A Queer History of the United States

ReVisioning American History #1

by Michael Bronski

Winner of a 2012 Stonewall Book Award in nonfictionThe first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present.In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to “Publick Universal Friend,” refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York. In the mid-nineteenth century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized “female marriage.” And in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. These are just a few moments of queer history that Michael Bronski highlights in this groundbreaking book.   Intellectually dynamic and endlessly provocative, A Queer History of the United States is more than a “who’s who” of queer it is a book that radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon primary documents, literature, and cultural histories, noted scholar and activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from 1492 to the 1990s, and has written a testament to how the LGBT experience has profoundly shaped our country, culture, and history.   A Queer History of the United States abounds with startling examples of unknown or often ignored aspects of American history—the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies, the prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil War, the impact of new technologies on LGBT life in the nineteenth century, and how rock music and popular culture were, in large part, responsible for the devastating backlash against gay rights in the late 1970s. Most striking, Bronski documents how, over centuries, various incarnations of social purity movements have consistently attempted to regulate all sexuality, including fantasies, masturbation, and queer sex. Resisting these efforts, same-sex desire flourished and helped make America what it is today.   At heart, A Queer History of the United States is simply about American history. It is a book that will matter both to LGBT people and heterosexuals. This engrossing and revelatory history will make readers appreciate just how queer America really is.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, Social Justice, Politics, American History

243 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 10, 2011

About the author

Michael Bronski has written extensively on LGBT issues for four decades. He has published widely in the LGBT and mainstream press and his work appears in numerous anthologies. He is a Senior Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.

Reviews

[Justin Tate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Bronski is a badass LGBT historian whose contributions I've long followed. He always seems to be the go-to academic for scholarly introductions of significant gay novels, particularly major pop publications such as Richard Amory's Song of the Loon and William Carney's The Real Thing. Closest to my heart is his book Pulp Friction (2003) which is one of the earliest academic examinations of gay mass-market paperbacks of the 1960s and '70s.

In this book, A Queer History of the United States (2011), Bronski has an even more ambitious goal—dissecting queer experiences throughout the entirety of American history. Or at least up to 1990. He considers more current developments "news" rather than history.

Though the focus is obviously on queer issues, there is a significant discussion of American history in general. This isn't that surprising considering that major events for the general populous were also major events for gay Americans. The World Wars, for example, were often a place for sexual self-discovery and re-thinking gender expectations. We know Rosie the Riveter was significant to women in general but learning how this played into perceptions of lesbian women was new to me.

Bronski's interest in pop culture yields valuable in other unexpected situations, such as when he unearths obscure Gold Rush-era poetry pining over erotic same-sex desire, the existence of celebrity nineteenth century drag performers, and other figures who were probably trans but in a time long before we had the proper vocabulary to identify them as such. Given how much same-sex desire has been oppressed over history, it is often startling to discover such records exist.

I consider myself familiar with major gay events (Stonewall) and figures (Walt Whitman), but this book goes far beyond the basics. Bronski hits the highlights, but he doesn't linger too long on history that is largely familiar. Instead, his focus is on the more neglected details that you won't be able to read about anywhere else.

Generally, the best thing about this book is Bronski's way of providing a queer lens to major American events. Studying history from minority points of view is critical to a more complete understanding of our country. I’m thrilled to see there’s a whole Audible series called "ReVisioning History" that takes on US history from African American, Latinx, Disability, Indigenous Peoples' and Black Women perspectives. History is an enormous, complicated, and multi-faceted experience for so many different groups of people. The only way to begin to understand the magnitude of our past is to see it from multiple angles. I'll definitely be checking out those other books in this series.

Critics of Bronski's book seem to focus their concern on a lack of details around trans issues. They also point out that there is a greater focus on white gay men than gay men of color, or lesbians in general. I think these are fair critiques and point to the danger of trying to be the voice for an entire population, particularly a population as broad-reaching as "queer." I suspect the simple reality is that Bronski's area of expertise does not extend as well into those experiences. I understand how challenging it is to be an expert in any one thing, much less multiple things.

