Was "L" placed at the beginning of the LGBT acronym because of the AIDS crisis?

Question

Seen in various LGBT documentation spaces online:

This history of the acronym goes back to the last sustained trauma in the LGBT world: the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and 1990s. ... a more significant and largely unacknowledged support in the care of men with AIDS was a community of lesbians, creating a level of solidarity between gay men and lesbians that didn’t exist before. From the earliest days of the epidemic, lesbians stood by their gay brothers.

Commemorating L-Week – “Why L Comes Before G”

This claim apparently spread from a 2016 medium.com post which also asserts very emphatically,

When civic and religious leaders call us "GLB" or "GLBT" rather than a now normative version of LGBT, it is not unlike those awkward years in the 1970s when well meaning white people struggled to learn to say “black” or “African American” [et cetera, et cetera]

I don't know where to find more careful historical documentation of this. I am skeptical of this claim because:

1. This is the kind of story that Tumblr users make up.
2. In my dim memory, GLBT was used interchangeably with LGBT until the early 2000s. (I could remember wrong, however)
3. It seems to me that the LGBT could have come to be the favored acronym simply because it was more euphonious than GLBT.

A positive answer could involve either oral history by a specific person who was involved in the community at the time, or a period publication advocating for the "LGBT" order for AIDS-related reasons. A negative answer could involve secondary sources adding more complexity to the issue, or an original source being misinterpreted, or period publications advocating for the "LGBT" order for other reasons.

Answer 1

A 2007 University of South Carolina document says:

LGBTQ: Is an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning. The acronym can be used interchangeably: GLBT, GLBTQ, LGBT, etc. However, placing the “L” first represents the purposeful inclusion of women in the community that suffer from sexism and/or invisibility.

A June 2009 article LGBT vs. GLBT: A Presidential Perspective by NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists credits Obama for solidifying the standardization to "LGBT" over "GLBT":

Obama promises the LGBT and HIV/AIDS communities just about everything except for marriage. As an editor (and an admitted word geek), what struck me more than anything was the choice to use “LGBT” instead of “GLBT” to describe us.

I used to be a hard-core “GLBT” user, but I have long since weaned myself off of that habit. I know that “LGBT” has been embraced by many people and organizations as the preferred acronym (e.g., you may have noticed “LGBT” is the acronym of choice on this blog). I just hadn’t realized that the pendulum had swung so far in favor of “LGBT” straight into the White House.

For any remaining “GLBT” users out there, it’s now clear to me (if not to you) that your days are seriously numbered.

A 2011 discussion Do you say LGBT or GLBT or queer or something different? by a Youtuber with over 1.5 million subscribers says:

Here's the thing: In my blogs and videos, I almost always say LGBT, standing for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. But pretty much everytime I say it, i get emails from people that are so upset that as a gay man, I didn't put the "G" first.

To be honest, the reason I do it is because lesbians really face a double whammy of discrimination - first for being a woman, and secondly for being gay.

So I put the "L" first in the acronym to recognize that.

The 2012 article Batgirl - Gay Icon? says:

we put the L first to emphasis women’s struggles and contributions which have historically been minimized

The 2013 book Gender & Sexuality For Beginners says:

The decision to put “L” first in the acronym has historically been a political one; often the person employing it was asserting that lesbians are underrepresented compared to gay men.

The 2015 article LGBT-SEARCHING FOR AN IDENTITY says that putting the "L" first is more feminist.

For timewise information, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, which includes the Bay Area Reporter (a gay newspaper going back to 1971) and the Washington Digital Newspapers which includes the Seattle Gay News are excellent free sources. The acronyms GLBT and LGBT both started being used about 1993. Without the "T", the earliest two examples I see in those databases are a 17 August 1989 article about the "GLB Defense Institute for gay, lesbian and bisexual people" and a September 1989 inquiry about how to join the GLB Defense Institute. A 29 May 1990 article title refers to "LGB awareness week".

Overall, the terms, which started as GLB and LGB, were both in use in the 1990s and only in the 2000s there was gravitation to LGBT over GLBT, to place emphasis on women, but not specifically because of AIDS.

Answer 2

Neither word was used much until the late 1990s, by which time the AIDS epidemic had been around for over a decade.

"GLBT" had a brief surge in popularity in the early 2000s, but its usage still remained well below that of "LGBT".

Google Ngram Viewer

Answer 3

It has nothing to do with their role in the AIDS crisis. It was placed first as an optics strategy and it originates from second-wave feminism. The insinuation that their solidarity with gay men wasn't pronounced until the AIDS crisis is offensive and sounds like a claim made by some younger member of the community who has absolutely zero historical context for the struggle that lesbians and gay men shared prior to the sexual revolution that started in the 1960s.

Lesbians and gay men helped each other survive for DECADES before the AIDS crisis. Gay men would often wed lesbian women as a cover for each other, so they could freely pursue their separate sexual interests. It was far preferable to cheating on an innocent spouse who is under the impression their partner is genuinely sexually attracted to them, but for most queers it wasn't easy to find these convenient arrangements. A spouse who is helping a homosexual partner cover (implying they know), whether they are straight/bi/gay/ace themselves, is known as a beard.

ONE, Inc. was one of the first LGBT activist organizations (pre-dating Stonewall by nearly two decades) and allowed women to join. Lesbians were some of the original founding members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).

You won't get through biographies about prominent gay rights figures like Vito Russo, Harvey Milk, Gilbert Baker, Larry Kramer, etc. without hearing first-hand accounts from some of their closest friends, many of whom were lesbians.

While it is true that misogynistic gay men and misandrist lesbian women exist, they are certainly minorities and those of us united under the queer label disown these attitudes as exclusive and prejudiced. The reality is that gay men and lesbian women have a long history of sharing fear, hope, struggle, love, unity and so much more.