Beacon Broadside

Beacon Buzz: Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks

Nell Irvin Painter reviews The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis for the New York Times Book Review

Richly informative, calmly passionate and much needed, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks” completes the portrait of a working-class activist who looked poverty and discrimination squarely in the face and never stopped rebelling against them, in the segregated South and in the segregated North.

Author Jeanne Theoharis appeared this morning on Democracy Now! with Claudette Colvin, a civil-rights pioneer who was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat in Montgomery in March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks. Jeanne discusses Claudette’s story in the context of her research into the local civil-rights movement at the time, and suggests Colvin’s case help set the stage for Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. It’s a really special 35-minute interview.

Watch Jeanne Theoharis on Democracy Now!

 

 

Rashid Khalidi discussed Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East on Up with Chris Hayes on MSNBC.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

More recent coverage for Brokers of Deceit:

Op/Ed by Rashid Khalidi in the New York Times

Review in the American Conservative

Review in The National

Interview on Democracy Now!

Interview on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC

Review in Foreign Affairs

Harpers Six Questions with Scott Horton

NPR's Weekend Edition

Huffington Post Live

 

 

 

Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape by Brad Tyer made this week's PW Tip Sheet: Best Books for the Week of March 25

Interview with Brad Tyer with the Missoulian

MakeitMissoula.com review: "Several times while reading the book, I had to just stop, sit back and admire a chunk of imagery crafted by a man who can just flat-out write. "  

Mountain West News review: "Montana needs a book like this. We need to remember the past. We need to be mindful of the present. We need to say thanks to all those who strife to do the right thing. We need more journalists like Brad Tyer to keep us humble."  

Events:

Country Bookshelf, Bozeman, MT, 3/30/2013

Hearst Free Library, Anaconda, MT, signing 4/3/2013

Butte Library, 4/4/2013, at 6:30 PM

The Montana Book Company, Helena, MT, 4/5/2013

Elk River Books, Livingston, MT, 4/6/2013

Shakespeare & Co. Missoula, MT 4/7/2013 7pm

Brazos Bookstore, Houston, TX, 4/11/2013, 7pm

Watch the Book Trailer on YouTube

 

 

Michael Bronski (A Queer History of the United States) was on HuffPost Live talking about marriage equality, DOMA, and the Supreme Court. Bronski was also quoted in an article on Huffington Post in the Gay Voices section 

Michael Bronski, the author of A Queer History of the United States and a Harvard professor, notes that sentimental arguments have become increasingly prevalent, and successful, in social movements over the last century. "Uncle Tom's Cabin was far more effective than quoting biblical texts or making a constitutional argument and abolitionist writings are filled with the tragedy of children being torn away from their mothers," Bronski said in an interview. "Suffragists mostly only used legal arguments but later, second wave feminism did better portraying a talented 12-year-old girl who wanted to play field hockey (or become a doctor) than in arguing for equal wages for female factory workers."

 

Outlaw Marriages by Rodger Streitmatter serves up a history lesson for the Supreme Court via this excellent post at Biographile:

While the Court mulls, however, we'd like to clear up some misunderstanding. Take the "recent" institution of gay marriage, as Justice Samuel Alito seems bent on calling it. Alito is trying to dissuade any major ruling on the grounds that evidence on the effects of same-sex marriage is too little, too soon: "You want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cell phones and the internet?" he asked. "We do not have the ability to see the future."

Fortunately, we don't have to. We mere humans may not wear the robes of soothsayers (or Justices, for that matter), Mr. Alito, but we do have access to local libraries and the benefit of hindsight. While, yes, the formal institution of gay marriage is recent, author Rodger Streitmatter reminds us that gay folks have been resourcefully affirming their own versions of marriage for centuries. In fact, they've found ways of making it work with or without our questionably-gay-Uncle Sam's nodding approval.

 

My Mother's Wars by Lillian Faderman featured as part of a round-up of titles on the post-War Jewish American experience on Biographile.

My Mother's Wars is the memoir that Mary, a Latvian Jew and New York immigrant, “was never able to write.” Faderman shares her spirited mother’s story from life-altering experiences (the Nazi's brutal annihilation of Preil, the shetl where Mary was born) to mundane city moments.  Each are rendered with poetry and frankness. Beginning in 1914, Faderman chronicles Mary’s futile love affair with commitment-phobic Moishe, the wrenching isolation of immigration and the insidious backdrop of antisemitism. Mary may not have been able to tell her story, but it’s testament to her incredible life that her daughter did it for her.

 

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine by Danielle Ofri

Kirkus Reviews: “An invaluable guide for doctors and patients on how to ‘recognize and navigate the emotional subtexts’ of the doctor-patient relationship.” 

