{"product_id":"a-queer-history-of-the-united-states-isbn-9780807044650","title":"A Queer History of the United States","description":"\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe first comprehensive history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender America, from pre-1492 to the present\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"Readable, radical, and smart—a must read.\"—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIntellectually dynamic and endlessly provocative, this is more than a “who’s who” of queer history: it is a narrative that radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon primary documents, literature, and cultural histories, scholar and activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from 1492 to the present, a testament to how the LGBTQ+ experience has profoundly shaped American culture and history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmerican history abounds with unknown or ignored examples of queer life, from the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies to the prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil War and resistance to homophobic social purity movements. Bronski highlights such groundbreaking moments of queer history as:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e• In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e•Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to \"Publick Universal Friend,\" refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e• In the mid-19th century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized “female marriage.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e• in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInformative and empowering, this engrossing and revelatory treatise emphasizes that there is no American history without queer history.\u003cb\u003eAuthor’s Note\u003cbr\u003e Introduction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e One: The Persecuting Society\u003cbr\u003e Two: Sexually Ambiguous Revolutions\u003cbr\u003e Three: Imagining a Queer America\u003cbr\u003e Four: A Democracy of Death and Art\u003cbr\u003e Five: A Dangerous Purity\u003cbr\u003e Seven: Production and Marketing of Gender\u003cbr\u003e Eight: Sex in the Trenches\u003cbr\u003e Nine: Visible Communities\/Invisible Lives\u003cbr\u003e Ten: Revolt\/Backlash\/Resistance\u003cbr\u003e Epilogue\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003cbr\u003e Notes\u003cbr\u003e Credits\u003cbr\u003e Index“Bronski does a stunning job of sweeping across five hundred years and weaving ‘queer’ through the history of this nation. Always insightful, and provocative.”—John D’Emilio, author of \u003ci\u003eLost Prophet\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The first book to cover all of LGBT history from 1492 through the present is Michael Bronski's\u003ci\u003e A Queer History of the United States\u003c\/i\u003e (Beacon Press). It is wonderfully readable and looks at the way we understand the history of the United States. The LGBT population moves from the margins to the mainstream and we see that the history of this country also is our history.”—\u003ci\u003eWindy City Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Bronski's book provides an excellent overview for  readers new to the field of gay history. Summing Up: Essential. All  levels\/libraries...”—\u003ci\u003eCHOICE Magazine \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“...A succinct distillation of the history of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders in America… Bronski’s impeccable research bolsters his arguments… a useful handbook for LGBT activist groups and other interested members of the gay community.”—\u003ci\u003eBoston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In the age of Twitter and reductive history, we need a complex, fully realized, radical reassessment of history—and \u003ci\u003eA Queer History of the United States\u003c\/i\u003e is exactly that. Along the way, there are enough revelations and reassessments to fuel dozens of arguments about how we got to where we are today. I don’t know when I have enjoyed a history so much.”—Dorothy Allison, author of \u003ci\u003eBastard Out of Carolina \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Bronski has that rare ability to comprehensively synthesize a large body of material without simplifying or distorting it, taking as much care with historical evidence as with the shifts in language necessary to accurately understand it.”—Martin Duberman, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, City University of New   York\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “This book is a revelation. Its lively and engaging narrative peels back layers of cultural interconnection—from the creation of corn flakes to curb masturbation to Bette Midler’s rise to stardom that started at a gay bathhouse—and much more. Bronski has a Zinn-like grasp of the ties that bind us all together and how to illuminate them on the page.”—Jewelle Gomez, activist and author of \u003ci\u003eThe Gilda Stories\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Bronski demonstrates with wit, insight, and impeccable scholarship that queer lives are, and always have been, woven into the very fabric of this country. Readable, radical, and smart—a must read.”—Alison Bechdel, author of \u003ci\u003eFun Home\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Elegant, insightfully selective, and unremittingly intelligent, Bronski’s survey—of the whys and the ways queer people’s work and struggle have been integral in forming what we call ‘the United States of America’—is an impressive and useful overview.\"—Samuel R. Delany, author of\u003ci\u003e Times Square Red, Times Square Blue\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A savvy political, legal, literary (and even fashion) history, Bronski’s narrative is as intellectually rigorous as it is entertaining.”