The histories of people with same-sex attractions and those who differently express their gender are filled with incredible pain and enormous pride, of overwhelming repression and victorious rejoicing, of stifling invisibility and dazzling illumination.
Throughout the ages, their sexuality and gender identity and expressions have been called many things: from “sinful,” “sicknesses,” and “criminals,” to “orientations,” “identities,” and even “gifts from God.”
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Though same-sex behavior and gender non-normativity have probably always existed in human and most non-human species, the concept of “homosexuality,” “bisexuality,” and “transgender identities,” (in fact, sexual orientation, gender non-normativity in general, and the construction of an identity and sense of community based on these identities) is a relatively modern social construction.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, non-binary (LGBATQI+) people, as is still often the case for many other minoritized communities, grow up in a society primarily without an historical context in which to project their lives. They are weaned on the notion that they have no culture and no history.
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In the famous words of African American social activist Marcus Garvey, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.”
The lives, stories, and histories of LGBATQI+ people have been intentionally hidden by socially dominant individuals and groups through neglect, deletions, erasures, omissions, bans, censorship, distortions, alterations, trivializations, change of pronouns signifying gender, and by other unauthorized means.
Examples of these erasures abound. Historian John Boswell cites an example of censorship in a manuscript of The Art of Love by the Roman author Ovid. A phrase that originally read, “A boy’s love appealed to me less” (Hoc est quod pueri tanger amore minus) was altered by a Medieval “moralist” to read, “A boy’s love appealed to me not at all” (Hoc est quod pueri tanger amore nihil).
In addition, an editor’s note that appeared in the margin informed the reader, “Thus you may be sure that Ovid was not a sodomite” (Ex hos nota quod Ovidius non fuerit Sodomita).
One of the first instances of an unauthorized changing of pronouns signifying gender occurred when, according to historian John Boswell: “Michelangelo’s grandnephew employed this means to render his uncle’s sonnets more acceptable to the public.”
We know about the figure of Sappho and her famed young women’s school on the Isle of Lesbos around the year 580 BCE, where we find the earliest known writings of love poems between women, and other important writings. Unfortunately, only one complete poem and several poem fragments survived after centuries of the Catholic Church’s concerted effort to extinguish the works of these extraordinary women.
An order in 380 CE by St. Gregory of Nazianzus demanded the torching of Sappho’s poetry, and the remaining manuscripts were ordered by Papal Decree in 1073 CE to be destroyed.
October is now Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) History Month. It originated when, in 1994, Rodney Wilson, a high school teacher in Missouri, had the idea that a month was needed to commemorate and teach this history since it has been perennially excluded in the schools. He worked with other teachers and community leaders, and they chose October since public schools are in session, and National Coming Out Day already fell on October 11.
Schools are conducting educational efforts around several special events, for example:
- National Day of Silence: a day in mid-April each year when students across the nation take a vow of silence to call attention to the epidemic of oppressive name calling, harassment, and violence perpetrated against LGBATQI+ students in schools and in the larger society.
- National Coming Out Day: October 11 each year in the US (October 12 in the United Kingdom), set aside to take further steps in “coming out of the closet” of denial and fear around issues of sexual and gender identity as a personal and community-wide effort to raise awareness.
- National LGBTQ History Month: originally proposed in 1994 by Missouri High School teacher, Rodney Wilson, it has become a nationally recognized observance of LGBTQ history (October in the United States, February in the United Kingdom).
- Bisexuality Day (also known as Bi Visibility Day or Bi Pride Day): September 23 to commemorate bisexual awareness and the accomplishments of bisexual people.
- Transgender Day of Remembrance: November 20 to commemorate the estimated two people killed every day somewhere in the world for expressing gender nonconformity.
- No Name Calling Week: based on an idea proposed in the best-selling young adult novel, The Misfits (2003) by James Howe, in which four seventh grade friends suffer the daily effects of insults and taunts.
- National Gay/Straight Alliance Day: January 25 meant to strengthen the bond between LGBTQ+ people and straight allies, and, in particular, to recognize and honor gay/straight alliances (GSAs), which work to educate peers to stop heterosexism and cissexism in schools and colleges.
- National LGBTQ/Queer Pride Month: June each year when members of gay/straight alliances join in annual Pride Marches and other festivities throughout the month in their local communities throughout the country.
The California legislature passed, and then-Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed into law in 2011, SB48, the first in the nation statute requiring the state board of education and local school districts to adopt textbooks and other educational materials in social studies courses that include contributions of LGBTQ+ people.
