2 for Wisconsin February 1982 & November 1998: the first state to pass a gay rights law later goes on to send the first out lesbian to congress: Tammy Baldwin. (Rebels & Pioneers).

In the fall of 1981, as Wisconsin lawmakers were debating a historic bill to ban bias based on sexual orientation, Tammy Baldwin, then a student at Smith College in Massachusetts, was dealing with more personal matters. "It was the only time I ever lived out of [Wisconsin]," the congresswoman recalls. "I was coming out. I'd just fallen in love."

But seven years after the bill's 1982 passage, Baldwin became very familiar with its merits. "In 1989 I finished law school [in Wisconsin] and became a small-practice attorney," says Baldwin, who made history herself in 1998 by becoming the first out lesbian to be elected to Congress. "Approximately a third of my practice was in civil rights: advocating for people denied housing opportunities, advocating for people terminated from jobs or who failed to receive a promotion for a variety of factors--sexual orientation or race or HIV status. I used that Wisconsin law and was able to successfully advocate for people.

"There's incredible symbolic power in having the government say that discrimination against gays and lesbians is wrong," Baldwin adds. "And many people have used the state law to argue for fairness in the workplace."

Twenty years after Wisconsin became the first state to enact a gay rights law, only II others have followed suit: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Hawaii, California, New Jersey, Vermont, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Maryland.