With this edition of Gay American History, sixteen years after its initial publication, I'm glad that a new generation will be encouraged to read the inspiring story of Barbara Gittings' early lesbian rights activism; the courageous story of Henry Gerber's founding of the first American homosexual-rights organization; the sad story of Lucy Ann Lobdell; the romantic story of Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens; the disturbing story of Alberta Lucille Hart (continued in my Gay/Lesbian Almanac [Harper & Row, 1983]); the fascinating story of John Addington Symonds' pursuit of Walt Whitman; the passionate story of Almeda Sperry's love for Emma Goldman—among many others.

I hope that another generation will enjoy, as much as I do, the aesthetically evocative, intellectually provocative language of the old documents, words that have the power to take us back into another time and place, to explore a world very different from our own.

Back around 1974, deep into the detective work for this book, I had begun to uncover numerous documents of a long-lost lesbian and gay American history. The excitement of those discoveries was intense. "Amazing!" I muttered to myself more than once, standing in the library stacks, reading yet another aged love letter or old medical-journal article. The details of those documents brought vividly to life a previously hidden past of same-sex affection and eroticism, oppression and, sometimes, the early resistance efforts of a group beginning to stand up for itself.

There in the library I had the strange feeling of being allowed a privileged glimpse into an invisible world of same-sex intimacy. That unseen universe coexisted quietly with the visible world of men's and women's relationships. Like a character in a science-fiction story, I was peeking into a parallel same-sex universe, usually veiled. But that world wasn't fictional. And the evidence of its existence wasn't even that difficult to find. Many documents of this hidden same-sex history were sitting right there on the library shelves. That evidence was simply ignored, as though it didn't exist.

Did I dare call the book Gay American History, I asked a friend, fearful that the title so firmly asserted the reality of a past whose existence others might contest. Because the idea of "gay history" was such a strange one in the early 1970s, my major aim in Gay American History was simply to present enough evidence to forcefully demonstrate that the hidden history of American homosexuals did indeed exist, and to insure that "its existence can no longer be denied." So I stuffed the book with every single piece of information I'd found, hoping to get it out in the world—not knowing if there'd be a second chance.

I succeeded, I think, in demonstrating the existence of large quantities of fascinating documents, many reprinted here. I showed that the lack of historical research on lesbian and gay U.S. history had (and has) nothing at all to do with any lack of documents.

But sixteen years after this book's original publication, lesbian and gay American history is still being denied. An eloquent example of such denial occurs right here in this reprint, on pages 198 and 199. A large signifying blank space occurs in this text because a doctor refused to give me permission to again reprint excerpts from his published article on aversion treatment. In this "therapy" a patient imagines "pictures of homosexuals" with "sores and scabs" and "vomits on them." The white space in this reprint speaks as loud as words. It is itself choice visual evidence of a history denied. Readers who wish to subvert such denial may of course consul* the same uncensored pages in the earlier editions of Gay American History, or the doctor's original article, whose full citation is given here in note 64, page 596.

In 1991, gay men and lesbians are still struggling to win their story a place in the new, multicultural narrative of this nation's past. They still have far to go before same-sex intimacy and pleasure, oppression and resistance become an ordinary, accepted part of the U.S. history taught in American elementary schools and high schools, colleges and universities.

Gay and lesbian U.S. history hits too close to home, I suppose, so the promise of Gay American History still lacks follow up in new major works. This edition of Gay American History includes a large new bibliography of some important texts for the study of U.S. lesbian and gay history. But, given the magnitude of the historical revision that needs to take place, relatively few books or book-length theses explore, specifically, the U.S. history of same-sex intimacy. A number of the important books that have been published are labors of love by independent, underpaid researchers working outside academia. Within the academy—the major mode of intellectual production — gay and lesbian American history is still considered "controversial." It poses an immediate threat to the employment prospects of the untenured, and it poses a direct challenge to traditional American ideals of masculinity and femininity, and to old judgments about the proper pleasures of the body. The history departments of U.S. universities are, for the most part, still too conservative to encourage hard empirical research and an analysis of lesbian and gay U.S. history that seriously challenges received sexual wisdom—and institutions. The U.S. history of same-sex lust and love—and the strange response to it—remains largely unexplored. To cite one example, the long U.S. history of the response to Walt Whitman's homoeroticism has not yet been adequately examined.

In 1991 and beyond, dedicated researchers must still work hard, I think, to find more and better empirical evidence of the gay and lesbian American past. But the problem of interpreting that evidence within its original historical context now strikes me as the major intellectual task facing those who try to understand the documents, including readers of this book. A close, ongoing dialogue between empirical research and theoretical analysis must occur if we are to better comprehend the history of same-sex eroticism and the responses to it.

Interpreting the evidence is problematic because the conceptual tools we use to construct that evidence and to think about the past deeply affect what we can know of it. Since Gay American History was published, we've discovered, for example, that "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" are categories and concepts just about one hundred years old; they are themselves historically specific, time-bound, and limited ways of socially naming, understanding, and organizing the "erotic" relationships of "same" and "different" sexes.* As the major terms defining our object of study, "homosexual" and "heterosexual," applied to a past society, may obscure the very different ways in which same-sex and different-sex pleasures were organized and constructed under very different social conditions. Our modern concepts, applied uncritically to the past, simply project our present social organization of eroticism, procreation, and gender onto that past, distorting our ability to see it as it was to those who lived it. Applied to the past, "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" may deny the difference of past and present, and may deny us a subtle, sophisticated sense of historical diversity.

Along with in-depth empirical research, I believe we need to keep considering how we think about the past; we need to develop new tools for doing so. The challenge of the future is to develop new ways of understanding the history of bodily pleasure as it was constructed under very different forms of social organization.

In the 1970s in Gay American History, I did not take that historicizing far enough. This book may now itself be studied as a historical document, as a product with characteristics particular to the moment of its original production. In the original Introduction to Gay American History, I spoke as "we" gay men and lesbians, "we" homosexuals, terms that suggest the existence of a unified subject extending from the present far, far back in time. I did also speak of the need to historicize our "profoundly ahistorical" thought about sexuality, but I didn't proceed fully enough with that work. In the 1990s, I am much more aware of the need to honor cultural and sexual diversity, pas* as well as present, and I can't speak now, even provisionally, as that collective "we."

Perhaps the greatest paradox and most creative promise of research in gay and lesbian history is the challenge it poses to received notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality—and to the lesbian and gay liberation movement that gave birth to such historical analysis. The biggest surprise and most interesting intellectual development in lesbian and gay history since 1976 has been that work which historicizes, relativizes, and fundamentally questions modern notions of heterosex and homosex, and the institutions corresponding to those concepts.

Today, I think that historians of lesbian and gay America do their most useful, subversive work for the liberation struggle when they deeply question the very concepts on which the gay and lesbian liberation movement is founded—concepts signified by the words gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight, hetero and homo—and all the other categories by which people have defined themselves and been defined by others. Doing justice to historical diversity, we also create a new sense of future social- sexual possibility. In the age of AIDS, Act Up, and Queer Nation, of mourning and activism, lesbian and gay history provides a useful distancing and deepening perspective. — 

Jonathan Ned Katz New York City, August 15, 1991.

*'See "Lesbian and Gay History: Theory and Practice," in my Gay/Lesbian Almanac (Harper & Row, 1983).

Jonathan Ned Katz, “Preface to the Revised Edition,” Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (Meridian/New American Library, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. First Meridian Revised Edition, April 1992), pages xv-xvii.