Other states are following this emerging and important trend. Primarily in academic environments, greater emphasis and discussion is centering on what has come to be called “queer theory” (an area of critical theory), where writers, educators, and students analyze and challenge current notions and categories of sexuality and gender constructions.
For LGBATQI+ people and allies, this information can underscore the fact that their feelings and desires are in no way unique, and that others like themselves lead happy and productive lives. This in turn can spare them years of needless alienation, denial, and suffering.
For heterosexual people, this can provide the basis for appreciation of human diversity and help to interrupt the chain of bullying and harassment toward people based on sexual identity and gender identity and expression. For all students, this content area has the potential to further engage students in the learning process from multiple perspectives.
California was also the first state to ban so-called “reparative” or “conversion therapy” in August 2012: a cruel and oppressive pseudo-therapy intended to change a client from homosexual or bisexual to heterosexual, or transgender to cisgender.
Though the inclusion of LGBTQ+ history has established a good beginning, we see it as only a beginning, as only a meager supplementary or additive measure of history that belongs to everyone, regardless of sexual and gender identities and expressions.
In actuality, LGBTQ+ history must be viewed as a historical canon that transforms and infuses the curriculum, one that needs to be taught and studied all year, every year, age-appropriately across the academic and non-academic disciplines, from pre-kindergarten through university graduate studies.
We are seeing increasing emphasis within the schools on issues related to bullying and harassment prevention. Current prevention strategies include investigation of issues of abuse and unequal power relationships, issues of school climate and school culture, and how these issues within the larger society are reproduced in the schools, among other concerns.
Often missing from these strategies, however, are multicultural curricular infusion. Unfortunately, still today educators require some amount of courage to counter opposing forces.
For LGBATQI+ violence- and suicide-prevention strategies to have any chance of success, in addition to the establishment and maintenance of campus gay/straight alliances, ongoing staff development, written and enforced anti-discrimination policies, and support services, schools must incorporate and imbed into the curriculum across the academic disciplines and at every level of the educational process, multicultural perspectives, including LGBATQI+, age-appropriately from pre-school through university graduate-level programs and courses, from the social sciences and humanities, through the natural sciences and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).
LGBATQI+ experiences stand as integral strands in the overall multicultural rainbow, and everyone has a right to information that clarifies and explains these stories.
Historical overview
Since the early to mid-19th century, a linear history of homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identities, predominantly first in the West, begins with the formation of a sense of “identity” and community brought about by the growth of industrialization, competitive capitalism, and wage labor, and the rise of modern science, which provided people with more social and personal options outside the home, according to historian and women’s studies professor John D’Emilio.
It is only within the last 170 or so years that there has been an organized and sustained political effort to protect the rights of people with same-sex and both-sex attractions, and those who cross traditional constructions of gender expression.
During this time, many individuals and organizations have rejected the medical and religious models of homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identities while embracing a social justice model, which investigates and attempts to address the ways in which social structures promote and maintain issues of domination and subordination.
From the “Homosexual Emancipation Movement” beginning in Germany in the 1860s when Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a lawyer from Hanover, wrote on the topic of same-sex love (in his Vindex and Inclusa) that he termed “Uranian” to refer to this type of love, which he borrowed from Plato’s Symposium, describing love between two men as “the beautiful love, this Heavenly love, the love belonging to the Heavenly ‘Muse Urania’.”
Then a Hungarian doctor, Karoly Maria Benkert, also known as Karl Maria Kertbeny, coined the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in 1869 in his attempt to convince the religious, legal, and scientific communities that same-sex attractions, though not the norm, were widespread and therefore should not be legally penalized.
First wave feminism arose in Germany, the UK, and the United States, and the first homosexual rights group in the US formed in 1924 in Chicago—called the Society for Human Rights, founded by Henry Gerber, a German US-American who had been influenced by Germany’s emancipation movement.
And from the “Homophile Movement,” in the United States with such groups as the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilites, to the tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s, with the birth of the Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activists Alliance, radical lesbians, second wave feminism, to the bisexual movement and the transgender movement, Queer Nation, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP), and Intersectional movement organizing, and No Kings organizing to the present day.
Many historians and activists place the beginning of the modern movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality at the Stonewall Inn, a small bar frequented by young people including trans people, lesbians, bisexuals, gay males, street people, students, and others located at 53 Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
At approximately 1:20 am on the morning of June 28, 1969, New York City Police officers conducted a routine raid on the bar. Feeling they had been harassed far too long, people challenged police officers on this morning — lasting with varying intensity over the next five days — by flinging bottles, rocks, bricks, trash cans, and using parking meters as battering rams.
