History has been taught as a linear development, stressing names, dates, and eras. However, actual human experience reflects a more nuanced development. Feminist theorist, Shulamith Firestone describes it as “the world as process, a natural flux of action, and reaction of opposites, yet inseparable, and impenetrable…history as a movie rather than a snapshot.”
Michael Bronski, Professor of Practice in Media and Activism in Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard, takes this approach in his insightful book, A Queer History of the United States. The book spans 500 years of our nation’s queer history. The Kirkus Review calls it “a lucid, cerebral treatise on gay culture from the point of view of a clever historian who maintains that ‘the heritage of LGBTQ + people is the heritage of Americans.’” Since Professor Bronski’s book ends by 1990, the SDG will continue to update queer history with films, articles, and more recent historic and political developments.
This SDG will be intellectually rigorous, entertaining and fun and provide a cautionary reminder of the consequences of silencing history.
Week 1
Presentations by Rick Mitz and Marlene Furth: Our personal oral histories and why they matter.
Discussion: Documentary, Before Stonewall (1984) Amazon Prime, Apple TV
Week 2
Chapters 1,2
Chapter 1: The Persecuting Society
Gender roles in indigenous cultures, the socio-religious influence of Puritanism, how colonial settlers perceived virtue and the danger of non-conformity, and 17th and 18th century movements that countered the persecuting society.
Chapter 2: Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions
How did Enlightenment ideas influence the American Revolution and gender? How did an emerging nation regulate sexual behavior? Were there revolutionary female to male cross-dressers? Why did Daniel Webster write, “Yes James, I must come, we will yoke together again; your little bed is just wide enough; we will practice at the same bar, and be as friendly pair of single fellows as ever cracked a nut.”
Week 3
Chapters 3,4
Chapter 3: Imagining a Queer America
Westward expansion, the call of the wilderness, cowboy culture, transcendental influences on egalitarianism on land and sea, an era of emerging American identity. From cowboy poet Bager Clark’s “The Lost Pardner” to Melville’s “Moby Dick,” love is hiding in plain sight and not silenced.
Chapter 4: A Democracy of Death and Art
The Civil War shaped ideas about gender, social justice, slavery, and feminism. America struggled with “manliness” as a result of the tragedy and trauma of the war. Some women again cross-dressed and “passed” as soldiers. How can a singular national identity be created? Walt Whiman and others taught a new body politic.
Week 4
Chapter 5: A Dangerous Purity
Race, ethnicity, class, color, identities in the Gilded Age. Purity movements emerge to shield society from moral wrong, while anarchists argue that it is unethical for the state to have any role in personal affairs. A new word, “homosexual,” speaks its name.
Chapter 6: Life on the Stage/Life in the City
Cities now include large populations of single men and women who have left the ideal of rural extended families. With growing urban centers, the theater takes the cultural center stage, along with vaudeville, burlesque, nickelodeons, and the movies. For public moralists, these venues, dens of sexual promiscuity and criminal activity, provided alluring alternatives to traditional gender and sexual norms. A subversive subculture thus thrived.
Among university-educated women dedicated to social projects from Hull House to Henry Street Settlement, some were in same sex couples. The YMCA became a place for same sex male coupling. Gay neighborhoods and street culture emerged.
Week 5
Chapters 7,8
Chapter 7: Production and Marketing of Gender
Heterosexuality, whiteness, and masculinity become manifest destiny. American Christianity enshrined a manly, bold, capitalist Jesus.
Red Scare paranoia, those who suffered, those who resisted. The beginning of the New Deal, the Roosevelts, and “Hick, darling.”
Chapter 8: Sex in the Trenches
An army of gay lovers, male and female, gay bars for men and women, and the return home from WWII as self-identified lesbians and gay men in their own communities.
Week 6
Movies/ Post WWII, repression and survival.
The Children’s Hour (1961) Amazon Prime, Apple TV, YouTube(Free)
The Boys in the Band (1970) Amazon Prime, Apple TV
Week 7
Chapters 9,10
Chapter 9: Visible Communities, Invisible Lives
The Kinsey Report shocks America. If a Communist could be hiding under your bed, who was in your bed? The first gay and lesbian rights organizations, Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis, begin to organize.
McCarthy: fear in public and in private life. Gay and Lesbian culture represented in films, books and the theater reflect this fear, as well as a growing and strong rights movement.
Chapter 10: Revolt/Backlash/Resistance
Gay manifestos, Stonewall, AIDS, Anita Bryant, Act-Up. Can a community survive and thrive? Moving on to the next struggle.
Week 8
Movies/ AIDS
Philadelphia (1993) Amazon Prime, Apple TV
The Normal Heart (2014) Amazon Prime, Apple TV
Week 9
Movies/ Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995) Amazon Prime,
YouTube (Free)
Freedom to Marry (2016)
Week 10
Articles: The Trump Years repression, and erasure.
The Guardian, January, 2025 , “Trump rolls back trans and gender identity rights and takes aim at DEI”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/trump-executive-order-gender-sex
Journal of the International AIDS Society, May 2025, Dismantling LGBTQ + Health Care and its effect on Global Health
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/MC12081823/
Additional articles that will update current developments at the time of the SDG
Movie/ Discussion
Our future in the lessons from the past…solidarity, intersectional respect, and heartfelt resistance.
Pride (2014) Amazon Prime, Apple
Core Book: Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States, Beacon Press 2011
Lilian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, Simon & Schuster 2015
Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire, 20th anniversary edition,
University of North Carolina Press 2010
Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Reflect: A Political History of ACT UP New York 1987-1993, Farrar, Straus, Giroux 2021
Additional Films:
Stonewall Up Raising (1984)
After Stonewall (1999)
The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)
How to Survive a Plague (2012)