Rather than fault him for this, let's recognize that a door is open for additional volumes to be written by someone who can fill in the gaps. Maybe that person is you? As Bronski notes, queer history is among the hardest history to uncover because so much of it happened in secret. We need more scholars who’re willing to dig through archives, read old newspapers, diaries and scraps of paper. We need people to tell the stories of queer persons from long ago. To acknowledge they existed, and to finally give them a voice. Don’t depend on someone else to write that book. If you do, there’s a good chance it’ll never be written.

Overall, if you’re interested in history—queer or otherwise—this is a cleanly written, thoughtful, and well-researched place to start. The audio version is a great option for those who generally find history books tough to get through. Vikas Adam has a velvety voice that gives off sexy professor vibes. I could listen to him read anything!

[Sunny Lu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty solid and comprehensive history, 3.5 because like I’m a communist who thinks America needs to not exist but that’s okay

[V. Briceland · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Queer History of the United States takes the Schoolhouse Rock approach to surveying queer culture in America. It's fast-moving, it hits all the expected high and low points, it's affirming, and it never explores its subject beyond cartoon depth. All it really lacks is a catchy tune.

Though the book alleges to cover a period of time spanning from before 1492 to the present, its pre-colonial and colonial history is at best sketchy—in fact, just about anything before the turn of the twentieth century is simply a quick run-down of the usual literary and political suspects (Walt Whitman might've been gay, y'all!). And by 'the present', Bronski means 1990, the year at which he unapologetically cuts off his narrative.

Bronski's gallop through several hundred years of history certainly covers a lot of territory, and for that it may be worth reading. Anyone expecting analysis or a critical eye may be disappointed to find that the read is a bit like attending a cocktail party and hearing all the expected names dropped, but not being able after to remember if anything interesting about them was said.

[Cody VC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would be five stars if not for some significant flaws. I would recommend this for any introductory course on US history, as long as it was supplemented with other texts such as The Transgender Studies Reader.

Bronski does a fair job including gender variance in the beginning, but peters out somewhere around the 1940s and never adequately recovers (not even a mention of Christine Jorgensen? Really?). Yet even the early mentions could have been handled better; for instance, Bronski says in the text that "berdache" is inaccurate and offensive, yet makes no attempt to use an alternative term--a failing made all the more striking when the book jacket captions one of the illustrations with the current term "two-spirit".
(He also discusses a person who refused to use pronouns by repeatedly referring to this person as "her".)

The book could also have benefited from one more look-over by an editor; I found a few typos here and there, and there were a couple of places where facts could have been introduced somewhat earlier in terms of narrative.

I do still hope that this comes to be considered an important text, because it is sorely needed.

[Jay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Messy and not my jam. A number of pitfalls that are real...
- centering whiteness
- centering cis experiences, esp amab cis experiences
- conflation of desire and labels gltbqqia
- uncreative notions of what resistance can look like that glorify violent actions and invisibilze other ways ppl have resisted and survived

where's the intersectional, anti-colonial framework to at least hold space for the possibility of radical kinds of queernesses throughout time?
it's hard to write these histories in ways that don't fall into these (and other pitfalls), glad this author have it a go. but for real there need to be better books than this.
anybody have other book suggestions?

[Cee · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a queer person and a historian especially interested in social history, I thought this book would be an interesting and enlightening read. While I did learn a few things and did more research about a few people, in general, I was extremely disappointed. This book was written by a cis white gay man, and that's VERY obvious.

The only time Bronski mentions bisexual people is when describing/defining the LGBTQ+ acronym. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember him using the word to describe a person at all. He does mention bisexual people, but doesn't label them in such a way. He also implies at least once that bisexual people have chosen a "side" when they settle down with people of another gender; for example, he goes on about Ralph Waldo Emerson's potential queerness (he had homosexual thoughts about a fellow student when he was in school) and then says that it's surprising Emerson married a woman and had children. Emerson never gave himself a label or addressed his potential queerness, so I'm not asking Bronski to label him either. That said, it's damaging to bisexuals (like myself!) to assume that, if someone is interested in someone of the same gender, they can't be happy or involved with someone of another gender.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book is focused heavily on white gay men. The next focus is white gay women. As a "queer" history book, I expected much more queer history - shocking, right? LGBTQ+ involves more groups than just the L and the G. I call myself queer because it's easier than explaining how I can be both bisexual and asexual. Reading this book and not seeing the word "asexual" at all is disheartening. We're part of the Q+ too.

