LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a kosmail to Chrislove.
I have reviewed a wide variety of books in the LGBT Literature series, covering many different topics—from queer men in the South to gays and lesbians in World War II to the Cold War persecution of homosexuality, among others. But it occurs to me that, as much history as I have covered here, I have not written that much about survey narratives of LGBT history. I know that many longtime readers of this series are probably well versed in LGBT history, but many others probably know little about it. That is not a judgment—indeed, even in 2018, it takes a certain amount of effort to learn about LGBT history, since it is so poorly taught (and, more often, not taught at all). For some readers, it might be good to offer a starting place rather than a deep dive into this or that historical episode. From time to time, I have spoken with students whose interest was piqued by the LGBT history I cover in class, and there are a few books that I tend to steer them toward as a beginning point for learning more. I would like to spend a little more time covering those kinds of books here at LGBT Literature, in addition to the more specialized monographs.
I regularly listen to an interview podcast, and the host always asks at the end, “What are three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to listeners?” It’s a big and tricky question, and interview subjects often hem and haw before answering. I’ve sometimes thought about how I would answer that question, and the book I’m covering today would definitely be on the list: Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States.
It is impossible for me to overstate how much A Queer History has shaped my life and career. The book is new(ish)—it was published in 2011, the year I began grad school, determined to study LGBT history. I entered my grad program with an intense interest in the subject and a strong belief in the importance of recovering, writing, and teaching LGBT history. My own coming-out, in my undergrad years, happened in the context of a spate of high-profile LGBT suicides, including that of Tyler Clementi in 2010. For me, reading about the history of my community—and, indeed, knowing that there was a history of my community that I could draw upon—was something of a lifeline. I entered grad school with an activist mentality, and I viewed the recovery of LGBT history as a life-or-death matter for queer people. That being said, I knew very little about LGBT history except for Stonewall. Immersing myself in the important historical monographs—Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities; Gay New York; Men Like That; The Lavender Scare; the list goes on—was an eye-opening experience. The history was richer than I could have imagined, but sometimes it was hard to put it all in perspective and really see the big picture of LGBT history.
Then, I picked up a copy of A Queer History. There are other LGBT historical surveys—some of which I will probably write about at some point for this series—but none like Bronski’s. In many ways, A Queer History is synthesis of U.S. LGBT historical scholarship up to 2011, and a way to make sense of it all. But Bronski’s work is so much more than that. It is not just “LGBT history”—it is a vitally important revision of American history. You might note the title’s similarity to Howard Zinn’s classic A People’s History of the United States, and Bronski does something very similar, but from a queer perspective. He begins the book by explaining a couple of major concepts for the reader to consider when it comes to LGBT history in the United States:
The first is that the contributions of people whom we may now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are integral and central to how we conceptualize our national history. Without the work of social activists, thinkers, writers, and artists such as We’Wha, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Martha “Calamity” Jane Cannary Burke, Edith Guerrier, Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Bayard Rustin, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cherrie Moraga, and Lily Tomlin, we would not have the country that we have today. Women and men who experienced and expressed sexual desires for their own sex and those who did not conform to conventional gender expectations have always been present, in both the everyday and the imaginative life of our country. They have profoundly helped shape it, and it is inconceivable, and ahistorical, to conceptualize our traditions and history without them.
The second, and slightly counterintuitive, key concept is that LGBT history does not exist. By singling out LGBT people and their lives, we are depriving them of their centrality in the broader sweep and breadth of American history. The impulse to focus on lives that have been shunned, marginalized, censored, ignored, and hidden in the past—and in previous histories of the United States—has been revolutionary in the growth of a vibrant LGBT community. This impulse is part of a larger social and political movement of Native American, African American, Latino/Latina, and other marginalized identities and cultures to reclaim and celebrate our “lost” histories. (Although as an identity, LGBT has, as we will see, a much newer history than other identities.) But it is equally important to understand that this is a transitional moment in history that has emerged in the past forty years precisely because those marginalized groups were so deeply dismissed.
More on history:
We have been taught, in our nation’s fairly unimaginative educational system, that history is a stable linear narrative with a fixed set of facts—names, dates, political actions, political ideas, laws passed and repealed.
As I was rereading that sentence in preparation for writing this diary, I thought, “That sounds familiar.” Probably because it’s something I say, in one form or another, on every first day of class—one of the many ways in which Bronski has influenced me. He continues:
In The Dialectic of Sex, a groundbreaking book of radical feminist theory, Shulamith Firestone writes that this conventional way of understanding the historical process as a series of snapshots—here is the American Revolution, here is the Declaration of Independence, here is the Emancipation Proclamation—is limiting and ultimately unhelpful. History, she states (drawing loosely on Marxist theory), is “the world as process, a natural flux of action and reaction, of opposites yet inseparable and interpenetrating . . . history as movie rather than as snapshot.”
Bronski goes on to rightly point out that much of “popular” LGBT history falls into that category:
It is essentially a list of famous lesbian or gay people and events used to justify contemporary understandings—here is Oscar Wilde, here are the Stonewall Riots, here are queer couples being married in Boston. This family album approach is appealing, because it provides a sense of identity and history, but it is ultimately misleading. In past decades women’s and gender studies scholars called this method of analysis “add one woman and stir.” The “important” women were added to the mix to create a gender balance, but there were no new layers of complexity or nuance as to what these women’s lives, thoughts, desires, and actions might actually mean for a shared historical past.
A Queer History is less “a queer history” and more a queered American history. Bronski ends his introduction with this awesome declaration:
To become American, to benefit from the contributions of LGBT people to this fabulous, horrible, scary, and wonderful country we call America, is to be a little queer. As history teaches, America only gets queerer.