 

Upcoming Author Appearances:

• David D. Burstein at NYU bookstore
  When: Tue Apr 2, 2013 6pm to Tue Apr 2, 2013 9pm  EDT Where: New York University
• Rashid Khalidi at the Politics & Prose Bookstore
  When: Fri Apr 5, 2013 7pm to Fri Apr 5, 2013 10pm  EDT Where: Politics & Prose Bookstore 
• Rashid Khalid, Keynote Speaker for Historians Against War National Conference
  When: Sat Apr 6, 2013 1pm to 4pm  EDT Where: Towson University
• Rashid Khalidi at Temple University
  When: Mon Apr 8, 2013 4pm to 7pm  EDT Where: Public History at Temple University 
• Lillian Faderman at the Sandwich Newcomers Club
  When: Tue Apr 9, 2013 7pm to Tue Apr 9, 2013 10pm  EDT Where: Newcomers Club, Sandwich 

Related articles

Honoring Rosa Parks Requires More Than a Statue

Happy 100th Birthday to Rosa Parks

Before Rosa Parks, another woman defied segregation

Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East

Historical Beacon Buzz: Langston Hughes reviews James Baldwin

Bromances: "Sentiment" Then, "No Homo" Today

This is the fourth episode in a series of interviews with Michael Bronski about the A Queer History of the United States, this year's Lambda Literary Award winner for LGBT Nonfiction. The interviews were conducted by Richard Voos. 

Enter to win a copy of A Queer History of the United States or one of Beacon's other LGBT titles in our Pride Month Giveaway. For more information, visit beacon.org/queervoices.

Listen to Queer History Episode 4-Bromances: "Sentiment" Then, "No Homo" Today

"I don't see how I can live any longer without having a friend near me, I mean a male friend. Yes, James, I must come; we will yoke together again; your little bed is just wide enough; we will practice at the same bar, and be as friendly a pair of single fellows as ever cracked a nut. We perhaps shall never be rich; no matter, we can supply our own personal necessities. By the time we are thirty, we shall put on the dress of old bachelors, a mourning suit, and having sown all our wild oats, with a round hat and a hickory staff, we will march on till the end of life, whistling as merry as robins, and I hope as innocent." —Daniel Webster, letter to James Bingham, April 3, 1804

My dear general—From those happy ties of friendship by which you were pleased to unite yourself with me, from the promises you so tenderly made me when we parted at Fishkill, gave me such expectations of hearing often from you, that complaints ought to be permitted to my affectionate heart. Not a line from you, my dear general, has yet arrived into my hands, and though several ships from America, several despatches from congress or the French minister, are safely brought to France, my ardent hopes of getting at length a letter from General Washington have ever been unhappily disappointed: I cannot in any way account for that bad luck, and when I remember that in those little separations where I was but some days from you, the most friendly letters, the most minute account of your circumstances, were kindly written to me, I am convinced you have not neglected and almost forgotten me for so long a time. I have, therefore, to complain of fortune, of some mistake or neglect in acquainting you that there was an opportunity, of anything; indeed, but what could injure the sense I have of your affection for me. Let me beseech you, my dear general, by that mutual, tender, and experienced friendship in which, I have put an immense portion of my happiness, to be very exact in inquiring for occasions, and never to miss those which may convey to me letters that I shall be so much pleased to receive.— Marquis de Lafayette to George Washington, 1799

A man of deep and noble nature had seized me in this seclusion. . . . The soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams. . . . But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul. — Herman Melville, review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Mosses and the Old Manse, August 1850

If the Marquis de Lafayette were around today, he might have signed his letters to George Washington, "Love you bro. No Homo."

How do we understand this language, from one military hero to another, which sounds to the modern ear more like a lover's whining than one general having missed contact with a fellow military leader? And the letter from Daniel Webster to James Bigham reminds me of the controversy about Abraham Lincoln that he shared bed with his law partner. Neither Lafayette, Washington, Webster, nor Lincoln was gay or homosexual. Those words didn't exist in their lifetimes. Men slept in the same bed as other men--it was the practice. Yet the feeling in Lafayette's letter and the strength of Webster's attachment to Bingham are undeniable. Are these the "bromances" and "man dates" of the 19th century?

I think that's an excellent question. When we read these letters now-- and I've actually taught these letters and these journal entries in my classes and students are quite perplexed and often try to come up with reasons why they are not love letters-- I think it's difficult to put these in context using anything in our contemporary society, because they have nothing to do with that. What I do think stands out with each of these, thinking particularly of the second Lafayette letter, is that they contain enormous amounts of sentiment. Sentiment as it was known in the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century is not as we might think of it today, as sloppy sentimentalism, but as a deep, sincere, honest, and, above all, ethical feeling for one's fellow man, the emphasis on "man," although it could be applied to human beings in general. And I'd like to make a distinction about the Washington/Lafayette correspondence as opposed to the Daniel Webster note--what we're seeing here is men who are valuing one another not only as men-- in all the complexity it might entail for the time-- but actually as patriots. When we look at Washington and Lafayette and we know the history, these are two men who just fought the American Revolution. Lafayette's gone back to France to fight the French Revolution. They are actually putting the Enlightenment ideals of equality, fraternity, and democracy above all else. So that's the context we have to view these in. I'm not arguing that they may not have had a sexual affair-- we have no evidence that they did, nor do we have any evidence that they did not. Certainly the intensity here of emotion and of sheer emotional investment in one another is very, very clear.

It's interesting, Michael, that the expression of that kind of sentiment and emotion today between two men--pick two generals, General Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell--would be completely unheard of and impossible to imagine. What happened in the intervening almost two hundred years?

