by Sarah Prager
DEDICATION
For Liz, and
all the queer activists making tomorrow’s history
CONTENTS
Dedication
Introduction
Elagabalus
Jeanne D’Arc
Kristina Vasa
Juana Inés de la Cruz
Abraham Lincoln
Albert Cashier
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey
Lili Elbe
Frida Kahlo
Mercedes de Acosta
Eleanor Roosevelt
Bayard Rustin
Alan Turing
Josef Kohout
José Sarria
Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon
Sylvia Rivera
Renée Richards
Harvey Milk
Glenn Burke
Mychal Judge
George Takei
Looking Back, Moving Forward
Glossary
Learn More
Bibliography & Notes
Acknowledgments
Back Ad
About the Author
Books by Sarah Prager
Praise
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
Quick question: Was George Washington straight?
Umm . . . yeah?
Most of us have probably never considered our first president’s sexual identity beyond knowing that he was married to a woman. We just assume he was straight because history doesn’t explicitly tell us otherwise. But when we make assumptions about any historical figure, we rewrite the past without even knowing it. What other assumptions are we making about the gender identities and sexualities of historical figures we think we know? And how do those assumptions shape the way we see the past—and our present?
The version of history we learn in school puts a straight, cisgender mask on almost everyone. But the truth is, queer people have been part of history throughout every era, on every continent. Being queer isn’t new; queer people have existed for as long as people have existed! And acknowledging that fact does something major: it reminds those who identify as queer that they have proud queer ancestors who fought for their rights, that they have cultural grandparents who took a stand. No one is alone in being queer, and shedding light on past queer identities can help us dig for the whole story on any number of historical figures. Recognizing the world’s rich history of queerness helps reduce homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia, and helps welcome queer identities to the mainstream with love and acceptance. That’s important, not only for queer people but for anyone who feels left out of or incapable of relating to the popular version of history most of us know.
QUEER . . .
* * *
What do we mean when we say “queer”? The word means so many different things to different people, and its definition is changing all the time. For some, it’s still a painful and derogatory term; for others, it’s been reclaimed. For the purpose of this book, “queer” means anyone not totally straight or not totally cisgender—anyone outside society’s gender and sexuality norms. “Queer” in this book does not only equal gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (terms often lumped together in the abbreviation LGBT or GLBT). Those four words refer to specific modern identity labels, and only a few of them at that. “Queer” also includes labels like genderqueer, panromantic, and asexual, as well as identities of people who showed characteristics of queerness (like gender nonconforming or same-sex loving) before we had any labels for them. A lot of these words and constructions didn’t even exist a couple hundred years ago. Seriously: the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” weren’t invented until 1869. But of course people of the same sex were into each other, dated, had sex with each other, and loved each other before the 1860s. They have done those things since forever. But putting present labels on past actions is tricky, which is why you need to choose your words wisely. (For more information about different queer terms, check out the glossary in the back of the book.)
So: the language we bring to the exploration of queer history is obviously as complex as the history itself. We’re leaving out hundreds, if not thousands, of terms for different kinds of queerness just by focusing on the words we have in the English language. (For instance, around the globe there have been entire minilanguages used exclusively by queer people, like Polari in Britain and Gayle in South Africa.) In English, all language related to queerness was initially more focused on actual sex acts than on a sense of self. One early example is the word “sodomite,” which means “a person who commits the crime of sodomy.” “Sodomy” comes from the Bible, specifically the town of Sodom, which was synonymous with violence and cruelty, including, in one story, an instance of attempted same-sex rape. “Sodomy” was used to describe men having sex with men and then, natch, used to outlaw men having sex with men. Since self-identifying as “gay” wasn’t yet a thing, it was doing the sex act itself rather than being homosexual that was illegal.
When a new sense of personal identity began to form around same-sex sexual attractions, language expanded accordingly. “Uranian” was used in 1800s Europe to mean “men with female spirits,” and the word “bisexual” was also coined around the same time. (Previously, no English word had existed to describe a person sexually attracted to more than one gender!) Then, through most of the 1900s in Europe and North America, people with any kind of same-sex attraction were labeled “homosexual,” without any room for identity complexity. Fast-forward to 1950s and 1960s North America, where there was a popular movement to adopt the term “homophiles” instead of “homosexuals,” placing the emphasis on same-sex love instead of sex. Obviously, that didn’t stick.
As for the ladies, we currently use “lesbian” to describe women attracted to other women. The term means “from Lesbos,” the Greek island where the poet Sappho wrote about loving other women in the 600s BCE, though the word took on its current connotation centuries later. (Fun fact: The citizens of Lesbos, the original “Lesbians,” unsuccessfully sued the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece in 2008 for people to stop using that word to mean gay women.) “Tribade” (referring to “tribadism,” an old word for scissoring) and “sapphist” (there’s Sappho again) were used before “lesbian” was popularized.
