Introduction
In the 1990s, when I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation and first book about Philadelphia lesbian and gay history (eventually published in 2000 by the University of Chicago Press as City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972), I thought I would conclude my narrative in 1976.[1] That year was important in Philadelphia because of the commemoration of the U.S. bicentennial, the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which was signed in Philadelphia in 1776. I knew there were interestingly queer stories to tell about bicentennial patriots, protesters, pornographers, and profiteers, and I was fascinated by historical scholarship on relationships between nationalism and sexuality. I also thought that if I reached 1976, I could explore what differences the Stonewall Riots of 1969 made in LGBTQ+ communities and movements and how the pre- and post-Stonewall era differed (or didn’t). I asked many of my oral history narrators, eventually totaling forty-three, about their memories of the bicentennial, and many of them had much to say. In the end, however, after my manuscripts grew in size (the dissertation was more than 600 pages and the book more than 400), I concluded in 1972, the year of Philadelphia’s gay pride march.
For the next two decades, as my attention turned in other directions, I continued to think about the bicentennial, occasionally doing more research, presenting lectures, and imagining a future book project that would queer the bicentennial. In the mid-2020s, as the commemoration of the U.S. semiquincentennial (the 250th) approached, I decided that the time was right for me to finish my book about the bicentennial. But as I did more and more work in preparation for a book that I thought would focus on LGBTQ+ history, I found myself drawn to other topics, many of which had connections to LGBTQ+ history but were not centrally about that. I was especially fascinated by my discoveries about African American, Asian American, Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander, women’s, and disability history, along with the histories of politics and cities. So I ended up drafting a broadly democratic history of the bicentennial, inclusive of LGBTQ+ histories but not focused primarily on them. The book, Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s, published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2026, begins with a chapter about the queer courtship of U.S. President Richard Nixon and Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, both of whom had distinct bicentennial agendas, and many of the subsequent chapters include sections that talk about LGBTQ+ issues and people, but the book is less LGBTQ+ focused than any of my previous five books.[2]
As a proud gay and queer man, I was concerned about downplaying the significance of LGBTQ+ history. Sadly, few straight historians make LGBTQ+ history important in their explorations of the past. But I also thought there were advantages in doing as I ended up doing: I could offer a model of how to write a broadly democratic history that includes LGBTQ+ people as important players and participants in the past.
As I worked on researching, writing, and revising my manuscript, the anonymous reviewers commissioned by my publisher offered many helpful comments and suggestions, but they and my editor at the press agreed that one proposed chapter had to go. Ironically, it was the chapter that had launched this project. Back in the 1990s, I had discovered, at the Lesbian & Gay Library/Archives of Philadelphia, the January 1977 issue of Mandate, which featured a special bicentennial feature titled “Philadelphia Freedom.” Mandate was a leading gay porn magazine of the post-Stonewall era and Mandate’s “Philadelphia Freedom” was an incredibly revealing source (double entendre intended). When I turned back to my work on the bicentennial in the early 2020s, I initially thought that my analysis of the magazine would be a good way to conclude the book. The reviewers, however, thought that the Mandate chapter was too disconnected from the chapters that preceded it. Also, concluding the book with my discussion of Mandate would have worked well for a “queering the bicentennial” book but not for the more broadly democratic book that I ended up writing. Moreover, my analysis of Mandate was quite critical, whereas the book otherwise could conclude with my more politically inspiring account of counter-bicentennial activism.
I do not believe that any of us were concerned about the sexually explicit images and sex-positive politics featured in Mandate, though I think even those of us who are deeply critical of sexual repression are inevitably influenced by the politics of sexual respectability. I also was a little worried about how and whether I could secure permission to reprint those images in a university press book, but in the end it didn’t matter: I agreed with advice I received and reluctantly reduced my discussion of Mandate to a few sentences in the book.
My concerns about removing the Mandate chapter from my bicentennial book were eased by my knowledge that I could share my more in-depth analysis of the magazine elsewhere. This exhibit is how I have chosen to do so. OutHistory’s online platform also has allowed me to include far more images than I would have been able to include in a book and to do so on a publicly-accessible website. This exhibit additionally provides me with an opportunity to (1) share excerpts from my Philadelphia oral histories, which I did not include in my bicentennial book, (2) pull together the book’s many references, across several chapters, to LGBTQ+ engagements with the bicentennial, and (3) reprint many primary sources and visual images that are discussed but not reproduced in the book.
I am grateful to the University of Chicago Press for permission to draw on Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s for this exhibit. Thanks also to the many research assistants and archivists acknowledged in the book, and especially to archivist John Anderies and research assistants Zach Greenberg and Reese Uteda.
[1] Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 2000).
[2] Marc Stein, Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s (University of Chicago Press, 2026).