I think what's happened is that we've lost the notion of sentiment between men, of honest, real, deep emotional feeling that can be expressed. Certainly, men today can feel deeply for one another, can work together. We hear wonderful stories in horrible situations of soldiers and their intense relationships in war time in Iraq or in Afghanistan. But the expression of these is completely different now. Certainly if General Schwarzkopf wrote a letter like this to General Powell--probably on email or texting him because he would not have time to write the entire letter out by hand--he'd have to add what the younger people these days say at the end of the letter: "No Homo." Clearly, he would not write this letter to begin with. I think what we've lost here is the ability of men to actually express their feelings, and maybe their feelings for women as well, but certainly for one another as men.

When we read the Herman Melville quote--and there are certainly others that would be very similar--it's impossible to come to the "No Homo" conclusion. The reading from Melville is really a different matter altogether from the Lafayette and Webster letters. He clearly formed a strong sexual attraction to his neighbor, Hawthorne. And in A Queer History of the United States, you put this in context with a number of homoerotic sentiments expressed in literature and letters by Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Thoreau, by Emily Dickinson, by Margaret Fuller. Some of those sentiments, and certainly Melville's, expressed far more than romantic friendship. And in Melville's work, the homoerotic is a clear theme, and the relationships, like Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick, almost always cross racial lines. Talk to us about the interaction and intersection of the racial and the homoerotic, starting with Melville, but as a theme in A Queer History.

I think one thing to keep in mind here is that when we're looking at this notion of sentiment, it really is in the context of the Enlightenment and in the concept of equality between men and ostensibly among women as well, although that doesn't play out as well until later on when we come into the suffrage movement. But I think that when we're looking at some of the writings by Herman Melville, say, in Moby Dick, or Charles Warren Stoddard in his South Sea Idyls, we're looking at two things. First, we're looking at this early bromance, this early version of the buddy movie between a white man and, as Leslie Fiedler puts it, a "colored" man. But we're looking at this, because it is the Enlightenment and we're looking at equality among men, as a form of racial justice. Keep in mind that at this time the races are completely separated, we have slavery, we have essentially a system of white supremacy across the world. And yet these men, in this case Herman Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard, are able to imagine relationships-- possibly sexual, certainly love relationships, and certainly intimate relationships-- between white men and men of different races. So when we're looking at these, I think it's important to focus on the sexual aspects, of course, but also on the aspect that this is the roots of what I would think of as being a movement, or an imagining, of coexistence between the races, which would bring us to a new level of equality that we had never even imagined before. 

In a future podcast, we're definitely going to talk about the contrast between social purity, persecuting society and social control movements and of movements for racial liberation and sexual liberation. I think that you describe in some detail and very clearly the relationship between the racial and the sexual in that contrast of movements.

What I find fascinating is that when we look at the history of race struggles, the struggle for racial equality within American culture, one of the earliest places that we can find it is in these homoerotic writings of Melville and of Stoddard. So in some ways, there's a very deep connection between sexual liberation, sexual equality, sexual desire, and the desire for equality among men.

The American Man: From Ichabod Crane to Jackie Chan

This is the third in an eight-part series of interviews with Michael Bronski about the A Queer History of the United States, this year's Lambda Literary Award winner for LGBT Nonfiction. The interviews were conducted by Richard Voos. 

Enter to win a copy of A Queer History of the United States or one of Beacon's other LGBT titles in our Pride Month Giveaway. For more information, visit beacon.org/queervoices.

Listen to Queer History Episode 3-The American Man: From Ichabod Crane to Jackie Chan

In this by-place of nature there abode, in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane, who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, “tarried,” in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity... He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. 

[...]

The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood; being considered a kind of idle, gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson... Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles of all the country damsels. How he would figure among them in the churchyard, between services on Sundays; gathering grapes for them from the wild vines that overran the surrounding trees; reciting for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering, with a whole bevy of them, along the banks of the adjacent millpond; while the more bashful country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address. 

From his half-itinerant life, also, he was a kind of traveling gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house, so that his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction.

[...]

Among these [country swains], the most formidable was a burly, roaring, roystering blade, of the name of Abraham, or, according to the Dutch abbreviation, Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood. He was broad-shouldered and double-jointed, with short curly black hair, and a bluff but not unpleasant countenance, having a mingled air of fun and arrogance. From his Herculean frame and great powers of limb he had received the nickname of BROM BONES, by which he was universally known. He was famed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, being as dexterous on horseback as a Tartar... He was always ready for either a fight or a frolic; but had more mischief than ill-will in his composition; and with all his overbearing roughness, there was a strong dash of waggish good humor at bottom. He had three or four boon companions, who regarded him as their model, and at the head of whom he scoured the country, attending every scene of feud or merriment for miles round... Sometimes his crew would be heard dashing along past the farmhouses at midnight, with whoop and halloo, like a troop of Don Cossacks; and the old dames, startled out of their sleep, would listen for a moment till the hurry-scurry had clattered by, and then exclaim, "Ay, there goes Brom Bones and his gang!" The neighbors looked upon him with a mixture of awe, admiration, and good-will; and, when any madcap prank or rustic brawl occurred in the vicinity, always shook their heads, and warranted Brom Bones was at the bottom of it.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving, 1820.

