empowerment. The Empire Strikes Back is a seminal text in trans academia and has been translated into twenty-seven languages.

Professor Cathy J. Cohen is a Black feminist, author, and social activist. She gained her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1993 and has been a leading academic at the University of Chicago since 2002, including a stint as the Director of the Centre for the Study of Race (2002–05).

Cohen is the principle researcher for The Black Youth Project and one of the founding members of the Audre Lorde Project, an organisation for queer people of colour that advocates radical action and community organising.

George Takei is a Japanese-American author, actor, director and social commentator. He became famous through his role as Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek, but has since become a vocal LGBT spokesperson and activist.

Takei has been involved in numerous campaigns, including to make the American Boy Scouts Association to drop its anti-gay policy and a campaign aimed at California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he vetoed sex-sex marriage legislation. His use of humour to share important LGBT messages via Facebook has made him very popular, with over 8 million followers.

bell hooks is an American author, critic, and social activist. As a founder and leader of intersectional feminist theory, her work focuses on the connections between gender, race and class. hooks, a bisexual woman, has published over 30 books, one of her most notable being Ain’t I a Woman? named after Sojourner Truth’s speech.

The main areas of hooks’ study are media, film, education and history. When asked ‘what is a feminist?’, hooks asserts that it is “rooted in neither fear nor fantasy… Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression’.

Born in 1882, Virginia Woolf became one of the most prolific writers of modernist fiction in the 20^th century. Her most notable works include Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and To the Lighthouse. She also wrote the seminal essay A Room of One’s Own, which continues to be a founding piece of feminist literature to this day.

Woolf had a relationship with Vita Sackville-West, another writer, who was at the heart of her novel Orlando. The novel is an exploration of gender and time, with the eponymous character weaving seamlessly between both.

Alan Turing, born 1912, was the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. During the Second World War he worked for the government in Bletchley Park, the UK’s codebreaking centre. His invaluable contribution and that of his colleagues is thought to have shortened the war in Europe by up to four years.

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts. To avoid prison, his punishment was chemical castration through oestrogen injections. In 2013 Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon.

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter, known best for her evocative self-portraits. She was a pioneer of various styles and forms, including Mexican tradition, folk art, magical realism, and surrealism. Kahlo is also deemed a feminist artist, for her frank and true expression of the female form.

Kahlo was involved in serious bus accident as a young woman, leaving her in an all-body cast for months. It was at this point that she quit her study of medicine to take up painting. Kahlo was bisexual and had multiple affairs with women outside of her marriage to fellow artist Diego Rivera. She once said of herself: “I was born a bitch. I was born a painter.”

Born in 1854, Wilde was an Irish poet, playwright and novelist. His most notable works include The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, both of which live on as two of the most adapted works of modern times. Near the end of his life, Wilde was prosecuted for ‘gross indecency’ and sodomy, under homophobic legislation.

Under cross-examination, Wilde said of his relationship with his lover: ‘It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as “the love that dare not speak its name”… It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection.’