Stonewall Speakers, a program of the Connecticut Stonewall Foundation, Inc., is a speakers’ bureau comprised of same and different gender loving people, transgender people and their allies. The organization was originally named ‘SPEAK! OUT,’ and was the creation of the Anti-Violence Project (AVP) of 1988. AVP organized during the hearings for two Hartford area high school youth who brutally beat and killed thirty three year old, Richard Reihl, a gay man from Wethersfield who was employed by the Aetna Insurance Company.

The boys were sentenced to thirty and forty years for enacting a murder due to unreasoned fear, hatred and non-acceptance of difference.  For this the families and friends of Richard Reihl and the boys suffered needless loss.

AVP recognized the urgent need for a preventive educational program for schools: one that might help to dispel the myths and stereotypes that hurt LGBT people. This program would provide youth an opportunity to: meet LGBT people and their allies in person to hear personal accounts of their lives; and obtain informed answers to any questions they might want to ask.

“SPEAK! OUT!” later changed its name to the “Stonewall Speakers Association” The choice of “Stonewall” in the organization’s name is a tribute to the historical Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969 in New York City’s Greenwich Village which is recognized as the marker for the Gay Rights movement in the United States.