This was a solid, well-researched book, and basically readable even though it skewed academic in its language. I didn't get a lot out of it, but it's a good introductory text.

One thing to note is that the book is very much a history not of the United States in totality, but of the contemporary LGBTQ community. It's a "how did we get here" kind of read. This is all well and good, but I thought there could have been better coverage of racial minorities (especially non-Black people of color), indigenous communities, the Latin American world, and rural/working-class/non-visible folks whose experiences didn't survive to become the "gay community" as we now imagine it.

As an example of what I was hoping to see: I remember my American women's history professor including lessons on Native American and West African women. Even though these histories were subsumed by European imperialism, we still studied them. In Bronski's defense, I'd hazard a guess that we don't have enough academics writing about the queer history of marginalized people, sad face. ( )

Illuminating history lesson integrating the homosexual movement into America’s historical landscape. This is the first book in the publisher’s ReVisioning American History series.

LGBT expert Bronski (Women’s and Gender Studies, Jewish Studies/Dartmouth Coll; Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps, 2003, etc.) contends that gay men and women’s contributions to the nation’s historical fabric have not always been recognized for their impact. To prove his point, the author ambitiously chronologically traces five centuries of significant, transformational events, people and places in gay history. Bronski reaches back to 1492 to highlight the sexually progressive European influence explorers like Christopher Columbus had on colonial culture and how those ideals locked horns with Puritanical mores. The author equates the injustice of slavery to homosexual oppression and explores the Revolutionary era’s strict ideas of gender conformity and the proliferation of same-sex “romantic friendships” in the 18th century. Drawing on countless references from literary texts, gay classics, poetry, journals, newspaper articles and letters, Bronski gives readers a grand tour of queer cultural vantage points. These include the “outlaw culture” of San Francisco, the erotic prose of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, the homoerotic novels that indelibly shaped American literature and the pivotal revolution at the Stonewall Inn riots. The author suggests that as the United States grew in size, so did the tyrannical promotion of the heterosexual union as the “ideal relationship.” Evidence of abundant gay soldiers in World War II surprises almost as much as the lengths they took to interact with one another. Considering more recent events, Bronski ends with the AIDS activism of late-’80s radical group ACT UP and the still-simmering gay-marriage argument.

A lucid, cerebral treatise on gay culture from the point of view of a clever historian who maintains that “the heritage of LGBT people is the heritage of Americans.” Required reading for both established and newly emerging members of the gay community—and far beyond.

-Kirkus Review

In many ways, this book was illuminating on just how much a part of US history LGBTQIA individuals are. But, if I'm being truthful, it's much more interested in white, cis-gendered, gay and lesbian individuals, which might be because of information actually available for individuals in US history, but still, it was disappointing. I'm not sure if it was out of an abundance of caution, or an actual oversight, but it felt very much like bisexual was a floor made of lava that this book attempted to avoid. There would be individuals described as 'homosexuals who also had opposite sex liaisons' (paraphrasing). I'm pretty sure bisexual was used exclusively after 'Gay, Lesbian,..'.
It was much the same with Trans and gender non-conforming individuals. There were a few individuals whose gender identities were explored, but generally strictly along a male/female binary and with some sort of disorienting pronoun usage (which may, again, be the author erring on the side of caution).
It felt very much like listening to a well-educated GLBT activism veteran about the history of the movement and their precursors. Well worth paying attention to, but a bit dated, with some blind-spots, and a weak (but still present!) grasp on intersectionality.
But, in consideration of how much of this falls into the general blind-spot of most US history, it's still worth the read. ( )

I read all but one of two of the first chapters of this book, for research for a gay historical fiction novel and ... some of it was really good, some of it was mediocre, but I found it had a lot of contradictions.

This is a very general history of gay culture in the United States, and with its broad brushstrokes, sometimes it wins, sometimes it loses.

I took lots of notes and found many enjoyable details (the chapter on the production and marketing of gender was an unexpected joy) I found lots of bisexual / asexual and trans erasure present not only in the historical text but in the text itself.

I liked that it often challenged and called out racist ideals of the time, as well as well-known historical figures who were racist, but I was just disappointed at times in the overall tone of this book, upon reflection.

This feels very white-centered and very along the gay/lesbian binary, as well as the male/female binary.

I'm pleased with the notes I made, but I just found this to be well-intentioned and equally harmful. At one point, Bronski conflates the queer struggle with the struggle for equality amongst African Americans in the United States. He makes one or two interesting points I suppose, but to conflate and compare struggles is harmful and has already been done a thousand times over. He then goes on to elaborate that we shouldn't compare struggles, but like lots of white male cis writers, lacks the subtlety to break down the intersectionality of blackness and queerness in any meaningful way.

He then makes a smart move and quotes Audre Lorde, and then leaves the quotation unattended. The more I think about this, the more it sours in my mouth, which is sad because it was an enjoyable read, but I often wanted Bronski to check his privilege and drop his pejorative views.

Oh well. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ( )

Spanning European colonization to 1990 and clocking in at only 240 pages, this really just a gloss. It does it what it is supposed to but considering it took months and months to finish it wasn’t exactly setting off flash bulbs in my mind. Stonewall gets about five sentences, but there is whole chapter on how World War II set the pieces in place for the social upheavals of the 1960s. ( )