State of the Field for Busy Teachers: LGBTQ+ History

Daniel Story
I’m Daniel Story, and this is History in Focus—a podcast by the American Historical Review. You’re listening to one of our four-part miniseries titled “State of the Field for Busy Teachers,” where we deliver to you one expert’s overview of their field of history, including how it has evolved over recent decades and where it’s at now in terms of recent advances, debates within the field, and where you can go to learn more. You’ll find other episodes in the series and links to resources at historians.org/ahr. Now, to the episode.

Don Romesburg
I’m Don Romesburg, and I am in Women’s and Gender Studies at Sonoma State University. I’m trained as a historian, and I regularly teach an LGBTQ US History class. And this is the state of the field for LGBTQ+ history. So the field of LGBTQ+ history as like a scholarly field began in the 1970s and there were a couple of formative works, one by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, that really explored in the 19th century how the passionate same sex relationships between middle class white women were central to the separate spheres ideology of the time and to a lot of the ways that women found their way in abolition, in feminism and just in the world. And then Jonathan Ned Katz produced, as an independent scholar, this amazing compendium called Gay American History, which was a curated set of 400 plus pages of primary sources from the pre-Colonial Era to what was then the present. And so I think of those two things as kicking off the field in the sense that Smith-Rosenberg made a historical intervention into the historiography of the 19th century and into women’s history that was fundamental to the field, whereas Jonathan Ned Katz showed the field that there is an abundance of LGBTQ+ history, and that it’s not something that you have to uncover, but that it’s just there to find if you look for it. Those two impulses, one to sort of speak to the field and through the field to change ways that we think about different things, urban history, political history, social history and so on, is one of the impulses of the field. And then the other is to demonstrate all of the different ways that gender diversity and sexual diversity has been in many different places, has transformed those places and been transformed by the context in which they exist. And so I really think that when we think about the field as 50 years old, basically at this point, right, it takes us away from this idea that this is really new material or new concepts that people should be nervous about how they’re going to incorporate into their K-12 classrooms or into their undergraduate surveys. There are many, many, many entry points into it, whether you’re talking about indigenous Two Spirit cultures and the ways in which it relates to settler colonialism, or whether you’re talking about the ungendering and forcible effects of gender and sexuality within enslavement and in systems of administration under reconstruction and onward for Black Americans, or whether you’re talking about the 19th century industrialization and urbanization and the ways in which the policing of and management of gender and sexuality are central to that, the same thing is true of the Progressive Era, world wars, and especially World War II was this transformative era where LGBTQ people really came to start to see one another as a people, both in the theater of war, in the sex segregated cultures and societies that sort of exist within the mobilization and on the home front in many different places, where people moved from their small towns to these bigger cities, and suddenly discovered that there were queer subcultures that existed in those spaces. Those are just a bunch of different ones, but, I mean, I can kind of trot through them, right? I mean, there’s in the post-war period, you have the Lavender Scare, which is in some ways more expansive than the McCarthy-era Red Scare, and goes on for much longer and specifically at the federal government, and then trickling down to state governments and to corporations, becomes this sort of policing mechanism to marginalize queer people and police them and surveil them. And in response to that, you have the Homophile Movement, which emerges to say we are a political minority, a civil rights bearing people that, along with more radical forms of direct action and intervention across the 60s and 70s, are the two parts of what becomes kind of queer and trans people as a political body and movement. So we’re part of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, we exist within all of the struggles of women and people of color and indigenous people, but also within an LGBTQ+ movement as it’s evolving. You see how that really plays out in the 1970s with the political history of the 1970s and the rise of the New Right and the rise of the New Right, along with affirmative action and feminism and abortion, really utilizes the gay rights movement as a wedge or a cudgel to mobilize a lot of different communities, religious communities, and others who feel like the America that they imagined that they were a part of maybe is more expansive than they would want it to be. Right? That leads into the 1980s and Reaganism. And you can’t really tell the story of Reagan and of the Republican revolution under Reagan without telling the story of AIDS. And you can’t tell the story of AIDS in the 1980s without understanding LGBTQ+ history. So there are all of these different spaces where in every era of modern history, there is a key LGBTQ+ component that tells a critical story about that era, and is not just about LGBTQ+ people as a minority, but is about the larger social forces and political