Queer America: A People’s GLBT History of the United States by Vicki L. Eaklor (review)

Vicki Eaklor’s Queer America was originally published in 2008 by the Greenwood Press.¹ Three years later this excellent survey of twentieth-century gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (“GLBT”) history was reissued as “a New Press People’s History” in a series edited by the late Howard Zinn (d. 2010). The series name pays tribute to Zinn’s frankly revisionist A People’s History of the United States, which has sold more than two million copies since 1980. Other books in the series treat topics examined at length in Zinn’s controversial bestseller: poverty; the American and Mexican Revolutions; the Civil and Vietnam Wars.² Queer America, by contrast, covers ground that Zinn left untouched in the first edition of A People’s History and only fleetingly mentioned in the book’s last edition, published in 2010. There, in an Afterword, Zinn acknowledged his persistent neglect of queer history and proffered an excuse belied by his work’s ample attention to indigenous peoples, African-Americans, and women: “I suppose … it was my own sexual orientation that accounted for my minimal treatment of the issue of gay and lesbian rights.” Readers of Zinn’s opus would have to look elsewhere for a “substantial account of the remarkable change in the national culture that took place when men and women who were ‘queer’ … asserted their humanity boldly, courageously, to the larger society.”³

Queer America offers just the sort of account that Zinn imagined but failed to furnish himself. It not only tells us but shows us that, contrary to the impression left by A People’s History of the United States, “GLBT history is U.S. history” (xii).

Unlike most other volumes in the People’s History series, Queer America is the work of an academic historian, in this case one who has taught LGBTQ history for over twenty years.⁴ Queer America grows out of this prodigious practical experience, offering students and teachers in the field a badly needed resource—a textbook, a nearly “comprehensive survey of 20th-century American history aimed at the general reader” (3). Queer America can be characterized—and might well be used—as a narrative complement to Gay American History (1976), Jonathan Ned Katz’s groundbreaking and still highly serviceable compilation of primary materials dating from the colonial period onward.

The pairing Eaklor’s textbook with Katz’s sourcebook would be stronger, of course, if Queer America provided detailed coverage beyond the twentieth century. According to Eaklor, limiting Queer America to the past century “conveniently allow[ed] it to bypass” some thorny problems of categorization, problems that Eaklor skillfully introduces in the book’s first chapter (“What is GLGBT History?”) through a discussion of Abraham Lincoln’s homosocial and possibly homoerotic intimacies. Unfortunately, her expedient temporal limitation too strongly implies that inquiry into twentieth-century people and phenomena proceeds unfettered by the definitional difficulties that beset historians of earlier periods. A twentieth-century focus also undermines the book’s utility for the kind of survey course on “Gay American History” that Eaklor herself teaches. An early chapter’s fascinating if desultory review of pre-1900 phenomena, from the berd-ache of certain Native American cultures to the sexologists of the fin-de-siècle, practically invites a reader to want and expect more.

Yet when it comes to the story the book actually sets out to tell—“the story of GLBT people and the conditions in which they lived during the last century” (xi)—Queer America is thorough, engaging, and insightful. Eaklor proceeds chronologically through well-paced and well-researched chapters on “Sexualities and Communities through Two World Wars,” “Queers in Cold War America,” “Cultures and Politics after Stonewall,” “Backlash and Regrouping” (about the 1980s), “The GLBT Nineties,” and finally the “controversy, visibility, and diversity” that characterize the contemporary moment. Each chapter begins with revealing vignettes of notable individuals, such as trumpeter Ernestine “Tiny” Davis...