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A Queer History of the United States

Author: Michael Bronski

A revised and expanded edition of the Stonewall Book Award winner that reveals the true depth of the American queer experience, spanning over 500 years

Michael Bronski draws from literature, cultural histories, and primary sources to show how the LGBTQ+ experience has impacted US culture and history. He distills this complex and large body of historical material into an insightful, accessible history.

This revised and expanded edition includes more on queer people of color, intersex people, and trans people. Bronski brings the narrative up to 2025, covering both the rise of and the current pushback against gay and transgender rights. He also writes of the intersections of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter in the fight for gay liberation, as well as Gender and Sexuality Alliance clubs in schools.

A Queer History of the United States includes stories of often overlooked or ignored individuals such as:

Thomas Morton, who in the 1620s broke away from Plymouth Colony and founded the town of Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage
Publick Universal Friend, an 18th-century nonbinary preacher who refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led a congregation in upstate New York
Internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman, who led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized “female marriage” in the mid-19th century
Augustus Granville Dill, who was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter in the 1920s.

The book also includes eye-opening examples of American history including:

The ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies
The prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil War
The impact of new technologies on LGBTQ life in the 19th century
How rock music and popular culture were, in large part, responsible for the devastating backlash against gay rights in the late 1970s