—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly, \u003c\/i\u003estarred review \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Bronski  does a stunning job of sweeping across five hundred years and weaving ‘queer’  through the history of this nation. Always insightful, and provocative.”—John  D’Emilio, author of \u003ci\u003eLost  Prophet\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] monumental  achievement.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Bay Area Reporter \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eMichael Bronski\u003c\/b\u003e is professor of practice in media and activism in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program at Harvard University. He has written extensively on LGBT issues for four decades, in both mainstream and queer publications, and is the author of three other books and editor of several anthologies.\u003cb\u003eFrom Chapter 3: Imagining a Queer America \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Writing a New National Culture: The East \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Paradoxically, as westward expansion made the country geographically  larger, new technologies—the invention of the telegraph in the late  1830s, the growth of a national railway system, and the telephone in the  1870s—facilitated travel and communications, making the country smaller  and more cohesive. In these conditions we see the eventual flourishing  of a distinctly American intellectual and literary culture. Washington  Irving’s 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” promotes the  ideal of robust, decidedly heterosexual masculinity, as embodied by  “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, over that of the lanky, effeminized  schoolteacher Ichabod Crane. Both men are courting young Katrina Van  Tassel until Brom Bones frightens Crane out of town. Irving’s gender and  sexual message is clear. Crane’s first name means “inglorious” in  Hebrew, which Bible-literate contemporary readers would know. And as  literary critic Caleb Crain points out, much of the action of the story  takes place by “Major Andre’s tree.” This is a reference to Major John  Andre, the British officer—generally thought to be a lover of men—who  collaborated with Benedict Arnold and was hanged by George Washington as  a spy in 1780.7 For Irving, nearly four decades after the Revolution,  the new, clearly heterosexual American man was an imperative. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In contrast to Irving, also in 1820, nineteen-year-old Harvard student  Ralph Waldo Emerson was writing entries in his journal about Martin Gay,  a fellow student three years younger to whom he was attracted. Two  years earlier, when he had first seen Gay, Emerson wrote: \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I begin to believe in the Indian doctrine of eye-fascination. The cold  blue eye of [Emerson deleted the name here] has so intimately connected  him to my thoughts \u0026amp; visions that a dozen times a day \u0026amp; as often  . . . by night I have found myself wholly wrapped up in conjectures of  his character and inclinations. . . . We have had already two or three  profound stares at one another. Be it wise or weak or superstitious I  must know him. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Crain notes that Emerson’s attraction to Gay was a form of the  nineteenth-century ideal of “sympathy.” In this context, sympathy— a  form of empathy that, as Crain writes, “allows us to feel emotions that  are not ours”—is an expansive form of romantic friendship. The deeply  felt connective emotion of sympathy allows one to not only value a  friend for his or her emotional sincerity, but to take imaginative leaps  toward understanding and sharing the emotions of another. This new  understanding of the possibilities of shared emotion was likely  inflected by the new America of wide-open western spaces, natural  landscape, and the outlaw. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In 1837 Emerson published “Nature,” an essay fundamental in defining  transcendentalism: the distinctly American philosophy promoting  individual spiritual transcendence through experiencing the material  world, especially nature, rather than through organized religion. The  next year, in his “American Scholar” speech, he urged his audience to  rethink the idea of the American man (by which he meant humans) and to  create an independent, original, and free national literature. Animated  by the ideal of an expansive sympathy influenced by the “naturalness” of  America, Emerson argued for an egalitarian society that values all of  its members’ individual contributions to a whole: the doctrine “that  there is One Man,—present to all particular men only partially, or  through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find  the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but  he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and  soldier.” \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Emerson’s vision of American equality, the basis for his strong  antislavery and pro–women’s suffrage beliefs, has roots in the  Enlightenment and in his radical, nature-based vision of Christianity.  But it is especially rooted in his ability to admit and emotionally  explore his attraction to—his sympathy with—other men. Samesex affection  was integral to understanding the mutually beneficent dynamics of the  individual in society. This egalitarian same-sex affection placed the  rugged individualism of the Revolutionary man into a new context, not of  conquering an American landscape but of emerging from it and being at  one with it. This was the cornerstone of a new way of understanding  gender, desire, and personal and social liberty. