Development of Gay and Lesbian Subcultures

I was flipping through the table of contents of a college US History textbook today, and was startled to find a subsection called "Development of Gay and Lesbian Subcultures," within a larger section on "Patterns of Ethnicity, Race, Class, and Gender," itself within a chapter on "Prosperity Decade, 1920-1928."

I've seen US History textbooks that include a mention of the Stonewall Riots in a section on 1960s social movements, but I've never seen anything like the four paragraphs covering this period in queer history.

What's even more remarkable is that they're covering the social history of queers, not just political history:

In the 1920s, gay and lesbian subcultures became more established and relatively open in some cities, including New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Baltimore. The Captive, a play about lesbians, opened in New York in 1926, and some movies included unmistakable homosexual references. Novels with gay and lesbian characters circulated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In Chicago, the Society for Human Rights was organized to advocate equal treatment. A relatively open gay and lesbian community emerged in Harlem, where some prominent figures of the Renaissance were gay or bisexual. In the early 1930s, the nation's largest gay event was the annual Hamilton Lodge drag ball in Harlem.....

And then, three paragraphs later:

The late 1920s and early 1930s brought increased suppression of gays and lesbians. New state laws gave police greater authority to prosecute open expressions of homosexuality....In 1929 Adam Clayton Powell, a leading Harlem minister, launched a highly publicized campaign against gays. Motion-picture studios instituted a morality code that, among its wide-ranging provisions, prohibited any depictin of homosexuality....

There are at least three reasons why it's exciting that this stuff appears on p. 737 of Making America, 4th edition, copyright 2006 (!) by Houghton Mifflin. Well...okay...four reasons, since it would be kind of weird if I didn't note the remarkable fact that the textbook's authors - rightly or wrongly - based by far their longest discussion of a queer topic in large part on the work of my advisor. I mean, that's pretty cool.

Beyond that, though, there's nothing remarkable about the standard academic habit of judging broad survey textbooks in terms of how much weight it gives to one's own small subspecialty and by how faithfully it seems to represent it. But it's not a standard academic habit that queer historians have, up to now, generally had many opportunites to exercise. You wouldn't have expected to find anything at all about gay, lesbian, or queer people or experiences. In fact, I would have guessed we'd be struggling to prevent the brief mentions of the Stonewall Riots from being excised from textbooks upon the demands of red-state local school boards. (And, I might add, we are struggling in many places to keep health curricula that don't consist of rhapsodic paeons to abstinence before marriage - or worse, that doesn't "teach" kids about condoms in terms that somehow, mysteriously seem to imply that they pretty much always break and are no protection at all. And, I mean, after all, the best way to get teenagers not to do something is to tell them not to do it. Right? Those religious-right folks sure do have the teenage mindset down pat.)

In fact, up till now I could pick out the "inclusive" textbooks just by looking up Stonewall in the index; if there was a sentence on it somewhere, it was one of the good textbooks, and if there wasn't, it was unfortunate. And while the Stonewall Riots a well-known and important event, of course, but, as Terence Kissack once put it in the Radical History Review, almost the entire corpus of scholarship on the gay and lesbian movement has sought to argue against the idea that gay freedom was born at the Stonewall.

A third reason is that maybe I'll get a job someday?

By the way, at the back of the book, which even covers the country's vocal debate over same-sex marriage in 2004, there is one of those little shaded textbook "boxes" that defines key terms - and the terms being defined are Defense of Marriage Act and civil unions.