As a study of an oppressed people’s struggle for civil rights, gay and lesbian political actions offer valuable insight into American history. Here, on Armed Forces Day, May 21, 1966, gay men hold a rally on the steps of the federal building in San Francisco’s Civic Center to protest their exclusion from the military. [Courtesy GLBT Historical Society of California, San Francisco, California.]

I have continued to assign the books I chose for the course’s initial offering: Leila Rupp’s brief but delightful overview, A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America; Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America; and Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey, the first volume of Martin Duberman’s memoirs.

To augment those materials I used some of my grant monies to compile a reader consisting of fourteen essays selected as a sampling of some of the best writing and newest thinking in the field. They were also selected to cover the very wide range of subjects noted in the course description. Although modern notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality are relatively new, I want my students to appreciate that same-sex desire has always played an important role in American history.

The course reader includes an article on pre-Columbian Native American sex/gender systems from Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology, and “Hearing Voices,” an essay on same-sex sexual practices in Africa and their impact on relationships among the enslaved in colonial America. A particularly popular reading is Richard God- beer’s “Sodomy in Colonial New England,” in which surprisingly tolerant attitudes about same-sex acts reveal much about seventeenth-century colonial law, religion, and community relationships. Because a significant portion of my students are Asian American, the readings from Russell Leong’s Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience also tend to generate a great deal of interest.[6]

What all my students have in common is enthusiasm for the subject matter. No one ever complains, “Gay and lesbian history again?” Although all of the signposts are familiar from countless American history classes from kindergarten on (the pre-Columbian period, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and so on), the course material is new—a combination students seem to appreciate. The course not only fills in the blanks in the more conventional histories, but it also raises questions vital to the study of history and to critical thinking. We discuss, for example, Charles Clifton’s “Rereading Voices from the Past,” which suggests that many male slave narratives include coded language indicating that the authors were raped by their male owner.[7] Clifton argues that such coded language deserves the same careful study as the language in female slave narratives, and he suggests that male/male rape is an aspect of the American slave experience that has been overlooked. His article generates much lively discussion about historical sources and the limits of interpretation.

My gay and lesbian history course is one of the most successful I have ever taught. In their anonymous evaluations at the end of the course, my students frequently refer to the class as “one of the best” and even “the best” of their university experience. For many students, it is like finding the missing piece to a puzzle—it rounds out their understanding of history acquired in previous classes even as it inspires them to learn more. Others are profoundly empowered by learning for the first time of a history of gay men and lesbians with whom they share some experience or identity.

Although I would like to report that it is my lectures that consistently receive top marks, in truth, what many students cite as particularly valuable are the three documentaries shown in class: Before Stonewall, After Stonewall, and The Celluloid Closet. The first two always evoke a sense of wonder and amazement: Old people! Talking about sex! The history they have been reading, pondering, and discussing in a fairly intellectual way suddenly comes alive. They feel the despair and pain caused by institutionalized homophobia and are shocked by the depth and breadth of legal discrimination. They see how a marginalized group strategized to acquire civil rights, then responded to a deadly epidemic. In After Stonewall, when they witness members of ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) disrupting a Mass in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, many of my students (and not just the Catholics) literally gasp, they are so struck by the power of that painful, highly controversial confrontation. The Celluloid Closet (a documentary on the depictions of homosexuals in popular film) elicits discussion on the power of popular culture in inculcating, challenging, and changing attitudes and perceptions.[8]

The combination of readings, films, and discussions gives my students important historical perspective on current issues, ranging from the controversies over gay marriage and adoption to the military’s policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” They appreciate the value of history, not just as a collection of stories about the past, but as a vital tool in the efforts to resolve present-day questions and problems.

While I consider the course to be highly successful, I have been less successful in bringing gay and lesbian history into high school classrooms. I have given a series of talks to groups of high school teachers on how to incorporate gender history into their course curricula (emphasizing that it is not an “add on”) as a new and exciting way to meet some of the existing state requirements. They are openly leery of discussion in their classrooms of anything to do with homosexuality for fear of generating controversy that will get them into trouble. I suggest that they tackle the issue head on: Before launching into a lesson plan, explain that they are not seeking a discussion of personal views on homosexuality, but rather offering an instructive new way of examining the American past by exploring the history of an overlooked minority. One approach might be to look at how some gay and lesbian individuals and organizations consciously borrowed from the African American civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s and the women’s rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Such a comparative approach invites study of the larger issues and strategies involved in all civil rights struggles, while it also points out the differences in the various groups’ challenges and solutions. It can also elicit useful questions about identity, as many Americans were (and are) members of more than one oppressed group.

