A half-century ago, House members pushed Congress’s first gay rights bill

The legislation went nowhere. More than 40 years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act protects gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination.

May 16, 2025

By Frederic J. Frommer

The Capital Pride Alliance will mark the 50^th anniversary of “Gay Pride Day” in the nation’s capital with WorldPride Festival starting May 17, a three-week LGBTQ+ celebration. Mostly forgotten today, however, is another milestone from a half-century ago: the first congressional bill to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.

In June 1974, Reps. Bella Abzug and Ed Koch, both New York Democrats, introduced the Equality Act to mark the fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. The bill (like the one Abzug dropped the previous month without Koch) would have extended the workplace protections in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 to sexual orientation. Although a historic piece of legislation, it didn’t garner much media attention at the time; there were no news stories the next day in the Washington Post, the New York Times or other national newspapers.

However, the national press did slowly pick up on the significance of Abzug’s legislation. When she introduced a similar bill in 1975—this time including a Republican co-sponsor, Paul “Pete” McCloskey —several newspapers published a wire service story about it. At a news conference, Abzug said the bill was needed “to guarantee that all individuals, regardless of differences, are entitled to share in the fruits of our society.”

An Associated Press story later that year couched her bill as a natural progression of the fight for gay rights.

“The first step was out of the closet, out of the obscurity and safety of no one knowing they were homosexual,” followed by street fights, marches and pickets, the AP observed in a story datelined from San Francisco. “Now the gay rights movement is in politics, bringing its fight for equal rights into courtrooms, state legislatures and even Congress.”

The legislation went nowhere, even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, as they did in 1974 (and lawmakers were consumed with the Watergate scandal). But in a twist, it was a conservative Supreme Court that wound up ruling, in 2020, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did indeed protect gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination.

“An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for the majority in the ruling, which was 6-3.

The New York Times noted in an analysis at the time that the ruling was an affirmation of the earliest goals of the gay rights movement, writing that “same-sex marriage was never a priority of those first leaders of the early gay rights movement – in no small part because it seemed completely unattainable. In places like New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, the goal was more likely to be precisely the kind of legislation that the Supreme Court has now ratified: making certain that gay men and lesbians were treated fairly in the workplace.”

In a 2018 oral history with the U.S. House Office of the Historian, Abzug’s daughter, Liz Abzug, said that her mother’s legislation was “considered unbelievable” when she first proposed it in 1974.

“Nobody could believe that she was introducing that act, you know, anti-discrimination against LGBTQ people,” the younger Abzug said. “She saw it as a natural extension of civil rights – the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII, which bans discrimination against women.” She noted that her mom was one of the first members of Congress to campaign in gay bars.

Although Congress never passed it, the legislation planted an important marker for the equality effort. The late David Mixner, who would go on to become a national gay rights champion and adviser to President Bill Clinton, recalled cutting out an article about Abzug’s bill in 1974 and hiding it in the top drawer of his dresser.

“Most of us hated ourselves and didn’t think we deserved equality,” he told The Daily Beast in 2019. “That was a symbol of great hope to have someone in the United States [Congress] say these people deserve equality.” One of the reasons Mixner came out two years later, he said, was because he realized there were Americans who believed that people like him were “normal and OK and that we deserve protection.”

The next year, he reflected on the significance of the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that the Civil Rights Law bans discrimination against gay and transgender workers.

“For four decades plus, we have been fighting hard to get what turns out to be the most difficult one, employment protection,” he said. “It’s the most important one. For years I’ve said we have 30-some states where it’s still legal to fire a person for being LGBTQ. Now I can’t say that anymore.”

Frederic J. Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, History.com and other national publications. A former Associated Press reporter, Frommer is the author of several books, including “You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals." Follow him on X.