Political organizing by oppressed Americans in the 1970s helped create lesbian, gay, bisexual or pansexual, trans, and queer history as a field of study. Why would people’s struggles for rights and freedom include wanting to be represented in historical accounts? Inclusive histories reflect the diversity of people in the United States, expose institutional discrimination against minorities, and outline their contributions toward the American democratic experiment. Like women’s history, LGBTQ+ history has developed through four stages that Gerda Lerner first identified: compensation, contributions, revision, and social construction.[1] LGBTQ+ historians first compensated for heterosexism and cissexism by finding LGBTQ+ people to reinsert into historical narratives, then determined how LGBTQ+ people contributed to history. As they analyzed primary sources, they slowly revised historical narratives through testing generalizations and periodization against evidence found by and about LGBTQ+ people. Finally, the field understood that sexual orientation and gender themselves are social constructions.
By the mid-1970s Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel had founded the Lesbian Herstory Archive (figure 4.1), collecting evidence of lesbian existence for the public, and Jonathan Ned Katz published a thick book of primary sources, Gay American History.[2] Stages one and two included uncovering the gender identity or sexual orientation of known figures like civil rights leaders Pauli Murray and Bayard Rustin. For stages two and three, scholars have debated how best to tell LGBTQ+ history—what counts as a first, who and what historians should emphasize, what places to highlight. Stage-four scholars stopped declaring that anyone who wrote intimately about someone of the same gender was “gay” or “lesbian” (why not bisexual?) and instead questioned how time-bound those terms are and debated how to identify people from time periods before society widely considered sexual orientation an identity.
Figure 4.1. At the 2007 LGBT Pride March in New York, people hold a banner representing Lesbian Herstory Archives. (CC-BY Istolethetv.)
This chapter takes the approach that LGBTQ+ history hinges on how concepts of sexuality and gender have changed to produce today’s identities, how queer Americans have formed community, and how these minority groups have forged movements using different tactics to gain rights and freedoms amid resistance and backlash. The chapter synthesizes formative, respected scholarship and includes some primary sources and recent research. It discusses the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality; how LGBTQ+ intersects with other structures of inequality that social institutions have enforced; and how LGBTQ+ people have struggled for social justice despite resistance and setbacks.
Ideas about sexuality and gender have changed historically. This basic premise is one of the ways that we know that sex, gender, and sexuality are social constructs—that is, they are ideas that emerge from society and are changed through social action. Queer Americans have formed different types of communities in different historical eras, and LGBTQ+ people have struggled for social justice. The political struggles of LGBTQ+ people intersect with and have been influenced by other struggles for social justice, like civil rights and women’s rights.
Colonial America through the Late 1800s
Colonial Europeans established norms of marital reproduction and a sexual double standard within gender roles, which rendered what fell outside these two ideals unacceptable.[3] The Europeans’ encounters with nearly six hundred indigenous nations and all the ways these societies constructed gender and allowed varied sexual practices challenged European essentialist beliefs. Europeans tended to believe their Christian God created two fixed genders through sex assignment, set gender-divided duties, and made reproduction the purpose of sex. Thus, sex acts for purposes other than reproduction were signs of sin rather than any fixed identity. Yet European and, later, North American records give evidence that over 130 tribes recognized some individuals as women whom Europeans considered male or acknowledged some persons as men whom Europeans sexed female.[4]
The Spaniard Pedro Fages, for example, reported from his 1770 California expedition, “I have submitted substantial evidence that those Indian men who, both here and farther inland, are observed in the dress, clothing and character of women—there being two or three such in each village—pass as sodomites by profession. . . . They are called joyas, and are held in great esteem.”[5] Colonizers’ descriptions forced what later became known as two-spirit people into inadequate Western models, such as calling the joyas men and sodomites.[6] White settlers gradually amassed power through irregular warfare to impose their norms by murdering and dispossessing civilians. An indirect effect was queering indigenous genders by labeling variation sinful, criminal, and subject to punishment.[7]
The intersections of race and sexuality are foundational to colonial history. Consolidation of English power included writing white supremacy into Virginia law. By the 1690s colonialists divided people into categories of white, Negro, mulatto, and Indian and decreed enslaved status heritable through the mother. Many colonies enacted laws against interracial sexual relationships, but judicial systems prosecuted enslaved Black, free Black, and sometimes poor white people and not the plantation owners, ensuring that slaveholders’ power included the ability to rape without legal consequences.[8] Meanwhile, church and colonial laws drew on the dominant universalizing view of sexuality as simply behavior and not a basis for majority and minority social identities. Legal statutes deemed sodomy (oral or anal sex) unnatural, a sin and a crime.[9]
An English servant’s case illustrates how class also intersected with gender and sexuality in colonial America. Thomasine Hall lived as a girl, woman, and man before migrating to Virginia in 1627 as a male indentured servant, Thomas. There Hall’s sewing skills and sporadic dress in women’s clothes led neighbor women to question Hall’s gender. A group of women physically examined Hall three times. Amid rumors that Hall fornicated with a serving woman, the General Court assessed Hall’s gender. Examiners declared Hall had male genitalia. Hall’s response according to the court records was “hee had not the use of the mans parte” and “I have a peece of an hole [vulva].”[10] After townswomen refused the official ruling that Hall was female, the court decreed Hall must wear a combination of men’s and women’s clothing. We will never know whether Hall was intersex or what to call Hall’s sexual desire. Evidence suggests that, like other colonists, Hall enjoyed sex for pleasure outside of marriage. Anglo society was more bothered by fluidity than hybridity in wanting to fix Hall in place as both woman and man.[11]
Gender, racial, and class hierarchies established by the eighteenth century all helped shape twentieth-century LGBTQ+ organizing, but first people had to start forming communities based on their same-sex relationships.
