Whatever sexuality means today and did not mean before, the word, like others before it, has always attempted to describe something we know is not re… - Michael Bronski

Humans are taught to think in dualities – left/ right, good/ evil, sacred/ profane, sin/ grace, clean/ dirty – the American Dream necessitates the creation of an American Nightmare. Who gets to be in the Dream v/s who is forced into the Nightmare is dependent on many factors: race, gender, class, income, physique, standards of beauty, sexual identity. In the past 40 years some queer people -- those who fit into standards of certain acceptability – were allowed into the Dream; but not all. Many LGBTQ people (those who were in the Dream) saw this as progress. But it is not progress until there is no more divide between the Dream and the Nightmare. There is an old Gay Liberation slogan which is “we don’t want a piece of the pie – the pie is poisoned.” So is the dichotomy between this Dream and the Nightmare.

Youth sexuality has often been, like homosexuality, unspeakable in our culture. This has been America's dirty little secret: teens and children think about sex. Some have sexual desires for members of their own gender. Young people coming out earlier, and often finding support in their homes and schools, is a major political advancement. For over a century, charges of "molestation," "corruption of a minor," and "recruitment” have been used-explicitly by J. Edgar Hoover, Anita Bryant, and others, and implicitly by many who are opposed to same-sex marriage-to demonize lesbians and gay men and deny them full citizenship. There may always be bias against LGBT people, but the charges of molestation will eventually fade as more youth come out.

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.