Similarly - and perhaps this is because I'm asexual - so much of the book is focused on "erotic"/sexual themes and lines. A person can be LGBTQ+ without having sex with someone of the same gender. We're not just sexual beings.

As a cis person, the trans/nonbinary history presented here often made me uncomfortable. Sometimes, that can be good! I believe in challenging your beliefs and learning new things and new ways to be an ally. This is not that. An example: a preacher named the Public Universal Friend lived in New England. The Friend was assigned female at birth, but openly refused to identify with a gender or with gendered pronouns, two facts that Bronski admits. In the same breath, however, he refers to the Friend as "she." Ignoring the fact that the singular "they" goes back to the 14th century in English, the Friend's colleagues and acquaintances didn't use gendered pronouns for them. Why did Bronski feel the need to? I don't think that Bronski is intentionally transphobic, but it's very uncomfortable. (That said, he does refer to trans people as trans****ites several times, so maybe it is intentional. I'm not sure on the reclaiming status of that word, but as a cis person, I don't feel comfortable using it.)

Bronski also centers most of the book on whiteness. Conflating fetishization of Native American and Black people with liberal attitudes toward culture and sexuality is, uh, Bad. For example, Morton and his Merrymount colonists recruiting Native women into their settlement so that they can intermarry with them almost certainly doesn't show a more tolerant social attitude.

One of the few explicit mentions of non-white people is about b*rdaches, a term that Bronski admits is offensive to Native people. Doing even a small amount of Googling shows that the term two-spirit was first popularized in 1990 - twenty years before Bronski published his book - so his use of the slur (other than as an introductory term, since it was apparently in use in the 19th century) is unnecessary and harmful.

I recognize that evidence of LGBTQ+ people in American history is regrettably sparse, even though we've always been here. That said, this book does little to be intersectional or challenging. There's a lot of dichotomy and little depth.

[TheBookWarren · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.50 Stars (Rnd down⬇️) — History is most horrifically but also most magnificently, subjective. This is indisputable. Yet, it is seldom the case that such stark & contrasting ‘versions’ of history can be reached, deduced, concluded, derived, forthwith & delivered in a vacuum, of differing brands— quite often — from the same brands own viewpoint.

This is the type of History novel that the 21st Century now commands. No, make that demands. For all of this modern-times’ madness and eccentricities, revisionist history is most certainly one of the more robustly-endearing. Yet, I find it hard to delineate the obvious questions that arise from this brilliant and confronting type of historic-literary publication..

For this reason, all I can say is.. Read this, then as I will, read the next instalments and before you read another page of History-books abound — Ask yourself if what you are about to read holds water or moreover, hold a candle to this high-bar indeed.

[Dona's Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certain themes arise in this compact history of Queerness in America. One of the most important is: How prejudice thrives within community(society); and how distinctivity (my term for the state or act of existing outside of the socially acceptable) survives despite society, in order to access community.

The reality of the persecuting society never completely vanishes from U.S. history. It becomes increasingly refined. In the colonies, social and political persecution of certain groups was relatively indiscriminate, making few distinctions among individuals within a minority group. Gradually, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, we see a growing cultural schism occurring between the private and the public, which was largely the reason people were able to explore nontraditional gender roles. p39

Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping unacceptable behavior private. p39

Also like: When Distinctivity is defined by its own existence and not by the socially acceptable, Distinctivity gains more nuanced access to community and thus society.

Because of harsh living conditions, the absence of strict legal policing, and relaxed demands of accepted propriety, gender norms in the West were markedly different from those in the East. p42

San Francisco’s Jeanne Bonnet was repeatedly arrested for cross- dressing and petty theft; at the end of her short life, she organized prostitutes to leave their work and make a living shoplifting. p42

This is a central paradox of U.S. masculinity. Masculinity has been increasingly defined by active heterosexual desire and relationships, yet is also defined by participation in an all- male homosocial world that has the potential for sexual interaction. p44

“The cowboy is queer; he is odd; he doesn’t fit in; he resists community.” p44

And like: For moralists, demands that sexual expression and desire conform to a uniform social standard is less about maintaining sexual similarness, and more about containing Distinctivity, or rather the countless possibilities of its iteration.