Members of my audiences of teachers nod and take notes, but in their e-mails to me, in which they excitedly report back on their success in working some of my suggestions into their lesson plans, their selections are always from my material on women’s, rather than gay and lesbian, history.

I am excited that History 177 is now routinely included in my annual course offerings, but I am also rather daunted by the task of continually updating my course readings. There has been such an explosion of superb research in recent years that I have found it impossible to keep up even with LGBTQ book reviews, let alone the actual books, articles, and scholarly papers. One of the great benefits of allowing students to pick their own research paper topics is that they are doing much of my work for me, investigating the most recent and exciting scholarship on a vast array of topics. I look forward to many more years of learning and writing about gay and lesbian people and movements, and to teach ing this lively course so integral to the study of history.

About the Author

Nancy C. Unger is associate professor of history and of women’s and gender studies at Santa Clara University. Mary Whisner made valuable contributions to this essay. Readers may contact Unger at nunger@scu.edu.

References

1. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago, 1983).
2. The lgbtq (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered/queer) scholar Linda Heidenreich, today associate professor of women’s studies at Washington State University, Pullman, was the graduate student who taught the course.
3. Plate 150 in Owen C. Coy, Pictorial History of California (Berkeley, 1925). Reprinted in William Lipsky,Images of America: Gay and Lesbian San Francisco (Charleston, 2006)."] The original publication of this picture “A Miners’ Ball,” signed A[andre] Castaigne, in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, May 1891, Volume 42, New Series Volume 20, p. 136, in an article titled “Pioneer Mining in California”.http://books.google.com/books?id=PWkiAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA127&lpg=PA127&dq="Pioneer+Mining+in+California"+Century+Magazine&source=bl&ots=EXaDoP00cz&sig=XFQJ2MERFNsrgXN-9cKSoj6uYcY&hl=en&ei=le9-S83fCpOltgej2vGaDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Pioneer%20Mining%20in%20California%22%20Century%20Magazine&f=false
4. Santa Clara University provost Denise Carmody pasted the complaint by the parent of the prospective student into an e-mail she sent to the chair of the history department, Thomas Turley. I sent a response to the president of the university, Paul Locatelli, S. J. Denise Carmody to Thomas Turley, e-mail, April 18, 2002 (in Nancy Unger’s possession); Nancy Unger to Paul Locatelli, S. J., e-mail, April 23, 2002, ibid. Locatelli to Unger, e-mail, April 23, 2002, ibid.
5. Stephanie Fairyington, “The New Post-Straight,” Gay and Lesbian Review (Nov./Dec. 2004), 33–34. Nancy C. Unger, Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill, 2000).
6. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York, 1996), 1–21. Leila Rupp, A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America (Chicago, 2002); Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1992); Martin Duberman, Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey (Boulder, 2002). Midnight Sun, “Sex/Gender Systems in Native North America,” in Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology, ed. Will Roscoe (New York, 1988), 32–47; Cary Alan Johnson, “Hearing Voices: Unearthing Evidence of Homosexuality in Precolonial Africa,” in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles, 2001), 132–48. Richard Godbeer, “Sodomy in Colonial New England,” in Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality: Documents and Essays, ed. Kathy Lee Peiss (Boston, 2001), 92–106. Russell Leong, ed., Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience(New York, 1995).
7. Charles Clifton, “Rereading Voices from the Past: Images of Homo-Eroticism in the Slave Narrative,” in Greatest Taboo, ed. Constantine-Simms, 342–61.
8. Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community, dir. John Scagliotti, Greta Schiller, and Robert Rosenberg (Before Stonewall, Inc., 1985); After Stonewall, dir. John Scagliotti (First Run Features, 1999); The Celluloid Closet, dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Sony Pictures, 1995).