About Lesbian and Gay History in the United States, and the beginnings of Gay Liberation

Aside from my interest in food, I’m a historian with a doctorate which I earned in 2003 with a dissertation about a bookseller in Los Angeles who had his fingers in a lot of cultural pies. During my graduate study, I was mostly warned off LGBT issues by a gay professor who tended to avoid them himself in his scholarly work, and I dutifully did so, but that did not at all stop my reading. The book that has influenced my thinking about this subject is a fairly old one, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (1983), by John d’Emilio. Note the dates. The book ENDS in 1970. Stonewall? June 1969. Lots of history before it. Some of us had been trying to decenter Stonewall in favor of some of those sexual communities that began in port cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles after the end of World War II, but all that came to a screeching halt during Barack Obama’s second inaugural speech when he uttered the phrase, “Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall.” Nicely alliterative. The historians who study women in the United States are fine with the identification of the Seneca Falls Women’s Conference of 1848 as a beginning point after 8 years of chafing at the treatment of women at an antislavery conference in London. Selma represents the most violent mass response to the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and THAT’s fine. Stonewall is different, and that’s mostly because of the outsized role New York City has played in American social and cultural history, all kinds of it. It’s basically as if all the…