Celebrate LGBT History Month

Today marks the start of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans History Month. Every February we celebrate the history, lives and achievements of the LGBT community.

Last year the Lesbian & Gay Foundation's Homo Hero campaign celebrated your homo heroes, the people you thought had driven LGBT issues and life forward.

You voted for some of the most important people from LGBT life, who often don't get anywhere near the recognition they deserve, people who battled adversity to make the future a more accepting place for others, people like Alan Turing, Justin Fashanu and Beth Ditto.

Since the Homo Hero campaign, a whole host of new homo heroes have come out, rugby star Gareth Thomas (now patron of LGBT History Month), BBC Newsreader Jane Hill and YOU for donating to the LGF's Aim High campaign, meaning that by the end of the month the LGF's inspirational guide for young LGB's will be distributed to UK schools.

As well as celebrating the lives of LGBT people this month and every month, we must also stand up to prejudice and discrimination.

And so to our first homo hero award of 2010, which goes to 12 year old Josh Priestley.

For most of Josh's life, his mum Karen, has been working at the Lesbian & Gay Foundation and last month she couldn't contain her pride at his heroics.

Josh had been out at the park with his friend. There was a gay couple in the park and Josh's friend started to verbally abuse them. At this point Josh stepped in and told his friend to: "shut up", before telling him that "gay people are human beings too, they're not from Mars or any other planet, they just don't dress like us!"

One of the couple said to Josh, "Thanks mate, at least you have got some common sense" to which Josh replied "it's ok, my mum works for the Lesbian and Gay Foundation".

And this isn't the first time that Josh has supported the LGBT community.

When Josh started Secondary school last year, part of his English project was to make a presentation about his family using various media and deliver it to the class.

Whilst creating his presentation, Josh was looking at the LGF website for information about the homo hero campaign and Manchester Pride, for his mum's part of the presentation.

Karen, Josh's Mum said: "Myself and Chris were a bit concerned about whether he would get a lot of stick off his mates when he'd done the presentation, but he went ahead and did it."

"When Parents' Evening came, I spoke to his English teacher who said she was really proud of him, he stood up in front of his peers and talked about where I worked and what I did at Pride and she said he talked about it with so much enthusiasm and pride - it did not phase him in the slightest and he got no stick from his peers."

Follow Josh's lead and challenge prejudice when you see it!

It's not too late to support Aim High, to make a donation, click here.