George Chauncey

“Most gay men did not speak out against anti-gay policing so openly, but to take this as evidence that they had internalized anti-gay attitudes is to ignore the strength of the forces arrayed against them, to misinterpret silence as acquiescence, and to construe resistance in the narrowest of terms - as the organization of formal political groups and petitions.”
― George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940

“As Rotundo, Donald Yacovone, and other historians have argued, the men involved in such same-sex relationships should not retrospectively be classified as homosexual, since no concept of the homosexual existed in their culture and they did not organize their emotional lives as homosexuals; many of them were also on intimate terms with women and went on to marry. Nonetheless, the same historians persist in calling such men heterosexual, as if that concept did exist in the early nineteenth century.”
― George Chauncey