America's definition of itself has been tightly connected to our definition of manliness and masculinity. There's a contrast between the British fop and the self-reliant Colonial; the educated and rather girly Ichabod Crane, as we've just heard read, and the manly Brom Bones; the Eastern intellectual and the cowboy; finally, from the invert and homosexual to a new heterosexual man at the start of the 21st century. Would you take these in turn, starting with the earliest definition of the American Man? How and where does that definition come into being?

The American Man has a very odd history, the remnants of which are still with us today, maybe even magnified in some ways. Certainly, we see the first American Man as a reaction to the English fop, as we see in the Washington Irving story. But even before the Washington Irving story, which was written in the 1820s, we see the American Colonialist really fighting against the notion of the effeminate Englishman, an odd notion since in fact George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and those other people all wore powdered wigs, had large libraries, and were actually rather dandified. One of the first American plays ever written is called The Contrast by Royall Tyler. It features two main characters: the effeminized English sympathizer-- also an American-- named Billy Dimple; and his opponent in love-- they're both after the same girl-- whose name is Colonel Manly. So from the very beginning, we see this dichotomy, and we see it play out again and again. 

I think the Brom Bones/Ichabod Crane story is simply one early aspect of this, but one which is really formative for American culture, even now, since most school children have to read this story which is at heart a story about a queer bashing. 

Say some more--remind us of how this story ends.

In the story, which I'm sure most people know, Ichabod Crane is the effeminized school teacher who comes into this small town, who teaches children but hangs out with the women, who does knitting with them, who is part of the women's sewing circle. His opponent is Brom Bones, who is a bully. At the height of the story, relying on the legend of Sleepy Hollow, which is that the headless horseman rides at night, Ichabod Crane is very fearfully riding home one night with this legend in mind. Suddenly, from across the bridge and chasing him is, indeed the headless horseman, who we know is actually-- probably-- Brom Bones with a lighted pumpkin on his shoulder. Ichabod Crane runs off-- is bullied-- out of town, essentially, and never is seen again. Presumably, he's moved, although there's always the possibility that he's actually dead. What I think is most interesting, and most people don't realize this about the story now, although certainly it would have been true back in Washington Irving's time, is that the first line in the story says that the action takes place next to "Major Andre's tree." This is a reference to the tree upon which Major Andre, the man who worked with Benedict Arnold against the American forces, was hanged for treason. Now, people would have realized this in 1820, not now, but Major Andre was generally thought to be a homosexual or certainly a man who was in love with other men. So, even Washington Irving back in 1820 was quite aware of the homosexual subtext for the story.

So there's a link right in 1820 between the girly-man and betrayal, betrayal of your country.

Completely. And I think what's interesting is that we see this played out again and again and again, in increasingly more complicated ways, when we come to World War II, but certainly as far back as 1820 and even before that we see this dichotomy between men who are learned, men who teach, men who like women versus who want to have sex with women, men who work with children, and the more "manly" American man.

And that's reflected in the legends around Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales as well.

Shortly after the Revolutionary War, we do begin to have these other American legends coming up. Ultimately, by the early to mid-19th century, the legends of Davy Crockett and of Daniel Boone, which are quite distinct legends, but both really show American men in this new light as frontiersman, as men going out to the West, as men who can conquer nature. A man who can-- in the case of Davy Crockett-- kill huge amounts of animals to prove his manhood. The Daniel Boone story is slightly different. He's somebody who actually seems to be taming nature versus killing it.

So the distinction that you write about in James Fenimore Cooper--the additional complexity in his work--involves that these are settlers and Native Americans in his stories.

Yes. I think if you look at Washington Irving, the paradigm here is the American Man is praised for being the bully against the effeminized Ichabod Crane. Shortly after this, we have James Fenimore Cooper, who is spinning out a different legend, which is that the white American man who is conquering the continent becomes friends with the Native American. In fact, they become very intimate friends. So in the five Leatherstocking novels by Cooper, we have Natty Bumppo becoming best of friends with Chingachgook. And the writing is quite erotic, the relationship is quite erotic. They have female love interests, but the center of the novels is this evolving male companionship and friendship, where they leave civilization, they leave the city, they leave the fort, and they go into the forest to bond together. I don't think Cooper intended for us to see them as being physical lovers, but the paradigm of the white man and the nonwhite man, or what Leslie Fiedler in his essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey" would call "the colored man," is st up as an American paradigm. It begins back in the 1840s and we see it play out again and again. We see it with Cooper, and we see it in a slightly different way in Moby Dick, where we have the intense relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. Melville is quite clear that they are a couple, since there is a chapter called, "The Wedding Night." We see it again even in Mark Twain, and this is what the reference is to the Fiedler essay-- we see it in the relationship of Huck to Jim, who's a runaway slave. I think that we can trace this from the 1820s throughout the 19th century.