For public moralists, the problem was not just that theaters bred immorality and crime, but that they let the imagination flourish. The theater was a central form of entertainment in urban areas and provided titillating alternatives to traditional ideas about gender and sexuality. This had been true for decades. In the early 1860s, poet and actor Adah Isaacs Menken, a Jewish convert of African American and Creole parentage who was a close friend of Walt Whitman’s and had both female and male lovers, became internationally infamous when shetook the lead role in Mazeppa. At the show’s climax, Menken, playing a young man, appeared mostly undressed and rode a live horse across the stage. Menken was a prototype of the socially dangerous “unruly woman” who refused to conform to accepted norms of gender and sexuality. p104-5

I like that this book treats the subject as a history of queerness, rather than a history of a collection of queer identities, and that I could formulate a reading of it from that unified place. I am slightly frustrated with what feels to me like a lack of bisexual perspective. But this book is such a concise work, I feel this could explain my complaint. We hear mainly from the expected bisexual voices-- Walt Whitman and Andy Warhol-- but I wanted to hear from Eleanor Roosevelt, Josephine Baker, and Virginia Woolf.

This is an excellent, tight history, but it makes me realize I need to read many more books on the subject. Perhaps it is the job of a good history book to leave a reader with more questions than it answers.

[Degenerate Chemist · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 140 pages.

This is poorly researched pop history. The sweeping generalizations and lack of evidence used in the arguments was fantastically annoying. The focus of this title is on white Queer folk. I wasn't expecting a deep analysis from a book that was only 200 pages but the writing is truly pathetic.

This might be worth your time if you don't know anything about the topic, but honestly you'll learn more from half an hour talking to people on the Queer side of tumblr.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good primer for those just starting to read about LGBTQ+ history.

Bronski takes a more diverse approach to centering marginalized groups within the LGBTQ+ community up until about the 1940s, where his focus narrows to mostly white gays and lesbians. There are some mentions of trans people (particularly in the 19th century), but no mentions of bisexual or asexual people, which is something other reviewers have mentioned.

However, it's a good beginning point, as Bronski provides critique on the varying strengths, weaknesses and biases (both implicit and explicit) in social justice movements throughout history. Basically, what it boils down to is that the United States has always been queer, and it's always going to be queer as long as here is life on the North American continent.

[Collin · Rating 3 out of 5]

when were y'all going to tell me that Rita Mae Brown, the author of the cat-themed popular cozy mystery series Mrs. Murphy, which I used to shelve all the time when I was a library page, was also a lesbian guerrilla activist in the 60s-70s and was in a relationship with FANNIE FLAGG?

[Erin Bookishness · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay. So. This book had really good information in it, and it is always a delight to find queer history that starts before Stonewall, but in terms of language choices it had some issues. Starting with misgendering a person who specifically rejected gendered pronouns and continuing into complete bi-erasure. It referred to people who had sex with men and women as “homosexuals who sometimes had heterosexual sex.” When something is labeled “queer history” I expect it to be the history of all queer people, but this was really just the history of gay men and lesbians. Trans and bi people are almost entirely excluded.

[Lauren Stoolfire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd seen this nonfiction history book making the rounds at the library quite a bit recently so I thought I'd give the audiobook edition a try. The narrator does a very good job presenting the information. The book is a great primer on the subject and it covers a few hundred years - like the author says there is so much more out there especially if you were to do a deep dive on a particular time period or figure. On the bit about free love, I was pleased to hear Victoria Woodhull get a mention.

[a · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like any book covering a broad topic and time frame, it has notable limitations, but I was overall genuinely impressed.

I thought that it did a better job with earlier history than the more recent, but that could also have been the fault of my reading, as I got to the 'oh no this will auto-return when?!?' reading sprint near the end.

[L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this on overdrive & read it because I wanted to learn about American History anyway this year (which I was never taught about in school pretty much at all) & it obviously wasn't supposed to be an all-encompassing work of every facette of American history, so it was fine to get an overview through a gay (white, male, middle-aged to old-ish) lens with.

I did find it lacking in several departments, though (When I use quotes they aren't direct quotes from the text, but paraphrased from memory).