When I say that A Queer History influenced me, I mean both personally and professionally. When I finally got a history classroom of my own, I adopted Bronski’s approach when it came to teaching U.S. history—not just when it came to LGBT history, but the histories of other marginalized communities as well. Some history courses relegate social movements to one or two designated “Civil Rights” days, but I make an effort to weave marginalized histories throughout the survey. Although I was not explicitly thinking about Bronski when I first designed my course, I realize that A Queer History is a large part of the reason I do that. As Bronski so rightly explains, it is not enough to isolate these histories and keep them separate from the rest of American history. These histories are American history.
Although his work is much more than a historical survey, Bronski does identify a few major themes when it comes to “the queer history of the United States”:
Perhaps the most startling revelation, which did not occur to me until I had finished writing, was that many of the most important changes for LGBT people in the past five hundred years have been a result of war. From the American Revolution to the war in Vietnam, wars have radically affected LGBT people and lives. These wars have had an enormous impact on all Americans, but their effects on LGBT people have been particularly pronounced, in part because the social violence of war affects sexuality and gender.
The second realization was that entertainment in its broadest sense—popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels—has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironicalls, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them.
One of the most salient themes here is the battle between the social purity movements (which began in the nineteenth century and have numerous descendants) and the right of LGBt people, and all Americans, to decide how to use their imaginations and bodies. This has always been a tension in American life, but the circumstances of the nineteenth century institutionalized it. This tension remains with us today.
Although it is titled A Queer History of the United States, it is really a queer history of America more broadly speaking, beginning with the first European contact with the continent and stretching to the 1990s. The first chapter, “A Persecuting Society,” deals extensively with Puritanism from the perspective of sex and gender.
By assigning sexuality to a private sphere, [Puritanism] prevented any public acknowledgment or discussion of almost all sexual activity. Thus it laid the groundwork for same-sex sexual behaviors and identities to be hidden and even considered shameful. When the Puritans rejected what they saw as sexual license or overt licentiousness in British culture, they fully accepted the role of sexuality and sexual desire in everyday life. This sharp divide—not exactly a contradiction, although it may have appeared so later, as sexual mores in American culture became more lenient—has remained a basic tenet of America’s cultural life. The tension between the needs and demands of society and the decisions of an individual to live her or his life as part of, yet separate from, the community informed the four centuries that followed Europeans arriving in this foreign land.
Not really a perspective often highlighted in American history survey class discussions about Puritans. This is what Bronski does in A Queer History, which is what makes it so fresh and fascinating. As he continues the narrative, he deals with such topics as the creation of American masculinity in the era of the American Revolution. Masculinity is also at the center of his discussion of the Civil War:
An immediate effect of the Civil War on LGBT lives and history was how it shaped ideas about gender; specifically, what it meant to “be a man.” Historian Drew Faust notes that during the Civil War, manhood was “defined and achieved by killing.”
[...]
The Civil War had deeply affected men’s relationships to one another. Killing now defined a new type of American masculinity, but it also exposed men’s physical and emotional vulnerability. In confronting their own mortality, men could explore, often with one another, new expressions of sexuality. This is seen most clearly in the writings of Walt Whitman. Considered by many to be the most notable nineteenth-century poet of American democracy, Whitman’s poems and letters are a perfect example of affectional and sexual behaviors between men in this period.
The book continues chronologically, covering the Gilded Age and early twentieth century, World War II (which rightly gets a whole chapter), and the social movement activity of the 1960s and 1970s—all while placing queer sexualities front and center. There is more I want to highlight, but this diary is already getting to be too long.
Although the book ends with the AIDS epidemic, there is an interesting epilogue that addresses more contemporary issues—and which, one day, might be viewed as a time capsule by fascinated readers trying to understand the queer history of the 2010s! In the epilogue, Bronski notes the great cultural and political strides LGBT people have made in the United States, from more youth coming out to more representation in popular culture to civil rights accomplishments. The epilogue was written while we were in the throes of the marriage equality debate, and Bronski closes his book with some thoughts on equality (some of which will prove to be controversial, and not all of which I agree with):
America is, of course, still striving to fully realize the constitutional ideal of equal protection under the law. What if equality under the law works against another unrealized American ideal: individual freedom and autonomy? The desire for legal equality has moved some to argue that same-sex marriage is a social good, not because it is equal to heterosexual marriage but because it is morally or ethically better than other same-sex relationships or sexual interactions.
[...]
Such language is antithetical to the other major historical root of the LGBT movement: the fight to eliminate or limit the state’s involvement in consensual relationships. It is also not the language of equality under the law. Some same-sex marriage supporters believe that protecting the family and the institution of marriage is a convincing argument to win over more conservative heterosexuals to support same-sex marriage. Many LGBT people, like many people in America, agree with this language of protection themselves, even though half of married heterosexuals get divorced. It is language that, twenty years ago, would have been rare in the LGBT movement. Why is it being used now?
Regardless of how you feel about the epilogue, the value of A Queer History of the United States—to the field of LGBT history, yes, but even more broadly to the study of American history—cannot be overstated. I’ll end this diary with Bronski’s closing words, which so succinctly sum up what A Queer History is all about:
All of which goes to prove that LGBT people are simply Americans—no less and no more. The idea of America has existed, in some form, for five hundred years. LGBT people, despite enormous struggles to be accepted and to be given equality, have made America what it is today—that great, fascinating, complicated, sometimes horrible, sometimes wonderful place that it was in the beginning.
LGBT Literature Schedule:
September 30: OPEN
October 28: OPEN
November 25: OPEN
December 30: OPEN
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