forces of that time. What we really see with the work of people like John D’Emilio and Estelle Friedman in the 1980s is the early scholarly articulation of the histories of LGBTQ political movements, as well as the different kinds of enforcing or oppressive forces that are pushing against LGBTQ people, whether it’s psychiatric or policing or political. And from there, we really have this explosion across the 1990s of scholarship. The one that made the biggest impact early on was George Chauncey’s work on Gay New York, which was really important for a lot of reasons, but I think for the field, the most important thing about it is that it demonstrated how we cannot really understand modern urban, at least, American history but really, I think modern urban history writ large, unless we understand how sexual subcultures and gender diversity were policed, were explored, were instituted in terms of bars, nightlife, bathhouses, different kinds of cultural spaces, literary spaces, artistic spaces, unless we understand how LGBTQ+ people are centrally a part of that. I know a lot of high school educators teach the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s for example. There’s a wonderful new book by Cookie Woolner that’s about the Black women of the blues who were “Lady Lovers” of one kind or another– that’s the term that she uses in her title, and also middle class black women and the kinds of same sex relationships that they had with one another. So I think that there’s ways that you could really take the work of Chauncey and the work of Woolner and really explore how those would be really incredibly useful to any teacher who’s just trying to find some compelling images, stories, touch points to teach about the 1920s teach about the Harlem Renaissance, teach about the Great Migration and so on. But really, from the 90s on, the field goes in all kinds of directions. There’s such an amazing colonial and early American historiography now. I think some of the really important work that you see there is the work, for example, of Rachel Hope Cleves, who talks about an early same-sex relationship between women in Vermont from the late 1700s to the early 1800s and she really unpacks and explores that. So that really pushes forward the work of Carol Smith-Rosenberg and some really interesting directions many decades on.There’s so much work that’s now done on Two Spirit Indigenous histories and the ways in which those relate to the forces of settler-colonialism. So Deborah Miranda has this article in GLQ called Gendercide that really explores how the genocide of indigenous Americans comes with gender side of Two Spirit or third gender or fourth gender, positions that were socially accepted, sometimes embraced, sometimes revered within different indigenous American societies and were systematically dismantled by settler-colonial forces. Gregory Smithers has new book out called Reclaiming Two-Spirits that is a wonderful synthesis of all of that scholarship, and would be, I think, a really good read for people. It’s really new, so it really captures all that scholarship that’s happened over the last 20 years in that field. So many things are happening in such an exciting way within the field of LGBTQ+ history right now, and one of the places where I think really interesting work is being done is around trans histories. And there’s a lot of scholarship that’s come out on transgender history in the last 15 years. A good kind of starting point is Susan Stryker’s short book Transgender History that people can check out. I think the second edition of that came out in something like 2017 a much more recent work by Jules Gill-Peterson, is the Short History of Trans Misogyny, and what I love about it, in addition to the fact that she really does make a short history, it’s a it’s a book that doesn’t have a whole lot of pages to it, is that she takes a really transnational approach to thinking about how was trans misogyny part of projects of colonization and policing prior to anything like the category of transgender existing and how did that inform the ways in which trans communities, or what we would now call trans communities, were able to be a part of the urban world of the 19th century in New York, for example, or the lesbian and gay, what we would then have called lesbian and gay, subcultures and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. So her work is really, really incredible. I think another really important place where this work is happening is in thinking about enslavement and emancipation and freedom. And the work of C. Riley Snorton is really important. There also the work of Candice Lyons. There’s a amazing book that I think did not get enough recognition in the last five or so years that came out from Thomas Foster that was about the ways in which the objectification of black men and the eroticization of black men in same-sex context produced different kinds of same-sex violences within the systems of slavery by white men against Black men and how that history has really been submerged, both within Black history and within LGBTQ history. A shortcut to thinking about all of this, I think, is in the Routledge History of Queer America, there is an article by Claire Sears that’s about centering slavery in 19th century, LGBTQ history, historically, we have not, as a field, grappled with slavery as centrally as perhaps we could have, and I think that that pivot has been something that’s been very important. We’ve also seen just so much more where queer scholars of color are thinking about how queer and trans people have been a part of all kinds of social movements, not just the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement or struggle for freedom or whatever, and