First of all, I disliked its approach which led to a lot of word count over colonial and racist, misogynistic, transphobic or ableist “homosexuals“ (& occasionally feminists), which is fine insofar as that the deeply flawed ideologies of prominent figures of LGBT history should definitely be highlighted, but that left very little space to contrast those people with black, native american and other LGBT people of color, women and specifically lesbians, trans people, disabled or at least nom-eugenicist LGBT people ... etc.

Especially the way the author talked about native Americans and, relatedly, fetishization of both native men and women (in this book, by white men) was not great. Since I'm a white person myself, what I'm about to say is just as much seen from a white perspective as the original text by Michael Bronski.

The fact that Morton and a number of other white men in the Merrymount colony invited native women to their maypole celebrations and that interracial marriages of those native women and white men were “encouraged“ by Morton is described as a proof for a liberal attitude held by Morton and Merrymount in regard to sexuality in general, implicitly including a potential tolerance of homosexuality. To me, it seems like plain fetishization of nonwhite, specifically native women. Later, Bronski attributes a positive quality to fetishization of romantic friendships between black and native men in popular literature by a white [gay, but not exclusively] audience, since the racist stereotype of sexually more “natural“ (less repressed by social conventions) men of color “helped white gay men embrace their own sexuality“ ... I mean? It's still bad?

Apart from that, there was an okay amount of mentions of lesbians, but Bronski almost exclusively referred to bisexuals as “homosexuals who slept with [opposite sex]“, for example James Dean, which I did find very ... odd. He does mention bisexuality occasionally, but never explicitly talks about it the way “homosexuality“ is talked about. Obviously it can be hard to label people who didn't have the same understanding of sexuality as we do now, but that doesn't explain why the author had no problem labelling people as “homosexual“, heterosexual or sometimes “queer“.
The focus transgender people and activism in this book is so miniscule that it pretty much doesn't exist. A handful of organizations and people are named, but it does in no way help understand the state of transgender people's lives and rights throughout American history. Here, again, exists an overlap between gay people and trans people who would've identified differently through history than today, but again, barely mentioning something at all that is explicitly included in the word “queer“ as well as the acronym LGBT which Bronski used to define the group of people whose history he was going to write about, is just ... bad academic writing plain and simple.

[A.E. Bross · Rating 4 out of 5]

My spouse recommended this book to me, and I can honestly say that it is worth the read. I do have to caution y'all, though. This book was published ten years ago, and obviously researched prior to that. It also only covers until the 1990s. The author uses a lot of language that is rigidly binary (constant use of "he or she" as opposed to using more inclusive terms like "they") and there's more than one instance of bi and pan erasure (i.e. people were either gay or they were straight, with little to no mention of bi- or pan-sexuality).

Once you're aware of that, though, the book outlines just how much more queer our history really is. The LGBTQIA+ community has had a hand in forming more of the "morals" that we have today, usually because their mere existence was so frightening to the straights that they instituted strict laws and rules that were often just overlooked. The history of LGBTQIA is a history of mostly straight, cis, white men to control the acceptability of desire, and has many, many intersections with feminism, racism, and ableism. And while I'm sure we can giggle about Kellogg inventing corn flakes in the hopes of making a "healthy, ready-to-eat anti-masturbatory morning meal," this writing reminds us that LGBTQIA individuals of all backgrounds have fought and died for the right to simply be themselves. While not the easiest read, it was definitely informative, and brought a lot of historical events and relationships into the light.

[Megan · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s pretty rare that I one-star a book. I was so excited for this book and the series of which it’s a part. Queer history is American history and this is a story that needs to be told. But this book is so woefully inadequate that I just feel angry. This would be a decent book if it were titled A White Gay History of the United States. I say decent because the author seemed to really struggle to decide whether he wanted to talk about queer people or black people (but not, I should mention, queer black peoples); this results in large sections that are seemingly random digressions into racial relations.

