A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 1)

by Michael Bronski

Queer History of the United States is the first book in Beacon Press’s ReVisioning American History series. This series is committed to offering fresh perspectives and examining our history through the lens of those groups whose stories have been excluded from the canon.

It is foolish to think that there can be an objective view of history.

The writing and reading of history is always, consciously or not, a political act of interpretation.

History teaches something new every time it is rewritten or interpreted. Pedagogy, like history, will never be able to contain all of America—a great country, an evil country, a place of tremendous generosity and welcome as well as pronounced disdain for foreigners and outsiders. America is not one thing or another. America is queer.

Europeans came to the Americas with an extraordinarily rigorous sense of how gender and sexuality should be organized. These strict ideas were bulwarked by rigid civil and religious statutes. The Europeans attempted to eradicate many non-European gender-normative customs, traditions, and behaviors. They often did this through accepted practices of violence, such as capturing and enslaving non-Christians and forced conversion. This legal and religious repression and violence provided a template for how mainstream European culture would treat LGBT people throughout much of U.S. history.

animals.’”8 European religious and social thought held that people who did not adhere to Christian concepts of sexual behavior, gender affect, or modesty were less than human; they were like animals.

While his actions were certainly considered grievously illegal and immoral, as private acts they had less impact on the community than, say, an act of adultery, which might result in pregnancy or the dissolution of a marriage.

Nonmarital sexuality was immoral because it did not contribute to the family on which society organized.

The Puritans had fled Great Britain to secure religious freedom for themselves, not others; they never intended to found a democracy.

These intense feelings were a sin, because they were dangerously discordant with the Puritan concept of individualism that demanded, especially for men, emotional control. According to Bray, Wigglesworth’s “sin” was feeling emotions too strongly, not necessarily the content of the feelings.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, over 650,000 Africans were brought to North America as slaves. However, this is a relatively small number compared to the twelve million Africans who were transported and sold, mostly in the Caribbean and South America, in the mid-Atlantic slave trade, also referred to as the first Middle Passage.

It would be inaccurate and unwise to make strict parallel claims for the oppression of slaves and gay people. But the extensive legal and social effects of slavery have shaped the social and political context of America today. The acceptance of slavery as a philosophical concept and political reality laid the groundwork for the justification of “othering”—designating a group of people as “different,” placing them outside of the legal, social, and moral framework granting full citizenship.

To the Europeans, native people and Africans who looked and behaved differently from them were dangerous to the accepted morality of the dominant culture, and therefore they were treated with varying degrees of moral and social scorn.

By othering, European colonists began constructing a new national identity and citizenship premised on a massive displacement of their own sexual and gender anxieties onto marginalized groups.

the newly formed United States—predicated on revolutionary ideas, yet deeply flawed in the execution of them—concepts

This new American man was bold, rugged, aggressive, unafraid of fighting, and comfortable asserting himself. This model was in complete contrast to the Englishman, who was stereotyped as refined, overly polite, ineffectual, and often effeminate.

federal Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which was enforced until 1943.

interested in empowering women, not protecting them—a

outside of the accepted, legally sanctioned social and judicial system; it claims its authority in a code of ethics based on human dignity and the innate worth of the individual.

They argue that sexuality is natural and positive, that sex can be solely about pleasure and, if consensual, should not be the subject of any laws. These

The car, as well as advances in other forms of transportation and the rise of a middle class, led to institutionalized vacations and formalized leisure time.

The acquisition of a wife was an essential aspect, if not the essential aspect, of American manhood.

The Veterans Administration quickly determined that a Section 8 discharge precluded a former service member from entitlements. These included access to health care at a VA hospital and accessing the numerous benefits of the GI Bill, such as college tuition, occupational training, mortgage insurance, and loans to start businesses. Worse, a Section 8 discharge often meant that the former service member was unable to get a job in civilian life.

Section 8 discharges were given more frequently. Homosexuals were not the only ones affected. African Americans were discharged, often for protesting civilian and military Jim Crow laws, in such disproportionate numbers—22.2 percent for a group that made up only 6.5 percent of the army—that the national black press started a campaign against the practice.

which categorized homosexual behavior as a crime, and the more “enlightened” principles of medicine, which viewed homosexuality as an illness.

The “sociology of the homosexual” was frequently conflicted, and when presented through the lens and language of journalism, often exploitative.

The hyperheterosexuality of 1950s American culture contained a deep distrust of the single man.

This reclaiming of past popular culture, often making fun of it while simultaneously using it to comment on the present, was called “camp.” Lesbian cultural critic Susan Sontag states that “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And ‘Camp’ is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”

He explores this idea in his 1963 The Fire Next Time: “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

Almost all of the people killed, injured, or arrested were African Americans.

feminists had identified lack of reproductive control as a central impediment to women’s personal, sexual, and economic independence and freedom.

The outpouring of religious rhetorical fervor and conservative political activity was largely, as in past awakenings, a direct response to progressive social changes.

the decline of America’s social and political status around the world, and the sexualization of popular culture.

They almost always reaffirm traditional gender and sexual stereotypes, rarely show LGBT characters as central protagonists, and make the argument that mainstream culture should accept LGBT people, never questioning how gender and sexuality are viewed in normative culture.

Certainly it is true that while laws are for everyone, they are often enforced mainly against the disenfranchised.