REVIEW: A QUEER HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Michael Bronski
When 'Queer' isn't Queer Enough
Gender, Purity, and Sex
Purity serves as a through-line, an antagonist through the whole book from the original Puritan settlers to the purity politics of both the social purity movements in the 1890s that promoted eugenics and white supremacy and the “cultural feminists” of the 1970s that exposed transphobic and anti-sex worker rhetoric.
Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States (2011) starts out promising. It’s a history of gender and sexuality in what would become the American empire. Bronski recounts the historical background and ideology of early settlers and how it frames all American ideas of sex and gender. He also tells of the culture shock between the genders and sexualities of European colonists and the Indigenous nations.
This is all fascinating and useful information. It helps provide the material conditions and progression of Euro-American gender and sexuality, which helps dismantle the notions of gender and sexuality as rigid and static, as well as provides enough distance that we see how gender and sexuality intersected, served, and commanded other aspects of settler-colonial life and culture. Gender and sexuality aren’t just these static things we have to work around but fluid and dynamic constructs often in service to the culture in which they were created.
And the fact we look at it through the different eras of American history shows how dynamic gender and sexuality can be. Even from the start of Puritan colonization in the 1620s to the beginning of the early Revolutionary period in the 1760s, much had changed. Unshackled from objectivity, Bronski demonstrates how gender and sexuality shape and are shaped by class, colonialism, nationalism, racism, religion, and war.
Purity serves as a through-line, an antagonist through the whole book from the original Puritan settlers to the purity politics of both the social purity movements in the 1890s that promoted eugenics and white supremacy and the “cultural feminists” of the 1970s that exposed transphobic and anti-sex worker rhetoric. There is a deliberate dissuasion on Bronksi’s part from the dead-end assimilation strategy for queer people. Purity is always attached to sectarianism, and unless we stand together, they will come for us one day even if it’s not today.
Lip Service
A Queer History’s main failing is that it’s not as all-encompassing as the title “a queer history” implies. It would’ve been more accurate to title it “An LGBT History” but even that’s more ambitious than what we got. Instead, it’s more “A Gay and Lesbian History” with lip service paid toward bisexual and transgender people. The book never mentions ace or intersex people and their history.
Bisexuals have always been treated as the outside insiders of the LGBT community, unfortunately. They are counted as being gay or lesbian—especially in historical examples before the concept of a bisexual identity existed—yet never treated as truly belonging, either. I am no expert on bisexual history or all the struggles they have and continue to face, so due to my own ignorance, my critique of the lack of true bisexual history is surface-level, but the lack of any real engagement with the bisexual movement is a glaring omission. Most mentions of bisexuality are simply when Bronski mentions the LGBT community as a whole.
So, a majority of my critique will be about A Queer History’s lack of trans history. Trans folk are barely mentioned, and when they are, it’s limited, usually about something else such as when discussing Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera or Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire and not the lives or involvement of trans people during specific parts of history.
Like bisexuals, a majority of the mentions of transgender people are when Bronski evokes the LGBT community as a whole. Their only times in the spotlight are women dressing up as men during the Civil War, mentions of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson and Street Transvestite Action Revolution (STAR), and using Janice Raymond and her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male as an example of “cultural feminist” transphobia.
Anecdotes and Accessories
The contemporary conception of transgender and nonbinary didn’t exist in Publick Universal Friend’s time, and using a deadname for a historical person before such a thing existed can be useful for clarity’s sake, but to continue to refer to Publick Universal Friend as their deadname, as a woman, and with feminine pronouns feels disrespectful.
The transness feels like an accessory. Female transvestites fighting in the Civil War are certainly interesting, but it’s anecdotal at best. Likewise, the only important insight on transness we get from mentioning Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson is that they were trans and formed STAR. We learn STAR is the basis for contemporary transgender activism but not about how and what it did. And The Transsexual Empire is treated as an example of transphobia, ignoring how it influenced and codified transphobia in the mainstream.
A Queer History ends in 1990; some will say that’s why there isn’t much on trans people or their movement. While the 90s was when trans folk did become the most visible, that explanation is unsatisfactory. Trans people existed before the 90s. We were there during the AIDs crisis, Stonewall, the McCarthy era, and so on. To regulate transgender Americans as only existing in the 90s is to reiterate that trans people are a new phenomenon rather than existing with the gay and lesbian struggles since the beginning.
Finally, I find the book's treatment of Publick Universal Friend, an American preacher who lived from 1752-1819, questionable. Perhaps I’m missing some academic context, but we’re told Publick Universal Friend identified as genderless and refused to use pronouns. The book, however, refers to Publick Universal Friend only as she/her, and constantly uses Publick Universal Friend’s deadname.
The contemporary conception of transgender and nonbinary didn’t exist in Publick Universal Friend’s time, and using a deadname for a historical person before such a thing existed can be useful for clarity’s sake, but to continue to refer to Publick Universal Friend as their deadname, as a woman, and with feminine pronouns feels disrespectful. I attempted some research into Publick Universal Friend to see if there was a reason, but even the Wikipedia article—of all places—respected Publick Universal Friend’s chosen name and lack of pronouns.
Historians interpret Publick Universal Friend differently: a woman dressing masculine to consolidate power and respect, a manipulative fraudster, or transgender. But since I’m told in A Queer History that “She renamed herself ‘Publick Universal Friend,’ refused to use the pronouns ‘she’ or ‘he,’ and dressed in gender-neutral clerical garments that made her sex unreadable [sic],” I’m lead to believe we are meant to interpret Publick Universal Friend as transgressing the gender binary, even if Bronski says Publick Universal Friend wouldn’t have been called transgender “by the standards and the vocabulary” of the time. I don’t think Bronski is transphobic, but I find the treatment of Publick Universal Friend questionable.
A Queer History, Not The Queer History
A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski is a really good but really disappointing book. It has a lot of great analysis of gender and sexuality and a lot of stories of gay and lesbian Americans, but it lacks asexual, bisexual, intersex, and transgender histories. Despite good insights on gender, there’s very little history on trans people excluding very specific moments that feel anecdotal and accessory.
I know there were transgender Americans throughout history because I've read Susan Stryker’s Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (Rev. ed., 2017). I know it’s good to have a book specifically on trans history, but when you make a book called “a queer history,” I expect it to be about the whole community and the intersections between them, or else it’s just a gay and lesbian history of the United States. This book, at best, queers American history only. It’s still a good book, and I think it’s worth reading, but it just makes me sad.
Susan Stryker’s Transgender History already exists and is excellent, but I wanted a QUEER history, the whole community and its solidarity, its fractures, its competing movements, and its ugly and positive sides. I’m just let down that the emphasis was on A Queer history, not THE Queer history.
Further Reading
“Trans & Nonbinary 101” by Nico Bailey
Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex by Elizabeth Reis
Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen
A Comprehensive Guide to Intersex by Jay Kyle Petersen
Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality by Dr. Julia Shaw