A short list of terms that do not appear in this book:
asexual, intersex, transgender, bisexual

Trans people are, instead (horrifyingly, anachronistically) called transvestites. The examples on which the author focuses are those of women cross dressing as men for purposes of war. Even when discussing bisexual peoples’ same gender relationships, bisexuality isn’t even implied; instead, and far worse, the implication is made that they were straight people who incidentally had sex with the same gender. I don’t think I’ve ever been so disgusted in my life to read this piping hot take from someone who is a noted scholar of LGBT studies at an Ivy League school. The B and T parts aren’t just there for sandwich ingredients.

[Saige · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was informative, but it missed the mark for me. It spent a lot of time talking about attitudes towards sexuality and gender in early America, yet a lot of the arguments were hard to follow. It would touch on subjects that I thought needed more explanation and do deep dives into topics that I found too shallow to warrant the attention. I liked the emphasis it placed on the authors and texts that shaped the movement, but sometimes the examples provided didn't mesh well with the paragraphs around them. There was also a decided lack of transitions. It switched amongst topics in a chapter and I was left searching for a connection that wasn't there. I learned some new facts, but overall this is definitely not one of my top texts for LGBT history.

[haleykeg · Rating 2 out of 5]

disappointed because I've enjoyed the others in the series, but this is almost exclusively a white cis gay male's history of the united states, with some mention of white women, so to call it an all encompassing queer history is willful ignorance at best. also, a lot of atrocities are glossed over using passive language.

[Izzy Batres-Patton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kinda bad ngl
Boring and somehow not gay enough

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great resource of homoerotic literature

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The United States is hella gay.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I understand that no history book can be comprehensive and that Bronski had to make choices about what to cover here, but I was disappointed in the choices he did make. I'm giving it a baseline rating of 3 because he does cover a ton of ground and I did learn some new things, and it's probably a decent starting point for anyone without any knowledge of lesbian and gay history in the United States (and yes, that limited description, "lesbian and gay," is intentional). But boy did this read like an older white gay man who has not kept up with the changes in the broader community since 1990, the year he chose for the ending of this book (because anything past that point isn't "history," it's "news," he says).

Here are just the top-of-mind complaints I have:
-His preferred term for the people he's talking about throughout the book is "homosexual" (used as both as adjective and a noun). Even when he gets to the point in history where the terms "lesbian" and "gay" become common, he persists in talking about "homosexuals."
-The idea that this is a representation of "LGBT" history is a joke. This is a history of lesbians and gay men. There are a very small handful of mentions of people being bisexual, but for the most part he talks about any man who has sex with men as "homosexual" and assumes, if they also had sex with women, that they did so as a kind of cover or to be more socially acceptable. There was no attempt to do even a sidebar with a deep dive into the emergence of bisexuality as an identity.
-The representation of transgender people was even less. Bronski seems to think that he's been inclusive of gender identity when really what he talks about over and over again is gender expression. He spends a huge amount of time discussing the ways that people conformed or didn't conform to acceptable forms of gender expression, or how those acceptable forms shifted throughout history, but this was all in service of talking about stereotypes of gay men and lesbians or how certain avenues of acceptability (e.g., the popularity of female impersonators) made life easier for "homosexuals." At times he speculates that someone assigned male who dressed as a woman might have been — wait for it — homosexual, but rarely does he ask whether this person might have been transgender. Even if there isn't a ton of recorded history about transgender people thinking of themselves as such before the 20th century, he did enough speculation that even a brief reflection on whether those who cross-dressed in the 1800s might have been transgender would have added more representation to the book. When he talks about Stonewall, he doesn't even mention Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera until later in the chapter, when he mentions STAR, and then it's literally never brought up again.
-Bronski inexplicably decides to use "her or his" as his go-to "gender inclusive" phrase. Was "their" really that much of a stretch in 2011?
-When Bronski profiles Public Universal Friend, who avoided all gendered pronouns, he decides to use "she/her" in accordance with the Friend's assigned gender at birth, which made my head explode in frustration.
-For a book that was supposed to provide a brief tour of several hundred years of history, I felt like Bronski spent way too long going into depth about certain prominent white men — particularly writers — in the 1800s and 1900s, quoting their letters and their writings and indulging in lengthy speculations about their identities. Having just complained in my review of Platonic that the author quoted romantic letters between well-known historical friends and said they were obviously just friends since they weren't having sex, I was equally frustrated that Bronski quoted some of these same writings and then talked about their obvious erotic or sexual implications. Although I understand that he wasn't trying to profile other identities within the queer community, such as asexuals, it was still frustrating that he could see no separation between romance and sex and assumed that these passionate declarations were clear indications of "same-sex sexual desire."
-Bronski attempts to include history beyond the white people who make up the majority of the book by frequently bringing up the African American community, and almost no one else. There is a brief discussion near the end about the Zoot Suit Riots, but otherwise you'd be forgiven for thinking that the United States up until 1990 was made up of white people and then a small minority of Black people, and that's it. And honestly, half the time that Bronski brought up the African American community, it wasn't to talk about the queer people in that community but to draw parallels between that community and the queer community or between the movement for civil rights for African Americans and similar movements for gay rights.