Passionless Women, Romantic Friendships, and Vanguard Communities
From the American Revolution through the Civil War, defining sex as acts rather than as the basis for social identity continued. New gender norms, however, affected attitudes toward same-gender attraction. Americans in the early republic rejected previous colonial-era views of women as sexual beings. Instead, in the late 1700s, society considered Protestant, middle-class women less lustful and more spiritually moral than men. Idealizing women as passionless and sexually self-controlled compared with men’s “natural” sex drive constrained women’s public (though not private) behavior. Women reformers, whose organizing started in churches, asserted that society needed women’s input because of their Christian virtues.[12] The perception that women’s and men’s temperaments and desires were distinctly different facilitated wide acceptance of emotionally intense same-gender relationships alongside traditional marriage.[13] Occasionally, women who could support themselves lived together in so-called Boston marriages. Contemporaries were more likely to attribute a sexual component to romantic friendships between men, like the poet Walt Whitman’s with Peter Doyle, than to women’s relationships because of society’s continued belief that a penis was necessary for sex.[14]
Industrialization through the 1800s also played a role in forming communities based on sexual orientation. As industries spread, more people migrated to larger urban centers for factory and related jobs and into places for raw production that had extreme gender imbalances. Despite the prevalent view that same-sex affection was behavior anyone might show, rather than an identity,communities based on same-sex attraction formed. By the late 1800s, New York City had developed a subculture with identity terms like fairy for effeminate working-class men and queer for gender normative men who loved men.[15]New Orleans was another hub. An array of woman-woman relationships also existed, usually divided by class and race. Lesbians sometimes patronized bars, dance halls, and other public spaces where queer men congregated in the early 1900s.[16] Police from Los Angeles to New York might arrest women wearing pants and sporting short hair on charges of masquerading as men.[17] Same-sex relationships also occurred among men doing the physical labor that produced resources for industrial production—mining in California, Pacific Northwest logging, Seattle dock work, and railroad labor transporting goods—despite anti-sodomy laws that penalized these behaviors.[18]
How Sexology Pathologized Identity and Led to Solidifying the Straight State
Near the same time that communities developed self-definitions, European sexology repackaged marital reproduction and widespread views on sin and crime in the language of medical science. These sexologists articulated the concepts of “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality”.[19] The earliest sexologists campaigned against sodomy laws by asserting that same-sex attraction constituted a form of benign variation among humans—that is, harmless identities differing from those focused on reproducing. Most sexologists, though, argued same-sex attraction correlated with gender transgression as a pathological identity.[20] Newspapers had recurring exposés on working-class women passing as men for work and freedom. By 1892 the pathology model played a role in a Memphis insanity inquisition. This case exposed the plans of two women, whom relatives had thought to be romantic friends, to marry each other by having one assume a male identity. But when family members broke up this middle-class relationship, the distraught “masculine” half of the couple murdered her lover, and the defense lawyer her father hired used sexology to argue insanity.[21]
With the emergence of sexology, gender nonnormativity and same-sex attraction were now mental illness, in addition to being violations of religious ideas about sin and criminal laws. Although queer communities continued to spread, society’s validation of romantic friendships declined, and antivice campaigns arose by the 1920s and punished queer public expression. After Prohibition ended, federal and state officials enacted laws to control alcoholic beverages, to police respectability in bars. State agents held authority to revoke alcohol licenses if bar owners allowed the presence of undesirables like prostitutes, gamblers, gays, or lesbians (terms in the popular culture by the 1920s), who according to these laws, made establishments disorderly.[22] From the 1930s through the 1960s police freely busted bar patrons on suspicion of homosexuality.[23]
