Axel Axgil, Danish gay rights hero

born 3 April 1915
married 1 October, 1989
died 29th October, 2011

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Axel Axgil, whose struggle for gay rights helped make Denmark the first country to legalize same-sex partnerships, has died. He was 96.

Axgil died in a hospital in Copenhagen on Saturday following complications from a fall, Danish gay rights group LGBT Danmark said.

Axgil, born Axel Lundahl-Madsen, was among the founding members of the organization — one of the oldest gay rights groups in Europe — in 1948.

On Oct. 1, 1989, he and his partner Eigil were among 11 couples to exchange vows as Denmark became the first country to allow gays to enter civil unions, with nearly the same rights as heterosexual couples. Eigil Axgil died in 1995.

In the 1950s, both were sentenced on pornography charges to short prison terms for running a gay modeling agency that issued pictures of naked men.

The men melded their first names into a new surname, Axgil, and used it in a public show of defiance."

-NY Daily News 

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A gay rights first: Protection from Employment Discrimination, 1972

"East Lansing led the nation in local legislation that protected gay employees against discrimination. Forty years later, the city celebrates."

by Lawrence Cosentino

Two score years ago, after hearing from an angry resident who didn’t want to pay the city $11 for mowing his vacant lot and before taking up the matter of an abandoned easement, the East Lansing City Council made national human rights history.

On March 7, 1972, the Council voted to “employ the best applicant for each vacancy on the basis of his qualifications for the job and without regard to race, color, creed, national origin, sex or homosexuality.”

The modest personnel rule became a national landmark in the history of gay and lesbian rights.

At a ceremony Tuesday, East Lansing’s City Council was scheduled to proclaim itself as “the first community in the United States to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.”"

-More at City Pulse

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Ed Watson: Gay marriage proponent

Gay marriage proponent who urged halt to Prop. 8 enforcement dies - Los Angeles Times: "Derence Kernek and Ed Watson became prominent faces in the California gay community's campaign for the right to marry when they urged a federal appeals court earlier this year to halt the enforcement of Proposition 8 so they could wed before Watson succumbed to advancing illness.

On the eve of a Thursday hearing on challenges to a 2010 ruling that the voter initiative banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, Watson died at age 78 of complications from Alzheimer's disease, diabetes and hypertension."

'via Blog this'