I'm sure there was more that exasperated me throughout the time I spent listening to this audiobook (not including the times the audiobook narrator mispronounced stuff), but those are the primary ones. I think Bronski was disingenuous to say that this was a volume of queer or LGBT history when it can be more accurately described as a book of "homosexual" history, primarily of white gay men. Within that narrow realm, I did learn some new things and gained some valuable perspectives on some of the tensions that have existed within the community over the years (e.g., the fight to be allowed to keep sexuality private vs. the pressure to come out to facilitate wider public acceptance). It will be interesting to discuss this with my book club next week.

[Taylor Sabol · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book was an interesting read but the author rambled a lot and everything he said I took w/ a grain of salt since he is a cis white gay man

[Joe Kessler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 2011 title should really have been called "A Gay and Lesbian History of the United States," due to how little it addresses the remainder of the LGBT+ acronym. The treatment of transgender people is particularly egregious, presenting just a few isolated examples of individuals living as genders not assigned to them at birth and ignoring their known preference of names and pronouns when it does. Yes, this is somehow a queer studies text that deadnames and misgenders its subjects -- which is all the more frustrating given how author Michael Bronski repeatedly cautions us not to project modern labels onto residents of the past, like calling Daniel Webster gay when he wouldn't have necessarily understood himself in that fashion, despite writing to a dear companion that he longed to hold him again in their small shared bed. I can understand the argument, but that (along with sheer human decency) should likewise guide us to accept the stated identity of someone like the Publick Universal Friend.

Narrowing our scope to simply an account of same-sex attraction in this nation, this is an informative overview. It highlights how there have always been Americans who had relations in that arena even before it was conceptualized as a particular orientation or community, and discusses how evolving media and cultural norms gradually produced the social configuration of queerness as it exists today (or as it did in the 1990s, since the book covers only through the AIDS crisis). Bronski is an older gay man himself, and he's good at explaining topics like how widespread availability of the birth control pill for straight couples inadvertently helped other sexualities gain acceptance, by unlinking sex from procreation in the public mind. I've also enjoyed his descriptions of how instances of coded homosexuality in mid-century movies and literature were recognized as points of similarity by folks who defied gender preconceptions themselves, well ahead of the mainstream catching on.

Overall this is a limited and flawed work, but I'd say it's still generally worthwhile if approached with the proper expectations. It explores a subject totally left out of traditional textbooks, and that's valuable no matter the clumsy handling of specific items outside the writer's area of expertise.

[Content warning for homophobia and racism including lynching.]

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

[Johann Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I expected: A queer history of the US.

What I did not expect: A thoughtful, “a-ha moment”-filled investigation into the invention of the heteronormative society that characterizes the contemporary US. From pre-colonial attitudes to homosexuality and homosociality, through the efforts of the Puritans and the invention of the “rough, tough Marlboro Man” American male intentionally drifting from a more genteel, erudite British gentlemanliness, the writers’ communities and social movements within the nineteenth century and thoughtful review of the impact of the world wars of the 20th century on American family values, this book just kept surprising page after page.

What I came away with: A contextual understanding of this country, its values and how those perceived values have been manipulated to lean towards heteronormative values. Increased vigor to encourage the LGBTQ community to carve its own path. And an understanding that the most successful activism stands in solidarity with all marginalized groups inside and outside of the queer community.

I believe this book is FUNDAMENTAL to understanding where we are at this moment in time. Strongly recommend.