really also thinking about how, why is it that, as Allan Berube said many, many years ago: when people think of gay, they think of white, and what are the mechanisms that produce that concept, right? And how can our histories of diverse queer and trans peoples decenter whiteness and call forth many other stories? And so Kevin Quinn’s doing a lot of work in that way. Nayan Shah is doing a lot of work in that way. Rene Esparza is doing a lot of work in that way. Eric Gonzaba is doing a lot of work in that way. So there’s many, many people who are doing that. And I think that there’s, there’s a lot that’s exciting in that. The last thing I want to mention is that one of the really exciting places, I think, that the field is looking is at the material lives of LGBTQ+ peoples that includes things like labor movements and work and domestic spaces and consumerism and nightlife and so people like Margot, Canaday, Stephen Vider, Alex Ketchum, again, Eric Gonzaba, have been doing a lot of work in those areas as well. So I think those are all really exciting places that the field is heading. We are not a field that tends to have a lot ofhighly contentious debates. I would not say exactly that as a subfield, LGBTQ+ historians are necessarily one big happy family, but we are really collaborative, we are really congenial, and we’re really excited to get our work out there. I mean, I think that’s such an important part of what we do as a field. We come from this place where our histories have systematically and institutionally been so marginalized that it was, you know, 30 years ago rarely taught in the undergraduate US survey, fifteen years ago wasn’t taught in K-12 classrooms. Right now, we’re in a place where we are in a new culture war, where history is at the center of it, whether it has to do with Critical Race Theory or Don’t Say Gay legislation. So we’re in a place where there are 11 states that have explicit sort of Don’t Say Gay, Don’t Say Trans, anti-curriculum laws. But we’re also in a place where, depending on how you count it, seven or eight states have inclusive history education mandates around LGBTQ+ history content. That means that there’s around 26 states and D.C. that don’t have something, right? So the field is very much in play in a contemporary political moment. So if I can plug my own book, I have a book coming out in April called Contested Curriculum: LGBTQ History Goes to School that’s all about the history of LGBTQ+ history education inclusion and the struggles around that. And comes from both my place as a historian and as my place as one of the lead scholars working in California and elsewhere to push for inclusive history education at the K-12 Level. So that book is also a short book, so I think it’s a quick read. I hope it’s a good read, and it has, in its conclusion, a bunch of different suggestions about what people can do in this moment to ensure that LGBTQ+ history is part of K-12 education, as I believe it should be, not just for LGBTQ+ youth, but for all of us, because when we live in a diverse democracy, where history education in public schools is a central project of civic learning, and has been since at least the 1800s– It is fundamental that all people are part of that story. So again, 15 years ago, there was almost nothing in terms of content for K-12 educators to use. They had to sort of go out and find things from the scholarly work that’s out there. That’s not true anymore. There’s amazing primary source sets that are specifically geared towards aligning with state standards. For example, one that comes to mind is out of UC Davis’s History Project. It was a project by Wendy Rouse that’s teaching LGBTQ+ history through primary sources. It’s excellent. I think you can also go to the website Teaching LGBTQ history. There you will find that an organization based out of San Francisco called Our Family Coalition has compiled this incredible list of all of the different resources that are now out there for K-12 educators to use, and many of them are really geared towards busy teachers who want to do this work, didn’t learn about this stuff when they were an undergraduate, didn’t learn about it in their education school training, may not have learned about it in any of their professional development, but know that they want to do this work, or live in a state where there’s now a mandate or an impulse toward doing the work. That’s, I think, a great place to jump off for teachers who are looking for how to do this. I should say also that, because I’ve been passionate about this K-12 space for a long time now, that if teachers are interested in learning more, they should feel free to reach out to me at Sonoma State, I’m happy to talk to teachers.

Daniel Story
That was Don Romesburg on the state of the field of LGBTQ+ History. You can learn more about this and other episodes—including other installments from the “state of the field for busy teachers” series—at historians.org/ahr. And for this particular episode, I have one less-than-happy note—and that’s an understatement—to add here at the end: Not long after I recorded this piece with Don, the administration at Don’s institution, Sonoma State University, eliminated a number of programs, including Women’s and Gender Studies and Queer Studies. As a result, all faculty in those departments, including tenured professors, were terminated. So in 2025-26, Dr. Romesburg is serving as a Visiting Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Queer Studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He can be reached at professorromesburg@gmail.com. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story, with transcription support from Mallory Hutchings-Tryon. That’s it for now. See you next time.