Same-sex love is not a modern invention. Old photographs, letters, court records and diaries show people of the same sex sharing their lives long before the words "gay", "lesbian" or "LGBTQ+" were in common use. In March 2019 Nathan Monk, an author and former priest, made that point on Facebook with a set of vintage photos of same-sex pairs, and the post was shared tens of thousands of times.
This page presents those photographs with notes on what each one shows and what it can and cannot tell us, followed by a short timeline of LGBTQ+ history in the United States, from a colonial execution in the 1620s to nationwide marriage equality in 2015 and the Respect for Marriage Act of 2022. Most of the people in these pictures are unnamed, so we describe what is visible rather than guess at private lives. Even so, the collection makes a clear point: affection between people of the same sex was photographed, kept and treasured long before it was openly discussed.
Why Nathan Monk collected these photographs
Monk's post answered a claim he kept hearing: that being LGBTQ+ was something "millennials invented". His argument was that the number of gay people has not suddenly grown; what has grown is the freedom to be visible. The screenshot shows the post's reach, with thousands of comments and shares.
In the comments, Monk pointed at the King James Bible, whose namesake, James VI of Scotland and I of England, had famously close relationships with male favourites, above all George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Historians still debate the nature of those relationships, and the claim in the comments that the king steered the translators is Monk's own reading. The exchange shows how quickly a photo post turned into a wider argument about history and faith.
Men together: soldiers, sailors and friends
Two soldiers in field uniforms, one kissing the other on the cheek, sitting on the bumper of a military vehicle with an army number plate. The uniforms and vehicle suggest the Second World War era or soon after. Wartime threw millions of young men together, and historians of the period have documented both close friendships and same-sex relationships in the armed forces.
Two young men in striped one-piece bathing suits of the early twentieth century, one sitting on the other's lap by the water. Men of this era often posed with an ease and physical closeness that later generations found surprising. Whether this was romance or friendship, the photograph was clearly a happy memory someone chose to keep.
A studio portrait of two men in high-collared military tunics, one seated, the other leaning over him and gazing down. Formal studio photos like this cost money and were meant to be kept, which makes the tender pose all the more deliberate.
Two sailors in dress blues outside a house, one lifting the other off his feet and cradling him, both laughing. Snapshots like this became possible once cheap roll-film cameras spread in the early 1900s, letting ordinary people record private moments rather than formal poses.
Two men in work shirts and wide-legged jeans embracing in front of a picket fence, one pressing his face close to the other's. The clothes and the print's border point to the 1930s or 1940s.
Two soldiers in garrison caps leaning their heads together, arms around each other's shoulders. This is the same photo used in the header image above. It is the kind of picture that, in its day, could have been read either as comradeship or as something more, which may have been exactly what kept it safe.
Two shirtless young men kissing on the lips by the sea, with people walking on the shore behind them. Unlike many of the other images, this one leaves little doubt about romantic intent, and it was taken outdoors in a public place.
Two sailors relaxing on the wooden steps of a barracks or training-camp building, one stretched across the other's lap. The white caps and dungarees are typical of the US Navy in the Second World War.
Two shirtless men, one seated and one standing behind him with his arms around him, posing against what looks like a ship's boiler or engine room. The scalloped edge of the print is typical of snapshots from the 1930s to 1950s.
Two men in swimming trunks on a crowded beach, one sitting on the other's back in a playful hold. Beach snapshots are common in collections like this one, partly because the seaside was one of the few places where relaxed physical closeness drew little attention.
Women together
Two photographs of the same pair of women in high-necked Edwardian blouses: in one they rest cheek to cheek, in the other they kiss. Dates around 1900 to 1910 fit the hairstyles and clothing. In that period, intense "romantic friendships" between women were widely accepted, which sometimes gave real couples cover.
Two women in skirts and cardigans kissing in a snowy, open landscape with farm buildings behind them. The photo has the feel of a casual snapshot taken by a friend.
Two women in long skirts kissing on the porch of a wooden house, one in a light dress and one in dark clothes. The long hemlines suggest the 1910s.
A sepia studio portrait of two women posed cheek to cheek, one with her arm around the other, in late nineteenth-century dress and elaborate braided hair. Cabinet-card portraits like this were popular from the 1870s to the 1890s.
