A Queer History of the United States for Young People

history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history
that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.
And he is right. We all carry history in us, around us, with us, alongside
of us. Histories of all kinds—national, local, personal, family, sexual,
emotional—are part of our lives and shape who we are. As Baldwin writes,
they are our “frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”
It’s easy for Americans to find our “official” national history. We learn it
in school; we see it in movies and on television. We hear it told on national
holidays and see it enacted in pageants and even carved in stone in statues
and monuments from Washington, DC, to small towns across the country.
For LGBTQ people—and especially youth and people just coming out—
it’s not as easy to find out our true history. It’s not taught in schools; it’s not
on postage stamps; the statues and monuments are only now beginning to
appear. Many famous Americans have been LGBTQ, yet when their names
appear in textbooks or histories, their sexuality is never discussed. Their
love lives—and sex lives—are never mentioned.
If we are erased from the history books, then how can we ever know who
we are? This absence, this erasure, denies us the right and the ability to use
our history as a guide, to feel pride in the heroism and accomplishments of
the LGBTQ people who came before us. And it denies us the ability to use
this history as a guide to the future so we can follow in their footsteps.
Think of the opening chapters of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer’s Stone, in which Harry—a boy with his own secret past and secret
powers—is shown to know nothing about his family past or his own history.
He only learns about his past, who he is, and his true nature when Hagrid—
the trusty Keeper of the Keys at Hogwarts who had been a close friend of
Harry’s deceased parents—tells him. When Hagrid discovers that Harry’s
foster parents have kept the information from him because they are
ashamed Harry is “not normal,” Hagrid explodes with righteous fury: “It’s
an outrage! It’s a scandal! Harry Potter not knowin’ his own story.”
And it is an outrage and a scandal that LGBTQ people do not know their
history—that it has been kept from them.
This book is a series of biographical stories and historical sketches. They
begin before there was a United States and move forward to the twenty-first
century. You may know of some of these people or have read about them in