This photo was taken by Kay Tobin Lahusen, a famous lesbian activist and photojournalist. 

Since we’ve had the ability to capture images with cameras (and now available to many people through their phones), photographs have been used to capture and share messages and ideas.

Lahusen started their career by becoming art director of a lesbian magazine called “The Ladder”. While the magazine covers had previously been hand-drawn pictures, Kay decided to use photographs of real lesbian women.

The photograph above is from an Annual Reminder Day picket, a yearly protest at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, between 1965 and 1969, against the United States laws at the time making relationships between two people of the same gender illegal, among many other social inequalities.

1969 was also the year of the Stonewall Riots, recognised as a major turning point in LGBT+ history and rights. The Annual Reminder Day pickets were created by a collective of what we would now call LGBT+ rights organisations.

In 1970, Kay became involved in the founding of the Gay Activists Alliance, one of the major groups that worked to improve rights for gay people in the United States. Kay Tobin Lahusen died in May 2021, age 91.