Two young women in a park, wrapped in a close embrace. Someone wrote "June 1942" across the top of the print, making it one of the few precisely dated pictures here, taken during the Second World War.
Two women in tailored jackets and skirts kissing as they sit on a low brick wall, legs crossed. The clothes point to the 1940s, when many American women wore practical suits for war work and office jobs.
Weddings, dances and playing with gender
A garden wedding scene in front of a clapboard house: a bride in a long veil and train faces a person in a suit and cap, with other women and a child nearby. All the participants may be women. "Mock weddings" in which women took both roles were a known custom at parties and women's colleges, so this could be a game, a real commitment, or both; the photo alone cannot tell us.
Two men in suits dancing cheek to cheek in a crowded hall, watched by other guests. Dance halls in cities such as Paris and Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s were famous for allowing same-sex dancing, and photographers of the era recorded several of them.
Four performers on a stage: two in frilled, old-fashioned gowns and two in top hats and tailcoats. They appear to be women in costume, with two of them dressed as men, a common feature of theatre and amateur shows in the 1920s.
How to read old photographs of same-sex affection
These pictures are powerful, but they need careful reading. Norms of touch changed a great deal over the twentieth century. Men holding hands, sitting on each other's laps or sharing a bed while travelling was ordinary in many places before the 1920s. Later, as fear of being thought homosexual grew, that easy closeness faded.
So a photo of two men embracing does not prove they were a couple, and it does not prove they were not. What it does show is that love and tenderness between people of the same sex were visible enough to be photographed, printed and saved. Many of these images survived because families or collectors kept them in albums and boxes; others were found at flea markets with no names at all.
Collectors and historians have built whole archives from such finds. When a photo comes with a name, letters or a note on the back, it can tell a fuller story. When it does not, the most honest caption is a description of what we see.
A timeline of LGBTQ+ history in the United States
- 1624–1625: Richard Cornish, master of the ship Ambrose, was accused by a 19-year-old crew member of forcing sex on him and was hanged in Virginia, probably in early 1625. It is one of the earliest recorded sodomy executions in English America. Men who said publicly that he had been wrongly put to death were whipped or had ears cut off.
- 1691: Deborah Byar of Massachusetts is reported to have been punished for wearing men's clothing, under colonial laws that policed dress as well as sexuality.
- 1989: Jazz musician Billy Tipton, born in Oklahoma City in 1914, died in Spokane, Washington. Paramedics and his son discovered that he had been assigned female at birth; he had lived as a man since the 1930s. He is now remembered as a figure in transgender history, a story about gender identity rather than same-sex love.
- 1990: A network of gay and lesbian teachers formed in Boston under history teacher Kevin Jennings. It became GLSEN, which today supports thousands of school gay–straight alliances.
- 2000: Vermont became the first state to offer civil unions to same-sex couples.
- 2004: Massachusetts became the first state to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples.
- 2008: The California Supreme Court ruled in May that same-sex couples could marry. In November, voters passed Proposition 8 to ban it; the 18,000 marriages already performed stayed valid, and marriages resumed in June 2013.
- 2015: In Obergefell v. Hodges, decided on 26 June, the US Supreme Court ruled five to four that every state must license and recognise same-sex marriages.
- 2022: President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, repealing the Defense of Marriage Act and requiring states to recognise same-sex and interracial marriages performed elsewhere.
How many Americans identify as LGBTQ+ today
Gallup's most recent survey, covering 2025 and published in February 2026, found that 9% of US adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or another non-heterosexual identity, essentially unchanged from the year before and up from 3.5% when Gallup first asked in 2012. Bisexual is now the most common identity in the group, at 5.3% of all adults.
The age gap is striking: 23% of adults under 30 identify as LGBTQ+, compared with 3% or less of those over 50. That gap is exactly what Monk was talking about. Researchers generally see the rise as a change in how freely people describe themselves, not a sudden change in who people are. The couples in these photographs simply lived in a time when there was much less room to say so.
Sources: Photographs collected and shared by Father Nathan Monk on Facebook (original photographers unknown); Encyclopedia Virginia: Richard Cornish; GSAFE: US LGBT timeline; Wikipedia: Billy Tipton; Wikipedia: GLSEN; Wikipedia: Same-sex marriage in California; Wikipedia: Obergefell v. Hodges; Gallup: LGBTQ+ identification holds at 9% in US (February 2026); Powerful Mind.
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