During World War II the military spread the normalization of heterosexuality and negative perceptions of “the homosexual.” Psychologists convinced military officials that homosexuality was a mental disorder that threatened morale and discipline. As eighteen million men moved through draft boards and induction stations, staffers asked questions designed to exclude gay men from service. Such questions heightened recognition that homosexuality existed even while pathologizing it. Officials feared that straight men would claim to be gay to avoid the draft; to deter this, they labeled anyone rejected for homosexuality as a “sexual psychopath” and gave employers the right to review draft records. Women’s auxiliary units started in World War II, but because criminal law usually ignored lesbian sex acts, the military did not similarly screen women recruits. Gay service members caught having sex or suspected of it faced humiliating expulsion after systematic inquisitions, which left several thousand men and dozens of women with undesirable discharges on their records.[24]
Gay and lesbian communities proliferated during and after the war, especially in cities with a military presence.[25] During the Cold War, federal, state, and local authorities redoubled efforts to achieve a straight state, including congressional laws and a presidential executive order against employing homosexuals in federal jobs.[26] Recent scholars have argued that the 1950s McCarthy Red Scare most victimized gay men and lesbians.[27]George Harris was among thousands fired. When the Central Intelligence Agency did a background check, they asked people from his Mississippi hometown about his sexual orientation. Suddenly jobless and homeless, Harris got a ride to Texas. He met Jack Evans soon afterward at a Dallas gay bar. As they dated, fell in love, and then lived together, they steered clear of bars to avoid arrest, and—fifty-nine years later—they became the first gay couple to marry legally in Dallas County.[28]
Watch A Couple In Their 80s Get Married In Dallas County's First Same-Sex Ceremony
George Harris and Jack Evans are married in Dallas June 26, 2015, in this video. They were both in their eighties, having lived together for fifty-five years.
Describe what you witness in the video. What do you think is the relationship between the videographer and the couple? What terms, items, or actions featured in the video are you unfamiliar with?
Given the history you learned in this chapter, why was this occasion so publicized and celebrated?
Conduct a bit more research on George and Jack; how did their lives together reflect larger historical events from the 1960s to 2015?
Check Your Knowledge
Contributed by Has Arakelyan, Rio Hondo College
Multiple-Choice Questions
1. What is one reason why oppressed Americans in the 1970s wanted to be represented in historical accounts?
A) To erase evidence of discrimination
B) To reflect the diversity of people in the United States and expose institutional discrimination
C) To focus only on political leader
D) To avoid discussing social construction
2. What are the four stages of LGBTQ+ history development, as adapted from Gerda Lerner’s model?
A) discovery, activism, revision, celebration
B) exclusion, inclusion, resistance, equality
C) protest, legislation, acceptance, normalization
D) compensation, contributions, revision, social construction
3. What was the primary purpose of the Lesbian Herstory Archive founded by Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel?
A) To collect evidence of lesbian existence for the public
B) To campaign for marriage equality
C) To publish fiction about lesbians
D) To organize political protests
4. What is a key question debated by stage-four LGBTQ+ historians?
A) How to define marriage in the 21st century
B) How to increase funding for archives
C) Whether to include women’s history in LGBTQ+ history
D) How to identify people from time periods before sexual orientation was widely considered an identity
5. What is a major shift that occurred in stage four of LGBTQ+ history scholarship?
A) Declaring all historical figures with same-gender relationships as gay or lesbian
B) Focusing only on legal history
C) Questioning the time-bound nature of terms like “gay” and “lesbian” and how to identify people from earlier periods
D) Ignoring primary sources
Discussion Questions
Why is it important for minority groups, such as LGBTQ+ people, to be represented in historical narratives? What impact does this have on society?
How do the four stages of LGBTQ+ history development help us understand the evolution of the field? Can you think of examples for each stage?
What are the challenges historians face when trying to identify the sexual orientation or gender identity of people from the past?
How does the concept of social construction influence the way we interpret historical evidence about sexuality and gender?
In what ways do archives and collections, like the Lesbian Herstory Archive, contribute to the preservation and understanding of LGBTQ+ history?
Multiple-Choice Questions - Answers
1. B) To reflect the diversity of people in the United States and expose institutional discrimination
2. D) compensation, contributions, revision, social construction
3. A) To collect evidence of lesbian existence for the public
4. D) How to identify people from time periods before sexual orientation was widely considered an identity
5. C) Questioning the time-bound nature of terms like “gay” and “lesbian” and how to identify people from earlier periods
