# Quote — Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States

> 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.

- Author: [Michael Bronski](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-bronski.md)
- Book: [A Queer History of the United States](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-bronski/a-queer-history-of-the-united-states.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Bronski#Epilogue) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-bronski/a-queer-history-of-the-united-states/lgbt-people-are

## More from this book

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-bronski/a-queer-history-of-the-united-states/youth-sexuality-has.md)

> language is both an entryway and a dead end.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-bronski/a-queer-history-of-the-united-states/language-is-both.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-bronski/a-queer-history-of-the-united-states/the-contributions-of-people.md)