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The feelings Emerson had for Martin Gay (his journals indicate  “sympathy” for other young men as well) did not stop him from marrying  twice and fathering four children. Emerson did not easily embrace all  aspects of this sympathy. In 1824 he wrote in his journal, “He that  loosely forgets himself here \u0026amp; lets his friend be privy to his words  \u0026amp; acts which base desires extort from him has forfeited like a fool  the love he prized.” This is an example of an internal tension that  reflected a larger tension between sympathy and overt sexuality: that  is, moving from a private emotion to publicly expressing that emotion. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Emerson was not the only person dealing with this conflation of  desires, emotions, and political ideas. A wealth of homoerotic  sentiments are present in the poems and journals of Henry David Thoreau.  Meditations on friendship run throughout his journal, and by the 1840s  they became increasingly erotic: “Feb. 18 [1840]. All romance is  grounded on friendship. What is this rural, this pastoral, this poetical  life but its invention? Does not the moon shine for Endymion? Smooth  pastures and mild airs are for some Corydon and Phyllis. Paradise  belongs to Adam and Eve. Plato’s republic is governed by Platonic love.”  \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Thoreau’s invoking of Endymion, Corydon, and Plato strongly suggests a  homosexual subtext; the two mythological figures were iconic  representations for same-sex male desire in Renaissance art, and the \u003ci\u003eRepublic \u003c\/i\u003ewas,  in part, an analysis of male friendship and love. Thoreau is using  friendship as a metaphor here. However, his attraction to the eroticized  male body appears throughout his journals without mythological  trappings, but rather with a decidedly transcendentalist bent: \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e [June 12, 1852.] Boys are bathing in Hubbard’s Bend, playing with a  boat (I at the willows). The color of their bodies in the sun at a  distance is pleasing, the not often seen flesh-color. I hear the sound  of their sport borne over the water. As yet we have not man in nature.  What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back  in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under  the severest penalties! A pale pink, which the sun would soon tan. White  men! There are no white men to contrast with the red and the black;  they are of such colors as the weaver gives them. I wonder that the dog  knows his master where he goes in to bathe and does not stay by his  clothes. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Thoreau’s message is that civilization, with its “severest penalties,”  is most unnatural. He is arguing that nature not only allows for  “exposure” but is a space for racial equality, one wherein even the idea  of “whiteness” is exposed as a lie. Alluding to classical literature  and the European culture it inspired was a common method for  nineteenth-century American intellectuals to discuss sexuality and  sexual behaviors. Used consciously to reinforce ideas about American  citizenship and democratic structures, the older culture safely places  the sexuality at a distance. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Margaret Fuller, a leading figure in the transcendentalist movement and author of \u003ci\u003eWomen of the Nineteenth Century, \u003c\/i\u003ethe  first major feminist publication in the United States, was also  connecting to same-sex erotic intimacy and a new American ideal. In  1843, several years after viewing Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen’s \u003ci\u003eGanymede \u003c\/i\u003eat  a Boston exhibition, Fuller wrote “Ganymede to His Eagle,” a poem about  the beautiful boy abducted by Zeus, in the form of an eagle, to be his  lover and cupbearer. Here the cupbearer speaks to the eagle: \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Before I saw thee, I was like the May, \u003cbr\u003e Longing for summer that must mar its bloom, \u003cbr\u003e Or like the morning star that calls the day, \u003cbr\u003e Whose glories to its promise are the tomb; \u003cbr\u003e And as the eager fountain rises higher \u003cbr\u003e To throw itself more strongly back to earth, \u003cbr\u003e Still, as more sweet and full rose my desire, \u003cbr\u003e More fondly it reverted to its birth, \u003cbr\u003e For, what the rosebud seeks tells not the rose, \u003cbr\u003e The meaning foretold by the boy the man cannot disclose. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Caleb Crain notes that Fuller is referring not only to the implicit  homoeroticism of the original myth but, more important, to the eagle as  “the emblem of sovereignty of the United States.” Thus she consciously  conflates mythological same-sex desire with the democratic progress of  the nation. Fuller is indicating that the longing for freedom implicit  in same-sex desire and sympathy cannot be fully expressed—the rosebud  cannot tell the rose what it feels—because its power, at root political,  emanates from being unspoken. In much of this literature is an  underlying assumption that unspoken feelings are stronger than  articulated ones. In 1839, at the age of twentynine, Fuller wrote to a  woman friend of long standing: \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e With regard to yourself, I was to you all that I wished to be. I knew  that I reigned in your thoughts in my own way. And I also lived with you  more truly and freely than with any other person. We were truly  friends, but it was not friends as men are friends to one another, or as  brother and sister. There was, also, that pleasure, which may, perhaps,  be termed conjugal, of finding oneself in an alien nature. Is there any  tinge of love in this? Possibly!","brand":"Beacon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301953589477,"sku":"NP9780807044650","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780807044650.jpg?v=1767720742","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/a-queer-history-of-the-united-states-isbn-9780807044650","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}