And we see it today in movies such as Lethal Weapon with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. And there are a spate of these movies in the 1980s with black and white cop teams. So one way of looking at these books-- be it James Fenimore Cooper or Mark Twain or Herman Melville-- is these are really the early template for what we now understand to be the buddy movie. The buddy movie as it exists now could either be Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with two white guys, but more recently-- in the '80s and we see this today in a more advanced, complicated way-- all those cop buddy movies. The newest spate of these is with an African-American actor and Jackie Chan, so we do have the biracial tension and the biracial loving relationship, only now it's an Asian man who has replaced the white man.

Berdache and Sodomite: Language, Gender and Sex

This is the second in an eight-part series of interviews with Michael Bronski about the A Queer History of the United States, this year's Lambda Literary Award winner for LGBT Nonfiction. The interviews were conducted by Richard Voos. Listen or read below to learn about how Europeans applied their language and beliefs to the "Two-Spirt" Native Americans they encountered.

Enter to win a copy of A Queer History of the United States or one of Beacon's other LGBT titles in our Pride Month Giveaway. For more information, visit beacon.org/queervoices.

Listen to Queer History Podcast Episode 2: Berdache and Sodomite

 

We-Wa-a-Zuni, A Berdache; Full Length Portrait from First People.

"Among Mamitarees if a boy shows any symptoms of effeminacy or girlish inclinations he is put among the girls, dressed in their way, brought up with them, and sometimes married to men." Nicholas Biddle, original journals of the Lewis and Clark expeditions

"Their garments consist only of skins; the women are always clad very modestly and very becomingly, while the men do not take the trouble to Cover themselves. I know not through what superstition some Ilinois, as well as some Nadouessi, while still young, assume the garb of women, and retain it throughout their lives. There is some mystery in this. For they never marry and glory in demeaning themselves to do everything that the women do. They go to war, however, but can use only clubs, and not bows and arrows, which are the weapons proper to men. They are present at all the juggleries, and at the solemn dances in honor of the Calumet; at these they sing, but must not dance. They are summoned to the Councils, and nothing can be decided without their advice. Finally, through their profession of leading an Extraordinary life, they pass for Manitous, — That is to say, for Spirits, — or persons of Consequence." From the journals of Jacques Marquette, 1673-1677

"Among the women I saw some men dressed like women, with whom they go about regularly, never joining the men. . . . From this I inferred they must be hermaphrodites, but from what I learned later I understood that they were sodomites, dedicated to nefarious practices. From all the foregoing I conclude that in this matter of incontinence there will be much to do when the Holy Faith and the Christian religion are established among them." Franciscan Pedro Font's diary

---

The use of the word "gay" really arose in the 1920s or '30s, but there was all sorts of different language in the previous four hundred years. Take us back to some of the earliest descriptions and usages of terms to describe queer people in the Americas.

Language can be very tricky, so when we're looking at language and how it's describing people, we have to realize that sometimes other people do the describing. So, before the Europeans even came here, we had many Native tribes and groups of people who exhibited behavior such as cross-dressing, same-sex relationships for both women and for men. Each of the tribes had their own language for this. When the Europeans came here, they used the French word berdache--which was a pejorative word essentially meaning a pedophile--for these people, completely inaccurately. Yet it's a word that continues to be used by anthropologists even today.

George Catlin (1796-1872), Dance to the Berdache. Drawn while on the Great Plains, among the Sac and Fox Indians, the sketch depicts a ceremonial dance to celebrate the two-spirit person.

There's a mix in the behaviors and attitudes that you're talking about among the Native Americans, around both same-sex sexual behavior but also around breaking gender boundaries.

Certainly breaking gender boundaries for the Europeans, who were quite shocked when they came here. So the language that we have, which is used to some degree now, is the European terminology. Which I think we find repeatedly throughout the history of America. America was here before the Europeans came, they brought over the language, another word that they brought with them was "sodomite." Which is a theological term, meaning a person who has committed a sin of sodomy. Used rather broadly about anybody who transgressed accepted gender or sexual behaviors. And yet, a word that's used today, even in the general sense of the sodomy laws which are defined in various different ways. So from the earliest Colonial times, we did not have "homosexuals," we did not have "gay people," we had people who were accused of committing the sin of "sodomy" and were "sodomites."

And so both of those terms--"berdache" and "sodomite"--were really pejorative.

Completely pejorative. The first, by social implication, although considered a sin. The second explicitly, theologically, a sin. So it's important to realize that most of our laws emanate to a large degree from canon law in Europe, and were translated from the church into the state.

American History is Queer History: An Interview with Michael Bronski

Beacon Press is proud to announce that A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski is this year's Lambda Literary Award winner for LGBT Nonfiction. The news came at last night's Lammy Awards, as we were preparing to post the first in an eight-part series of interviews with Michael Bronski about the book. The interviews were conducted by Richard Voos. Listen or read below to find out why American History is Queer History.  

Listen to A Queer History of the United States, Episode One

What's the difference between a "Queer History" and a "regular" history?

