Queering American History
As my 2026 book Bicentennial documents, the focus on U.S. history during the bicentennial contributed to burgeoning public interest in African American history, Native American history, women’s history, and other historical topics. It also helped influence and inspire the growth of LGBTQ+ history as a field of inquiry. In January 1976, for example, The Advocate, one of the country’s most widely circulating gay periodicals, published a groundbreaking set of articles on LGBTQ+ history, previewed with an advertisement featuring a lipsticked George Washington. As publisher David Goodstein explained, “Even for gay Americans, 1976 is a Bicentennial year. The history of gay people for the past 200 years has been one of invisibility…. In this issue, we share what we have been able to find out about our past.” An introduction noted, “Whether you support it, protest it, treat it like a joke, a celebration or a solemn occasion, one thing’s sure. You won’t be able to avoid the Bicentennial…. Whatever each of us decides to do or not to do about the Bicentennial, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we need to know more about our contribution, as gay people, to the nation’s history. We need to understand what it’s been like for us in America, and why things are as they are. We need to know more about our past so we can create a better future.”[1]
The Advocate was not alone in using the bicentennial to promote greater attention to LGBTQ+ history. In a January New York Times review, for instance, gay historian Martin Duberman praised “Song of Myself,” an episode in CBS’s bicentennial series “The American Parade,” for focusing on Whitman’s homosexuality.[2] Later that year, Duberman, whose script for Philadelphia’s Living History Center had been rejected in 1975, repurposed another bicentennial commission. Duberman had been invited to write a play for a bicentennial series planned by the Kennedy Center, but his script about beat writers Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, which addressed the “destructive tragedy of growing up macho male,” was rejected.[3] In December 1976, Duberman’s gay-themed Visions of Kerouac was performed at New York’s Lion Theater.[4]
Bicentennial exclusions incited desires for LGBTQ+ history in other contexts as well. In April 1976, a letter to Pittsburgh Gay News expressed frustration and irritation at CBS’s Bicentennial Minutes, which aired nightly on television during prime time viewing. “I am sick and tired of seeing the ‘Bicentennial Minute’ every night on TV, and in discussing this with friends we wondered why there couldn’t be a gay person in U.S. history featured.”[5]
In the same spirit, Tom Wilson Weinberg found a creative way to circumvent the Philadelphia bicentennial commission’s unofficial ban on LGBTQ+ programming. Song of Whitman, written by Weinberg, was performed on July 17 and 24 on the Italian Fountain stage behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Of all Philadelphia ’76’s myriad entertainments,” Weinberg explained, “this is perhaps the only one with gay content.” Philadelphia Gay News later affirmed that Philadelphia ’76 Inc., the local bicentennial commission, “presented one gay offering on its program, a dramatic reading of poetry and prose by Walt Whitman.” The selections emphasized “Whitman’s expression of his homosexuality—an aspect that was not discussed with Philadelphia ’76 before the contract was signed.”[6] With his successful navigation of the formal recognition and sponsorship process, Weinberg increased the percentage of LGBTQ+ projects on the commission’s official list from 0 to .0625.
For the development of LGBTQ+ history as a field of study, Jonathan Ned Katz’s book Gay American History, published in November, was a key catalyst. Katz’s book presented hundreds of primary sources about the nation’s past. He did this work as a community-based historian and at a moment when college and university history departments never had knowingly hired a historian of LGBTQ+ life and rarely mentioned LGBTQ+ topics in their classes. While Katz’s introduction did not directly address the bicentennial, the timing of publication was not an accident: the book was published during the bicentennial year; its title linked gay history with U.S. history; and the book included multiple primary sources from the nation’s founding era, including documents by and about Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Deborah Sampson, and George Washington. Katz addressed the bicentennial directly in two parts of the book. In a section of the book that focused on Native American history, he reprinted comments that Barbara Cameron, co-founder of the San Francisco-based group Gay American Indians, had made earlier in The Advocate. Asked how she felt about the bicentennial, Cameron responded, “Angry… It’s ridiculous. What should Indians celebrate? Two-hundred years of broken promises, land theft, genocide and rape? It is one thing to talk about ‘celebration’ and another to look at the little Vietnam the government has going in South Dakota. We’re going to be demonstrating in Philadelphia in ’76. There are plans for demonstrations at Mount Rushmore. Gay Indians will be there.”
In a section of Gay American History that focused on resistance, Katz quoted writer Walt Whitman’s 1871 prediction that by the time the bicentennial arrived, “intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man—which, hard to define, underlies the lessons and ideals of the profound saviours of every land and age, and which seems to promise, when thoroughly develop’d, cultivated and recognized in manners and literature, the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these States, will then be fully express’d.”[7]
Whitman’s predictions for 1976 were unrealistically optimistic, but LGBTQ+ people "express’d" themselves loudly and proudly during the U.S. bicentennial; queer "passionate attachments" are alive and well in 2026; and "loving comrades" continue to pursue their "lessons and ideals" as they begin to imagine the U.S. tricentennial in 2076.
Notes
[1] “Coming Up Next,” Advocate, 14 Jan. 1976, 6; D. B. Goodstein, “Opening Space,” Advocate, 28 Jan. 1976, 5; “It’s Been 200 Years,” Advocate, 28 Jan. 1976, 35. See also Len Evans, “‘For Centuries We Hid Alone,’” Advocate, 28 Jan. 1976, 36, 38, 39-40; Shelley Singer, “‘Let Them Be Sea Captains,’” Advocate, 28 Jan. 1976, 37, 39; “Outrageous!,” Advocate, 28 Jan. 1976, 43; Dean Gengle, “Reclaiming the Old New World,” Advocate, 28 Jan. 1976, 40-41.
[2] Martin Duberman, “How Honest Was Abe?,” NYT, 11 Jan. 1976. See also “Great Gay Poet Comes Openly to CBS-TV,” Pittsburgh Gay News, 7 Feb. 1976; John Whyte, “CBS Portrays Whitman,” Weekly Philadelphia Gayzette, 19 Mar. 1976, 2, 4; “People, Places & Things,” Pittsburgh Gay News, Apr. 1976, B16.
[3] Duberman, Midlife Queer, 119–25, 133. See also Martin Duberman, Visions of Kerouac (Little, Brown, 1977).
[4] Barbara Crossette, “Kerouac Translated from Page to Stage,” New York Times, 3 Dec. 1976, C4; Mel Gussow, “‘Kerouac’ by Duberman Limns One Side of the Beat Generation,” New York Times, 7 Dec. 1976, 56.
[5] “People, Places & Things,” Pittsburgh Gay News, Apr. 1976, B16.
[6] “Whitman Play Scheduled,” Weekly Philadelphia Gayzette, 9 July 1976, 3; “Digging Whitman for the Bicen,” Philadelphia Gay News, Sept. 1976, A5. For the script, see the Tom Wilson Weinberg Collection at the Wilcox Archives.
[7] Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (Crowell, 1976), 334, 341. See also Jim Downs, Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016), 89–112.