The organization now has chapters throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Britain, providing both men and women arenas for creating drag personae amidst elaborate ritual.

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Presiding over celebrations and hobnobbing with notables are recurring themes in Sarria's life. His army stint garnered him connections with Berlin's theater crowd. He once lunched with Pancho Villa's widow. With emblematic flair he served Lyndon Johnson a flaming dessert at the 1968 San Antonio World's Fair, an incident that nearly got him gunned down by the Secret Service. His life is a study in transforming the mundane into high drama.

Robert Rosenberg's and Greta Schiller's documentary Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (1984) features Sarria leading a chorus of "God Save Us Nelly Queens" at a Black Cat reunion.

In early 2006, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to rename a portion of Castro Street in Sarria's honor.

Historically, cabarets and revues have been much more likely to mention or imply same-sex desire than the "legitimate" theater; and same-sex desire has been less frequently condemned in cabarets and revues than in mainstream plays.

Cross-dressers have often been misunderstood and maligned, especially in societies with rigid gender roles.

The queer community has used documentary film to resurrect historical memory and to permit the marginalized to bear witness, as well as to build an image base that reflects our diversity and counters distorted representations.

Female impersonation need say nothing about sexual identity, but it has for a long time been almost an institutionalized aspect of gay male culture.

In the United States, glbtq candidates have achieved some significant successes at the ballot box in the last three decades, running for and winning local, state, and national elections.

The centrality of gay and lesbian bars to glbtq culture has been reduced in recent years, but they continue to fulfill important functions; and, in many areas, they remain the most visible manifestation of glbtq presence.

Latina/o glbtq communities in the U.S. pursue multiple visions, diverse politics, and a variety of struggles for identity and liberation; their efforts have helped shape the meaning of what it means to be queer and Latina and Latino in the U.S. and transnationally.

San Francisco has enjoyed a reputation as a "gay mecca" since World War II.

A movement that emerged in the late 1970s, the Radical Faeries identify with the gender variant sacred outsider that has appeared and reappeared in many cultures throughout human history.