LGBTQ+ People and Their History Are Here to Stay
And We Need to Protect Them
Over the last two weeks, the new administration took a series of actions to scrape any mention of transgender people from federal websites. Evidence of the deletions are especially glaring at the National Parks Service (NPS), which now refers to “LGB” people. Just last month, I wrote about two NPS sites that reflect significant LGBTQ contributions to US history—the house where members of the lesbian separatist Furies Collective lived in Washington, D.C., and the home of Lucy Diggs Slowe and Mary Burrill, queer Black women who were life partners. As far as I can tell, the page for the Slowe-Burrill House is unchanged, but the page for the Furies Collective has the stunted “LGB” acronym all over it. The federal government is trying to rewrite history by writing transgender and gender nonconforming people out of it.
It’s easy to feel upset and overwhelmed by these erasures. My heart rate accelerated as I described the situation to my students yesterday. The federal government is attempting to deny the existence of transgender people in our history and in American life today. It’s natural to feel discouraged by the contrast between the vast scope of federal-level censorship and our limited power as citizens in an increasingly undemocratic society. And I confess that I initially fell into the sense of helplessness that authoritarian governments want to cultivate: it was too late, and they had won. Autocratic governments systematically erase histories that challenge narratives of their necessary and inevitable domination. Deleting a people’s history is a step along the way to negating their humanity.
But we still have options—and reasons for hope. Fifty years ago, the field of LGBTQ+ history barely existed. In 1975, Jonathan Ned Katz published Gay American History, the first collection of primary source documents about the LGBTQ+ past ever. Today, my office shelves literally overflow with books about queer history. The deletion of keywords (or letters) from federal websites is a setback, but it does not undo this tremendous accomplishment.
I belong to a small but mighty professional organization, the LGBTQ+ History Association. Over the last 72 hours its list-serve has lit up with reports of anti-trans government censorship, calls for action, and links to resources. The members of this organization are independent scholars, graduate students, K-12 teachers, and professors at colleges and universities across the United States. We aren’t sitting idly by as the new administration deletes our colleagues’ scholarship or refutes the evidence of transgender existence that historians have painstakingly documented.
Each of us can help preserve LGBTQ+ history—and, by doing so, defend LGBTQ+ people. The following suggestions reflect my own network / knowledge as well as suggestions culled from posts to the LGBTQ+ History Association list serve.
Learn LGBTQ+ History—And Tell Your Friends
One of the most important things you can do is read / listen to LGBTQ+ history. When friends, neighbors, or politicians tell you that trans people did not exist in the past, tell them about The Publick Universal Friend. In 1776, Jemima Wilkinson experienced death in Rhode Island, only to awaken as a genderless spirit named The Publick Universal Friend. The Friend devoted the rest of their life to sharing their knowledge of the spirit world and wore a mix of male and female clothing. Or tell them about Alan Hart, a medical doctor in Oregon who in 1917 convinced his physician to remove his uterus and ovaries in order to affirm his male gender. (Not sure where to find those stories? Keep reading!) Share resources about LGBTQ+ people with younger queer people in your life. Perhaps more than anyone else, these younger LGBTQ+ folks need to hear from you—from all of us—that they are seen, that they have a history, and that these executive orders change neither of those truths.
If you can, buy (or encourage your community library to buy) books by pathbreaking historians of the transgender experience—Susan Stryker, G. Samantha Rosenthal, Jen Manion, Hugh Ryan, Emily Skidmore, and Jules Gill-Peterson, to start.
If you prefer to listen to history, check out the Making Gay History podcast by journalist Eric Marcus.
And hey, maybe share this newsletter with a couple friends. :)
Promote the Inclusion of LGBTQ+ History in K-12 settings
Dr. Don Romesburg,* a fellow LGBTQ+ historian, led a movement in California that resulted in the California FAIR Education Act of 2011, which brought instructions about people with disabilities and LGBTQ people into the state’s social studies curricula. Its “Teaching LGBTQ History” website provides a wealth of resources for instructors, including professional development opportunities and sample lesson plans for elementary, middle, and high school students. Another helpful site for K-12 educators is History UnErased. They also have a podcast, “UnErasing LGBTQ History and Identities.” (History UnErased is a private company so you need to purchase a license to access their curricula.)
*Last month, Sonoma State University announced plans to lay off 46 instructors and shutter its Women and Gender Studies Department, where Don teaches. Click here to support the “SaveWGS” campaign.
Help Preserve the LGBTQ+ Past
If you’re able, donate to OutHistory.org and other non-governmental centers for the preservation of LGBTQ+ history. OutHistory.org was created by the pathbreaking independent scholar and activist Jonathan Ned Katz. Its current director is historian Marc Stein. It has exhibits with primary sources, timelines, and all kinds of fascinating information about the queer past.
Locate and download the LGBTQ+ histories that the NPS and other government agencies are deleting from their websites. Last week the NPS took down a 2019 publication, The Pride Guide: An Interactive Workbook for Exploring Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History and Places. You can find this public domain government document on my website (and surely in many other places). Papers from a government-funded 2017 conference about Stonewall remain available and unaltered on the NPS website as PDFs. Head to OutHistory for the NPS’s LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History (2016), which is a collection of essays by notable scholars.
Virtually Visit an LGBTQ+ Archive
The ONE Institute and Archives at UCLA maintains the archives of hundreds of queer people and organizations. I enjoyed this digital exhibit, “Together on the Air,” about radio and the LGBTQIA+ Latinx community. It includes links to audio from Radio GLLU, the first bilingual LGBTQIA+ radio program in the US.
The William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia is home to an outstanding archive of the city’s queer past. Their digital exhibit “Speaking Out for Equality: Gay Rights and the Courts” describes the importance of transgender rights to the broader struggle for LGBT equality.
Another major center for LGBTQ+ research, the Gerber-Hart Library and Archives in Chicago, has a digital exhibit on “Transgender Periodicals.”
The GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco has many digital exhibits, including “Legendary: African American LGBTQ Past Meets Present.”
As of publication, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History still has its LGBTQ+ History webpage up. The site includes a link to a YouTube documentary about Sylvia Rivera, a pathbreaking transgender activist.
There are so many more terrific places online where you still find all kinds of LGBTQ+ history! Dr. Alex Ketchum maintains a list of LGBTQ+ archives in the United States and Canada.
Support LGBTQ+ Community Histories
I’m a fan of Queer Newark Oral History Project, which chronicles and supports the local LGBTQ+ community.
The state of Delaware maintains a website for LGBTQ+ history, “We Have Always Been Here.” It’s a completely digital resource for information about important LGBTQ+ Delawarians and events, timelines, and primary source documents. Check out a related Instagram account, DelawareQueerHistory.
Google your city to see if there is a queer oral history or historical mapping project near you. I just googled “Cleveland queer history” and found Queer Cleveland, which maps LGBTQ+ sites and events in Northeast Ohio.
These projects all run on paper clips and prayer, so a donation of any amount helps.
Information and Action, Not Despair
The new administration’s attempts to delete and deny LGBTQ+ history are part of a concerted effort to rewrite the American past to justify a new regime premised on race- and gender-based inequality. The deletion of the “T” in LGBT might strike some as a small or even inconsequential edit. To an extent, I agree that we shouldn’t belabor an acronym as our democracy teeters on the edge of collapse. But we can maintain that perspective and recognize that efforts to erase LGBTQ+ people often mark the leading edge of ethno-nationalist power grabs. These histories really do matter.
It took a social movement to create the field of LGBTQ+ history in the 1970s. Today, we can all contribute to the social movement to defend it.