 As I was writing the book and as the book was being edited, we decided that actually that was a little bit too literal, and that what we wanted to do was a Queer History, which would be rather a history of a sensibility rather than a history of what certain people did or didn't do. I think that a Queer sensibility would be a sensibility that would be from the outside. So whereas LGBT people may have lived to a large degree on the outside--although not always since many of these people were in fact not openly gay at the time--what the book does is that it looks at American History from the point of view of an outsider. So in this sense, it's not that different than, say, a black sensibility or a Latino sensibility. 

One of the things that always comes up is the terminology, and you discuss this in the Introduction and the first chapter. The language used even in the last one hundred and twenty years--gay, homosexual, invert, Sapphist--none of that existed of course when the Mayflower landed or in the first hundred or two hundred years of US History. So, how do you write a "Queer" history of the United States given that the terms and the identity and the social meanings have changed really radically over five hundred years?

I think one of the reasons we were attracted to the word "Queer" is its non-specificity. So, by "Queer," it's being used generally, meaning a point of view an outsider or a "deviant"-- non-normative experience. But you are completely right. Certainly words such as "gay" and "lesbian," "homosexual" were not used two hundred years ago in many cases. I think that none of these words were used for the first four hundred years of American history--my book begins in 1492. It is a tricky feat to actually use contemporary words to describe the activities, the emotions, the feelings, the sensibilities of people who lived five hundred years ago, or three hundred years ago. I tried for the most part not to use those words, and simply to let the people speak in their own words, and to evaluate what they were saying and what they were doing without putting our modern sensibilities onto them. 

The core argument in your book is that American History is Queer History. Lay out the argument for us if you would.

Since the 1960s, there have been movements to include those people who have been "left out" of American history. So we see Women's History, African-American history, Latino history, Native American history. And certainly when we think about Gay and Lesbian or GLBT history, that's the same impulse--to bring Gay and Lesbian people back into American history. When I began writing the book, it struck me that the more research I did, that while this project was well-intentioned, it was rather unnecessary. That in fact gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender people, African-American people, Latino people, women have always been in American history. So the very process of separating people out in order to put them back in seemed to me to be shortsighted. So the purpose of the book as I began writing it became clearer and clearer--it was simply to identify and find the LGBT people that are in American history already. The more I did this, what I discovered was that there were so many people, so many events, people's lives, people's personalities were so intertwined with what we think of as American history that there was no separation at all. 

Can you give us one or two examples that would connect what we all learned in elementary and high school about American History to the idea that the queers were here all along?

There are a multitude of examples. Two that come to mind immediately are, in the 19th Century, the 1850s, we have an intense relationship between Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts who was one of the leading abolitionists, who had an intimate, passionate relationship with Samuel Gridley Howe, one of the major reformers of American culture back then. This is the man who started Perkins School for the Blind and completely reformed our notion of dealing with different physical disabilities. The letters between the two men are quite striking, and even though both of them were married--Samuel Howe actually was married to Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic--their relationship was sustaining to both of them. When Howe was on his honeymoon with Julia Ward Howe, he received word that Charles Sumner was very upset and wrote him a passionate note saying that he wished that he was there with them. Interestingly, Sumner himself married later. They have complicated relationships. Julia Ward Howe, although this was only discovered about ten years ago, wrote a novel about a hermaphrodite--a man/woman who loves both men and women--that most critics now think was her own meditation on her husband's bisexuality.

I recall hearing about Charles Sumner in high school. There was a famous fistfight in the Senate that he was involved in. Obviously, we all know the Battle Hymn of the Republic. And your purpose is to connect their queer lives into American History in a way that has not been done before. 

Right. And I think there are two ways of looking at it. One way of looking at it is to say, "This is sort of interesting. This is some extra stuff we didn't know before." And we can actually prove it. We have letters, we have diaries, we have unpublished novels. But I think that's a simplistic way of looking at it. I think a more complicated way is to ask, "What did this have to do with their relationships? What did Sumner's queerness have to do with his abolition stand? What did Howe's queerness have to do with his drivenness to reform society? What did Julia Ward Howe's realtionship to her husband have to do with her impulses to the early suffrage movement and for liberation of women?" So, I think that when we look at the larger picture, the queerness, the sexuality, the really complicated sexual relationships, are integral to these people's desire to change the world and make it better. 

And you said you have an example from the twentieth century as well.

I think we see a very similar situation, and similar also in the sense that these are people involved in a heterosexual marriage, when we look at the career and life of Eleanor Roosevelt. We know now, thanks to historian Blanche Weisen Cook, that Eleanor had a very complicated, intimate, most-probably sexual relationship with Lorena Hickok, who was a journalist. At one point, Eleanor moved her into the White House with her. And that Hickok's reporting upon Eleanor Roosevelt was integral to Eleanor Roosevelt's promotion of herself as a social reformer. Along with this, we do know that Eleanor Roosevelt had a wide, wide circle of female friends, many of whom were lesbians, many of whom were involved with social work. These women as an aggregate were called "Roosevelt's Brain Trust." And, in fact, Eleanor brought them to Washington and they were instrumental in forming the New Deal. Francis Perkins, one of Eleanor's intimate friends, was the first woman to head the Labor Department. So I think when we're looking at Eleanor Roosevelt's life, it's not just interesting that she had this affair with a woman-- she also apparently had an affair with her chauffer, named Earl Miller, as well, so Eleanor's life was complicated-- but what is really amazing that there is this circle of friends--which, again, Blanche Weisen Cook calls "female support networks"--that literally changed our very notions of how social work functions in American society and how reform functions. All again based upon lesbian--or women being intimate with women--relationships.  