And for the trans and gender nonconforming folks out there, Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term “transvestite” in 1910 (more on Magnus later). “Cross-dresser” was also common back then and was used more broadly than it is today. In the 1970s a bunch of words like transgenderal, transgenderous, and transgenderist were tried out before “transgender” was generally settled upon. One of the earliest words used to describe intersex people, “hermaphrodite” (now a slur but once the preferred term), came from the god Hermaphroditos, who in mythology blended with a nymph to become one being of two genders.
The language we use to describe people’s identities matters; these words have a great deal of power. There are literally hundreds of ways to describe queerness in English alone—and it’s important to respect the exact terms a person uses to self-identify. For gender pronouns in the chapters to come, we’ve made case-by-case decisions in an effort to respect how individuals described themselves; and you’ll see in one story that we chose the gender-neutral “they” instead of “he” or “she.” In a few stories we also used the birth name of a person who later transitioned to using another name; in modern times, it’s almost always considered hurtful and rude to bring up a transgender person’s birth name, and we only did it here either because that person used both names to describe themselves even after transitioning, or for historical clarity when unavoidable.
THERE . . .
&n
bsp; * * *
There has been no time in human history when queer genders and sexualities didn’t exist. From aboriginal Australia to Japanese folk culture to American slave plantations, people of all faiths, races, heritages, and cultures have been queer—every color of the rainbow and then some. Some of the individuals featured in the chapters ahead illustrate a few of the many different ways people have transgressed gender and sexuality norms throughout time. Others are historymakers you’ve heard of, but who you might not have realized had a queer side. And still others are the activists who shaped the queer rights movement that’s ongoing today. Each one of them is a part of the story.
But before you get the lowdown on these twenty-three incredible individuals, it’s important to have all the context. What was going on around the world, and in their local communities, while each of them was alive? What strides had the queer rights movement already made? Global cultures have demonstrated various levels of queer acceptance—and intolerance—throughout history. For those cultures that did embrace diversity, tolerance became a lot harder when Christian European colonists conquered almost every corner of the globe in the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. Suddenly there was exactly one correct way to do gender and sex almost everywhere. Sure, some places maintained their unique structures, like the Bugis in Indonesia (who still have five genders instead of two), but the world overall had far fewer rainbow colors. A rise in the persecution of queer people can be linked to the rise of Christianity, though Christianity is certainly not the only religion to question the morality of queer identities and sexualities. The story of worldwide queerness is being written and rewritten across the globe every day, as mainstream attitudes change and understanding grows.
Europe
* * *
In ancient Greece and Rome, marriage between men and women was more about partnership and child-rearing than attraction or romantic love. It was normal for husbands to go to female concubines and/or to young boys to indulge their sexuality.
Queerness was also out in full view in the leaders of Al-Andalus, as Spain was called under Muslim rule in the 700s to 1000s. One of the male caliphs of Córdoba kept a male harem, and he made his wife dress as a boy and use the male name Djafar so that she could *ahem* excite him in the bedroom and ensure the continuation of the family line.
In the Middle Ages, “sodomites” were a popular scapegoat. If there was an earthquake or a plague or some other punishment thought to have been sent by God, one way to purge the town of evil was to round up some men who could be accused of having sex with other men and execute them. (Unfortunately, this scapegoating continues around the world today.) The Spanish Inquisition similarly targeted queer folk. European colonists exported homophobia everywhere they went, a legacy that still has a stronghold in many parts of the world. Most of the countries that outlaw homosexuality today do so because of prohibitions dating back to when they were British colonies, centuries before the UK became one of the world’s most queer-accepting countries. Why homosexuals were one of the colonists’ most popular scapegoats remains unclear. It wasn’t just a bad interpretation of the Bible, since colonial states didn’t outlaw greediness or other things Christianity forbids. Simply seeing homosexuality as “unnatural” likely played a major role; the colonists didn’t recognize how ordinary it had always been in many cultures.
Queer Europeans didn’t start formally organizing for their rights as a community until the very late 1800s, when queer advocacy first emerged in Germany. That’s when they started thinking of themselves as queer people, instead of people who did queer things (like wearing clothes that didn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth). Remember Magnus Hirschfeld? Well, he was a Jewish German doctor who founded the first queer rights group, pioneered sex reassignment surgeries, and led the first studies on same-sex attraction and gender nonconformance. Yay, Magnus! But then all that progress was pretty quickly undone when the Nazis came to power in the 1930s. Nazis arrested about a hundred thousand men for being homosexuals, sending many to their deaths in concentration camps. They also burned Magnus’s Institute of Sexual Research to the ground. His foundation was resurrected later in the century, when Western European countries began making huge strides with queer-forward legislation. The Netherlands became the first country ever to legalize marriage equality in 2001. Yay, Netherlands!
