This June marks the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which kickstarted the gay rights movement in 1969. The bar where it all began has been commemorated as a national monument, with a new visitor center debuting this summer. It’s part of a small but mighty contingent of LGBTQ heritage markers in the city, including the New York City AIDS Memorial, the Alice Austen House, and Brooklyn’s Marsha P. Johnson State Park, which in 2020 became New York’s first state park named for an LGBTQ person.
This Pride month, we’re taking a look at some of the other LGBTQ memorials and monuments around the globe, from celebrations of groundbreaking historical figures to more somber reminders of the persecution people in the community have faced and continue to face today.
Christopher Park
New York City
Directly across the street from The Stonewall Inn sits triangular Christopher Park, which has become something of a pilgrimage site for those visiting the Greenwich Village neighborhood to take in its gay heritage sites. The centerpiece is a work called Gay Liberation, which was created by American sculptor George Segal in 1980; it depicts a pair of men and a pair of women cast in bronze and painted white. It’s considered the first piece of public art dedicated to the gay-rights movement, and when it was commissioned in 1979 to mark the 10th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, it came with a few rules from the patrons: The artwork needed to have equal representation of men and women and “had to be loving and caring and show the affection that is the hallmark of gay people.”
In 1987, Amsterdam’s Homomonument became the world’s first public monument dedicated to the LGBTQ community.
Photo by Alaatiin Timur/Shutterstock
Homomonument
Amsterdam, Netherlands
On the bank of Amsterdam’s Keizersgracht Canal, three pink granite triangles (each with sides measuring 10 feet) are positioned on a small plaza near the waterfront, connected by lines that form one greater triangle: the Homomonument. Unveiled in 1987, the installation was the world’s first public monument dedicated to the LGBTQ community, honoring victims of persecution and violence, both past and future. The three triangles point to the city’s National War Memorial, the Anne Frank House, and the offices of COC Netherlands, the world’s oldest operating LGBTQ advocacy organization, which has been going strong since 1946. One of the triangles protrudes onto the water (built as steps ascending from the canal), one is installed at street level, and another rises from the plaza like a groundswell of hope and courage.
The Legacy Walk
Chicago, Illinois
Chicago’s Legacy Walk is a collection of 20 monuments dedicated to LGBTQ pioneers.
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In Chicago, LGBTQ history doesn’t get a single monument—it gets 20. The Legacy Walk is a half-mile series of rainbow-adorned bronze pylons lining both sides of North Halsted Street in the Boystown neighborhood. Each column features two memorial plaques commemorating the life and work of LGBTQ individuals “whose achievements helped shape the world,” says Victor Salvo, founder and executive director of the Legacy Project. Plaques are periodically replaced with new markers; while the older ones join the Legacy Project’s archives for a planned future museum and use in the traveling Legacy Wall exhibit, which has been on display in locations beyond Chicago. Currently, visitors to this LGBTQ walk of fame can learn about international legends such as Oscar Wilde, Lorraine Hansberry, and Frida Kahlo. You can also schedule a guided tour of the Legacy Walk, which is $40 for adults, $25 for college students, $15 for seniors and high-school students, and free for elementary school kids.
In Manchester, England, a commemorative statue dedicated to 20th-century mathematician Alan Turing makes up one of 18 key sites within the city’s LGBTQ Heritage Trail.
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Alan Turing Memorial
Manchester, England
In the middle of Manchester’s Sackville Park, a bronze representation of Alan Turing sits patiently on a bench, apple in hand—a reference perhaps to the tree of knowledge and his method of suicide, a cyanide-laced apple. The plaque at his feet reads: “Father of computer science, mathematician, logician, wartime codebreaker, victim of prejudice.” The 20th-century Englishman—whom many learned about when Benedict Cumberbatch portrayed him in 2014’s The Imitation Game—was prosecuted and chemically castrated for homosexual acts during the 1950s. Located near the city’s Gay Village district and the Beacon of Hope HIV/AIDS memorial, the statue was erected in 2001, though it gained greater fame after Queen Elizabeth II posthumously pardoned Turing in 2013. The commemorative statue in Turing’s honor is part of Manchester’s LGBTQ Heritage Trail, also called the Out in the Past Trail, for which small rainbow mosaics are set into the pavement to mark key historic sites.
Sydney’s Darlinghurst neighborhood, home to the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial, is where the city’s annual Pride events occur.
Photo by Richard Glover
Sydney Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial
Sydney, Australia
The pink triangle is recognized globally as a powerful emblem of LGBTQ pride that’s been reclaimed from its former usage as a Nazi marker to identify homosexual men; a black triangle meanwhile marked lesbians. Today in Sydney’s Darlinghurst neighborhood, the pointed LGBTQ symbol serves as a larger-than-life tribute to queer victims of the Holocaust. Located in Green Park (near the Sydney Jewish Museum), the memorial—a pink enameled-steel prism—is embedded in the earth and overlaps with triangulated black columns, which together form a fractured Star of David. The triangle’s glossy surface is reflective by day and emits a soft glow by night, as if lighting the way to hope and life.
Transgender Memorial Garden
St. Louis, Missouri
A fertile, urban greenspace is a vibrant way to grow community, something the Transgender Memorial Garden in St. Louis has been doing since 2015. The Grove neighborhood site, located at South Vandeventer and Hunt Avenues, is the world’s first garden to memorialize victims of anti-trans violence and to celebrate transgender lives. It’s planted with native Missouri trees and wildflowers, cultivated by volunteers, and supported by the Metro Trans Umbrella Group—a local nonprofit organization that marched collectively as grand marshal of the 2019 St. Louis Pride Parade.
The Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism is in Berlin’s central Tiergarten.
Photo by Andrew Baum/Shutterstock
Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism
Berlin, Germany
Berlin is home to a stark monument that commemorates the thousands of LGBTQ lives lost to Nazism before and during World War II. Since 2008, the memorial has stood among other somber tributes in Tiergarten (the city’s central park), inviting visitors to peer through a window within a giant concrete cube to glimpse a video that showcases a same-sex kiss. In addition to this memorial—and Berlin’s impressive Shwules (Gay) Museum—travelers can visit other monuments that commemorate victims of LGBTQ persecution across Germany. In Cologne, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg—all cities that celebrate Pride annually—similar memorials honor tragedies of the past and remind us that the fight for human equality continues.
This story was originally published in 2019; it was most recently updated with new information on June 3, 2024.