Out of the ashes of the Stonewall Inn, the Christopher Street Liberation Day Umbrella Committee formed in New York City to plan activities and a march on Sunday, June 28, 1970, up Sixth Avenue. From that first march others grew throughout the world. dJune each year is now reserved for local “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride” activities.
Bisexuals, who had since the beginning been alongside gay and lesbian activists, began to organize for the rights of bisexuals in the mid to late 1970s. For many reasons neither the gay and lesbian rights movement nor mainstream political movements initially responded to the needs of bisexuals. At first, bisexual women organized themselves in same-sex groups for support and consciousness-raising; bisexual men later followed this example.
By 1972, parents and friends were organizing support groups for themselves and their loved ones. Today, a national network of local chapters of the organization Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (or PFLAG) offer support and is on the front lines in helping to defeat heterosexism and transgender oppression.
Founded to fight governmental and societal inaction, in 1986, the intergenerational direct-action group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) formed in New York City. A network of local chapters quickly grew in over 120 cities throughout the world under the theme “Silence = Death” beneath an inverted pink triangle.
In addition, the youth-oriented group Queer Nation formed in 1990 with independent chapters soon appearing in local communities around the country. Chanting, “We’re here. We’re queer. We’re fabulous. Get used to it,” Queer Nation members stressed “queer visibility” and an end to heterosexual privilege and homophobia.
And on the cutting edge in the movement for equality and pride are transgender people who have come out of another closet in large numbers, and are making the links between transgender oppression, heterosexism, sexism, racism, classism, and many other forms of oppression.
And young people are “coming out of the closet” with pride earlier than ever before, and they are organizing groups (like gay/straight alliances) in high schools, on college campuses, and in communities throughout the country.
A growing number of LGBTQ people are raising children proving that love is what it takes to make a family. We have won the right for same-sex couples to marry, others are working to lift the ban against LGBTQ+ people from openly serving in the military, while the opposition continually tries to thwart our efforts.
Originally meaning “different” or “outside the norm,” the term “queer” has often been used as a derogatory term. Some lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, however, have turned the term around by using it in an inclusive way and as a term of empowerment.
First, young people adopted the term as non-label in order to deconstruct sexual and gender categories as a form of resistance. It is used now at times to denote a person who is not heterosexual or not gender-normative.
Following the lead of young people, what has come to be referred to as “queer theory” and “queer studies,” with such notable writers as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, among many others, is now having an enormous impact on college and university campuses as a bona fide academic discipline.
Based on Peggy McIntosh’s (1988) pioneering investigations of white and male privilege, we can, by analogy, understand heterosexual and cisgender privilege as constituting a seemingly invisible, unearned, and largely unacknowledged array of benefits accorded to heterosexuals and cisgender people, with which they often unconsciously walk through life as if effortlessly carrying a knapsack tossed over their shoulders.
This system of benefits confers dominance on heterosexuals and cisgender people while subordinating members of LGBTQ+ communities. These systemic inequities are pervasive throughout society. They are encoded into the individual’s consciousness and woven into the very fabric of our social institutions, resulting in a stratified social order privileging dominant (“agent”) group members while restricting and disempowering subordinate (“target”) groups.
As the old saying goes, the fish is the last to see or even feel the water (read as heterosexual and cisgender privilege) because it is so pervasive, and therefore, the fish takes the water for granted. Often, those beings situated outside the confines of the water (LGBTQ+ people) can, in effect, perceive the water’s existence with its edges, depths, surfaces, consistencies, and reflections.
By analogy, what many (most likely the majority) within our schools and the larger society consider as “normal” and appropriate, upon critical reflection, are perceived by many as (re)enforcements of heterosexual and cisgender standards and what is referred to as “heterosexual and cisgender privilege.”
No matter how loudly critiques protest that this is merely a “bedroom issue,” we know that the bedroom is but one of the many places where we write our stories. Therefore, while each October is a good time to begin the classroom discussions, the full stories of LGBTQ people need to be told throughout the year.
We have come far in psychiatry, religion, education, medicine, and science from a time not so long ago when these social institutions viewed topics of sexuality and transgender identities as unhealthy, sinful, criminal, or as morally suspect.
Teaching, especially teaching that has social change as one of its goals, raises many questions from different quarters. Anytime one begins to raise topics about deeply rooted assumptions, however, one is likely to encounter some resistance, and even hostility, especially in these ultra-conservative MAGA-enforced times.
While I hope that educators are teaching these topics in a totally supportive environment, to assume that this is the case would be naïve and would misunderstand the times and the potential resistance.
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