Africa
* * *
Africa can be considered the world’s most diverse continent in terms of race, culture, and language—and the diversity of queerness is just as impressive. Sex and marriage between males was common for the twentieth-century Zande of central Africa; people assigned male at birth took on female appearances and roles in the Mossi courts of Burkina Faso; women could become soldiers and take wives among the Dahomey (now in Benin); and the Ndongo (in today’s Angola) had a leader, assigned female at birth, who ruled dressed as a man and had a harem of men who dressed as women, known as the leader’s wives. Most of our sources documenting this precolonial African queer culture are from Europeans who wrote down their descriptions of these peoples when they first encountered them in the 1600s to 1800s. How long these gender nonconforming traditions had been going on before the Europeans’ arrival is unknown.
The Europeans eventually succeeded in taking over much of the African continent and erasing many of the queer cultures that had been there. Not only did queerness become less accepted, but its history was repressed, and the mainstream narrative in much of twenty-first-century Africa has been that homosexuality is an import of the Western world. You can regularly see phrases like “homosexuality is un-African” on signs at antiqueer protests around the continent. And in 2009, a small group of American evangelicals traveled to Uganda and held a series of talks and workshops about the dangers of the “gay agenda” and the threat it posed to “traditional families.” Later that year the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act was submitted to the parliament, which called for life imprisonment for “the offense of homosexuality” (same-sex sex or attempting to marry someone of the same sex); seven years in jail for an uncompleted attempt; and the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” (same-sex sex where one of the people is under age eighteen, is HIV-positive, or meets other special criteria). Straight allies weren’t safe either: anyone who “aids, abets, counsels, or procures another to engage in an act of homosexuality” would be jailed for seven years. That means a mother who doesn’t turn her gay son over to authorities is liable to go to jail. The version of this bill passed in 2014 had a maximum sentence of life imprisonment instead of execution for the “aggravated homosexuality” offense, but ten other countries in the world do still have death-penalty laws against homosexual acts, and more than half of African countries criminalize homosexuality.
But progress is being made. Despite police raids on queer bars and a constant threat of violence and murder, African queer activists are mobilizing in Uganda and elsewhere, holding Pride parades, circulating publications, and forming advocacy groups. No matter how many times the government and police try to keep them down, these brave activists keep going. And legal victories are beginning to pop up, with South Africa legalizing same-sex unions in 2006 and Mozambique decriminalizing homosexuality in 2015.
Asia
* * *
We know of intersex gods being worshiped in Hinduism as early as the first century—like Ardhanarishvara, who is split down the middle as half male and half female. Many of the famous male conquerors of the Middle East and Asia had male lovers, and it was pretty normal to be bi in their cultures.
Bisexuality and polyamory were the norm in Han Dynasty China too (we’re talking BCE). Ten emperors in a row each had both a female wife and an official male companion. This practice came to an end when one emperor went overboard, showering his male partner with political promotions and luxury gifts; after the emperor died, government officials murdered the partner to prevent him from succeeding the throne as the late emperor had wished.
In South Asia, the hijra are peop
le assigned male at birth and presenting as women; they are seen as nonbinary, neither male nor female. In India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh hijra are legally recognized as a third sex. The recorded history of a third sex and other transgender identities in this region dates back to the Kama Sutra, which is about two thousand years old. When the British ruled India from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, the hijra were outlawed as a “criminal tribe” and were strictly monitored and oppressed. Though there’s still a lot of social stigma against the hijra in India, some are making huge progress: Laxmi Narayan Tripathi became the first trans person to represent all of Asia Pacific to the United Nations, in 2008, and Madhu Kinnar was elected mayor of her town in 2015.
Oceania
* * *
Did you know that queer people have their own country? The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands. In 2004, a group of Australians protesting their country’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriage declared themselves independent on a few sandy islands at the edge of the Great Barrier Reef. A gay man was declared emperor, and the country even has its own set of stamps featuring various queer pride symbols like the rainbow flag (which is, of course, the country’s flag). Okay, it’s uninhabited and not recognized by the United Nations, but it’s still very much a thing.
As for the broader continent, there’s evidence of several indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands who counted male-male sex as an accepted part of their cultures in precolonial times. Today, your chance of landing on an Oceanic island where same-sex sex is legal is about fifty-fifty. But the cultures might be trending more toward equality: in New Zealand in 1999, Georgina Beyer became the world’s first openly transgender member of parliament.
Latin America and the Caribbean