The Out100, Taxing the Wealthy, and Kate Bornstein talks with Dan Savage: Monday Media Roundup

Michael Bronski was named one of the Out100 by Out Magazine. (Be sure to check out the full spread--some amazing photos!)

Gender Outlaw Kate Bornstein, whose memoir will be published by Beacon Press in 2012, weighs in on a tricky question at the Never-Safe-For-Work Savage Love. 

Wondering about the Letters of Marque clause? Jay Wexler talks about the Odd Clauses with New Hampshire Public Radio. 

Spirituality and Practice gives a great review to See Me Naked by Amy Frykholm. 

Going viral right now and very relevant to #Occupy: Chuck Collins (Wealth and Our Commonwealth) explains why we need to tax the wealthy. 

 

Moments in Queer History: Loreta Velazquez, Stonewall, and Lawrence v Texas

Beacon Press is celebrating Pride Month with a giveaway. Enter by tomorrow, June 30th, to win an autographed copy of A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski, a book The Bay Area Reporter called "A monumental achievement."

Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States features many people and pivotal events from U.S. History, those both well-known and lesser-known. Today we share three moments from America's queer history.

June 26, 1842: Loreta Velazquez is born in Havana, Cuba. She is one of approximately 1,000 women who assumed male identities in order to fight in the Civil War. Velazquez, who married a Texas army officer, enlisted in the Confederate army under the name Harry T. Buford without her husband’s knowledge. Velazquez continued to fight after he was killed, and reportedly served at Bull Run, Ball’s Bluff, Fort Donelson, and was a spy for the Confederacy in Washington D.C. She published her memoirs in 1876.

June 28, 1969: New York City police raid the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village causing protests and violent street altercations between the homosexual community and the police over several days. Raids on gay clubs and bars were routine at the time, and the “Stonewall riots” were among the first instances of the homosexual community fighting back against government-sponsored persecution. A larger culture of political militance followed Stonewall, with slogans like “Gay Power” and Gay Liberation Front (GLF) emerging in its wake.

June 26, 2003: The Supreme Court rules on Lawrence v. Texas, throwing out 500-year-old sodomy laws across the country. The case arose when, on an anonymous tip, Houston police entered the apartment of the plaintiff and discovered him having consensual sex with another man. Both men were arrested and convicted under a Texas law that prohibits “deviate sexual intercourse.” In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court decided that these laws violated the individual’s right to engage in private, consensual sex and were therefore unconstitutional."

Watch our trailer for A Queer History of the United States on YouTube

Images of Loreta Velazquez from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. Link.

Enter to Win a Signed Copy of A Queer History of the United States

Beacon Press is celebrating Pride Month with a giveaway. Enter to win an autographed copy of A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski, a book The Bay Area Reporter called "A monumental achievement."

Watch our trailer for A Queer History of the United States on YouTube

Moments in Queer History: The Marquis de Lafayette and Adah Isaacs Menken

Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States features many figures from U.S. History, those both well-known and lesser-known. Today we share two moments from America's queer history.

June 12, 1799: The Marquis de Lafayette writes a passionate letter to George Washington expressing his deep affection for the General. Lafayette writes, “There was never a friend… so tenderly beloved, as I love and respect you.” These “romantic friendships” were not uncommon in Washington’s day. Enlightenment ideals such as brotherhood and rational love paved the way for a “homosocial” sphere in society, one where intense same-sex friendships became an important outlet in (and complement to) marriage.

June 15, 1835: Poet and actor Adah Isaacs Menken is born. Menken became internationally infamous when she took the male lead in Mazeppa, a play based on the narrative poem by Lord Byron. At the show’s climax she appeared, practically nude, riding a live horse across the stage. Her work as an actress, coupled with the fact that Menken had both male and female lovers, lead public moralists to portray her as a socially dangerous and “unruly woman.”

Listen to Michael Bronski discuss A Queer History of the United States on The Callie Crossley Show and Radio Boston today. And you can see him read at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge tonight.

Free Reading for Pride Month: Find Some Excellent Book Excerpts on Scribd!

We love Scribd, and apparently many others do, too, since we're fast approaching 100,000 reads of the book excerpts we've posted there. 

If you haven't checked out the enormous wealth of reading material at Scribd, perhaps you can start with our LGBT Pride Collection. For Pride Month, we've pulled together excerpts from a dozen books: memoir, history, and ideas. Click on the covers below to read an excerpt from each book:

And if our excerpts whet your appetite for more, here are some interesting Scribd posts from other publishers we like. 

Harvard University Press: How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States

NYU Press: When Gay People Get Married

U of Chicago Press: No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life Among Lesbians and Gay Men

Workman: The Real World Guide to Coming Out

The Quest for Equality and the Long Struggle for LGBT Freedom

Michael Bronski is the author of A Queer History of the United States, and is senior lecturer in Women's and Gender Studies and in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. He has written extensively on LGBT issues for four decades, in both mainstream and queer publications.

