Credit: AP
By ITV News Multimedia Producer Suzanne Elliott
February is LGBT+ History Month, 28 days of celebration, information, education and remembrance that aims to raise awareness on matters affecting the LGBT+ community, promoting equality and diversity across society.
Even today,
LGBT+ people face prejudice and discrimination, but for many lives have been improved and saved by those trailblazers and pioneers that have gone before.
Here are 10 LGBT+ who have changed the lives or their community, country and the world.
Barbara Gittings
Many of us this side of the Atlantic may not know her name, but Ms Gittings is widely regarded as the mother of the LGBT+ civil rights movement, blazing a trail for future generations during a time when it was dangerous to be openly gay.
In the 1920s and 1930s of buttoned-up Britain, homosexuality was an illicit act, and would remain that way until 1967 when the law changed in England and Wales. Even though gay culture was vibrant, it existed mostly underground, its community forced to socialise with a certain degree of covertness in order to avoid exposure and the risk of prison.
Berlin, meanwhile, had emerged from the dark years following the first world war as a cultural hub of creativity and intellectualism, attracting pioneers in the fields of science, psychology, art and literature. The German capital was also a hotbed of hedonism where sexual freedoms and gay culture flourished, and where exciting new forms of music and dance contributed to the febrile atmosphere.