Michael Bronski

Youth sexuality has often been, like homosexuality, unspeakable in our culture. This has been America's dirty little secret: teens and children think about sex. Some have sexual desires for members of their own gender. Young people coming out earlier, and often finding support in their homes and schools, is a major political advancement. For over a century, charges of "molestation," "corruption of a minor," and "recruitment” have been used-explicitly by J. Edgar Hoover, Anita Bryant, and others, and implicitly by many who are opposed to same-sex marriage-to demonize lesbians and gay men and deny them full citizenship. There may always be bias against LGBT people, but the charges of molestation will eventually fade as more youth come out.

language is both an entryway and a dead end.

the contributions of people whom we may now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are integral and central to how we conceptualize our national history. Without the work of social activists, thinkers, writers, and artists such as We'Wha, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, [[Martha "Calamity" Jane Cannary Burke, Edith Guerrier, Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Bayard Rustin, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cherrie Moraga, and Lily Tomlin, we would not have the country that we have today. Women and men who experienced and expressed sexual desires for their own sex and those who did not conform to conventional gender expectations have always been present, in both the everyday and the imaginative life of our country. They have profoundly helped shape it, and it is inconceivable, and ahistorical, to conceptualize our traditions and history without them.

My earliest involvement in the gay community was in the gay liberation movement of the early 1970s. We had very strong opinions then. I have come to realize that in life and politics, there is always more to take into consideration. If there is one clear, unambiguous argument here, it is that the LGBT history of America is, and has always been, U.S. history. (Author's Note)

Interpretations are best made with the long view in mind.

It is impossible to understand American history—including the position of LGBT people—without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country

Today we routinely use LGBT, a fairly recent, and accepted, amalgamation of identities, each of which has a specific history that often had little to do with the others.

Pedagogy, like history, will never be able to contain all of America-a great country, an evil country, a place of tremendous generosity and welcome as well as pronounced disdain for foreigners and outsiders. America is not one thing or another. America is queer.

LGBT people are simply Americans-no less and no more. The idea of America has existed, in some form, for five hundred years. LGBT people, despite enormous struggles to be accepted and to be given equality, have made America what it is today-that great, fascinating, complicated, sometimes horrible, sometimes wonderful place that it was in the beginning.

Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping 'unacceptable' behavior private. This complicated relationship between the public and private is at the heart of LGBT history and life today.

A Queer History of the United States stops at 1990, but LGBT communities have seen enormous changes since then. By the late 1980s, the rise of the so-called "Gaybe Boom" was beginning, as increasing numbers of children were born into two-parent same-sex households. Lesléa Newman's children's book Heather Has Two Mommies-which became a target in the culture wars of the 1990s-was emblematic of this sea change in the community.

in America, equality under the law is a complicated affair. Certainly it is true that while laws are for everyone, they are often enforced mainly against the disenfranchised.