At the same time we celebrate the seventh anniversary of Commonwealth of Massachusetts granting same-sex couples the right to marry in Massachusetts, we must renew our commitment to struggle against state control of our personal lives and our bodies. The Supreme Judicial Court’s decision - the first in the nation, with four other states and the District of Columbia quickly following suit - was a great, and important moment for Massachusetts and the United States. The quest for equality under the law moved one step further to the ideal of the promises of the Constitution.

Equality under the law is one of the traditions in a long history of the struggle for freedom, but it is not the only one, or even the most important, and for GLBT people it is, indeed, the most recently articulated.

American women and men have demanded, not equality under the law, but rather the freedom to make decisions about all aspects of their personal behavior – including, or perhaps especially, their sexual behavior. The ability to make these choices – and to resist state sponsored control of their personal lives –  was, for many, understood to be the bedrock of both individual and collective freedom.

This tradition is embedded in, and drove, the earliest incarnation of the LGBT movement: the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, both founded in the 1950s. But this insistence on the ethical imperative that all humans should have the ability to make decisions about their sexual partners and activities has deep roots in American cultural and political traditions. For LGBT people these traditions are vitally important because they were the first manifestations of resistance to dangerous and often deadly attitudes that permeated American culture.  

We see this resistance in the works of Walt Whitman and his celebration of all sexuality  – including same-sex love and activity – at the root of American democracy. We see it in the life and speeches of Victoria Woodhull – the first woman to run for President on a national ticket in 1872 (before she or any other woman in America could vote, of course). She insisted on the doctrine of “free love” and the constitutional right of every American to keep their sexual partners for as long or a short as time as they choose. It is in Emma Goldman’s turn of the century speeches, calling for an end to laws that criminalized homosexual behavior. And we see it in the writings of Alexander Berkman, who wrote movingly of his own homosexual experiences in prison. Harry Hay, the founder of the homophile movement in America in the 1950s, was most concerned that women and men were arrested and jailed for simply having sexual contact with members of their own gender.  

Each of these writers and activists – and many other defenders of personal sexual liberty – saw their liberation as part of a larger political movement for the freedom of all people to live their lives without government or social interference. The larger vision of liberation and the connection to a broader freedom agenda has been lost to some degree as the contemporary LGBT movement focused more narrowly on the rights and needs of LGBT people. 

Attaining the right to marry is an important step to making sure that LGBT Americans have equality under the law. The right effects few people – those who are able to and choose to get married, as well as their children. As we celebrate this anniversary of same-sex marriage in the Commonwealth – an important step towards equal legal rights before the state - we should also consider how far we have to go until LGBT people are truly liberated from the state and social controls that surround us.

A Queer History of the United States

"In the age of Twitter and reductive history, we need a complex, fully realized, radical reassessment of history-and A Queer History of the United Statesis exactly that. Along the way, there are enough revelations and reassessments to fuel dozens of arguments about how we got to where we are today. I don't know when I have enjoyed a history so much."-Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

One of Lambda Literary's Highly Anticipated Books of 2011

In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to "Publick Universal Friend," refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York. In the mid-nineteenth century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized "female marriage." And in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP's magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. These are just a few moments of queer history that Michael Bronski highlights in this groundbreaking book.

Intellectually dynamic and endlessly provocative, A Queer History of the United States is more than a "who's who" of queer history: it is a book that radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon primary documents, literature, and cultural histories, noted scholar and activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from 1492 to the 1990s, and has written a testament to how the LGBT experience has profoundly shaped our country, culture, and history.

A Queer History of the United States abounds with startling examples of unknown or often ignored aspects of American history-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 LGBT life in the nineteenth century, and how rock music and popular culture were, in large part, responsible for the devastating backlash against gay rights in the late 1970s. Most striking, Bronski documents how, over centuries, various incarnations of social purity movements have consistently attempted to regulate all sexuality, including fantasies, masturbation, and queer sex. Resisting these efforts, same-sex desire flourished and helped make America what it is today.

At heart, A Queer History of the United States is simply about American history. It is a book that will matter both to LGBT people and heterosexuals. This engrossing and revelatory history will make readers appreciate just how queer America really is.

Michael Bronski has been a gay activist, writer, and cultural critic since 1969. An original founding member of Fag Rag (1970) and Boston Gay Review (1975), he was also the principal arts writer for the Gay Community News (the first national LGBT weekly) from 1975-1995.

Along with winning two Lambda Literary Awards, he is the recipient of the 1999 The Martin Duberman Fellowship for scholarly research in GLBT studies, awarded by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York, and the prestigious 1999 Stonewall Award, presented by the Anderson Prize Foundation. Bronski has won community recognition awards from Boston’s AIDS Action committee and the Cambridge Lavender Alliance, and the 2004 Leadership Award from the D-GALA (Dartmouth Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association and the 2008 Distinguished Lecturer Award form Dartmouth College. He is Senior Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.

Read an excerpt from A Queer History of the United States