[Rory Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall I think this is an accessible and good premier into lesbian and gay history. I did enjoy the book's repeated references to various literary influences on queer movements and the broader culture. I also was very interested in the chapters describing the formation of masculinity and feminity in the US.

However, I think the book is primarily centered around a white gay and lesbian history at the sacrifice of transgender, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, QTPOC history. I felt that at the very least there were points where asexual and bisexual/pansexual identities could have been mentioned in places like describing Boston marriages between women. It could simply be noted that some of these women may have been otherwise queer than just lesbians. Otherwise, I felt a lot of transgender history and QTPOC history was mainly mentioned in passing.

Book is still definitely worth a read if one is interested in learning more about queer history in the US generally.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall I liked this book. It’s a fast-paced overview of the oft-forgotten role queer people have played in the procession of American society. The bibliography is a gold mine for anyone looking to explore historical queer media; I discovered so much literature and artwork through this read.

For me, the biggest weakness of this book is that it places a huge focus on the histories of white queer people, largely erasing black, brown and genderqueer people.

Consequentially, there is absolutely no reference to the history of queer people in the US’s extensive colonies and territories. In fact, the only territory or colony that is even mentioned Puerto Rico, and that only in passing. It is highly suspect that a book with such omissions can purport to be a history of the United States.

[Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's an admittedly ambitious project to try and cover 500 years of queer history in roughly 250 pages, but I was disappointed that Bronski adopted such a dichotomous approach (you're either gay or straight/either male or female). There were some compelling sections, and he certainly did his research, but it ultimately felt like too much breadth, not enough depth.

[Madeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Queer History of the United States was a transformative read for me on multiple levels. Although I can’t totally quantify the depth of healing it provided for my own internalized homophobia, heteronormativity, dissatisfaction with most modern queer representation (archetypes of gay people in entertainment), and lack of understanding of the gender binary, I can say that this book was a deeply educational experience. It cleared a lifetime of smog, teaching me what school never did and helping me to understand and exorcise preconceived notions about my own identity.

As they say, education/the truth will set you free. In the wake of the Don’t Say Gay Bill in Florida, the comments on “defending” marriage between man and woman from the LDS church, the Catholic Church saying that we can be gay but not act on it, and the daily thrum of homophobia in my own lived experiences, this book helped manage some of my own fears. Understanding the historic puritanical moral panic and the cyclical attempts to discredit and destroy queerness and control gender narratives, as well as the queer activism that has buoyed queer lives, makes me feel far more hopeful in the fight against homophobia.

Learning about the various philosophies surrounding queerness and the roots of many modern day representations of queerness in entertainment makes me feel free to create my own philosophies on queerness. Free to develop my own identity, be my own person. This changed my feminism, my intellectual outlook, everything. Left me hungry for more history, more philosophy.

🌈❤️


Some other reviews are essentially calling this the cinematic Mickey Mouse version of queer history because, I assume, the book sweeps through history from the founding of the United States to the AIDS crisis in less than 400 pages... of course, with such a page limit and when writing an easily digestible historical account of an incredibly nuanced concept such as queerness, there will be holes, people omitted, stories bubbled down to the bones. Things will get left out.
There were sections that were too sparse, like the lack of information on the Stonewall riots or the speeding through of the feminist movement that left out so much information. I was also disappointed in how the racism or class disparities in many of the gay movements, like ACT UP, was barely touched on... the racism of the original white lesbian trailblazers was discussed, but not the racism of the gay male activists. Transphobia was also touched on maybe once and non-binary identities not really discussed. Not as much history on working class or POC queers, but, Bronson acknowledges this is due to social class disparities with publishing and visibility in the public sphere.

I also really did not appreciate the recurring use of the word “homosexual” throughout the book, but that rises from a personal philosophy more aligned with Whitman’s view of queerness than Ulrich’s.

So yes, there were issues. There are more histories that need to be written and more voices uncovered. Each topic, if given justice, would have its own book.

HOWEVER, as it stands, this is a necessary read for any who wish to truly understand American culture and the ways it has both shaped the queer experience and been shaped itself by queerness. It will provide a fantastic foundation for conceptualizing modern queer issues, activism, and homophobia.
If you are queer and have failed to understand your own existence in the United States, this book may even be healing for you, like it was for me.