in America, equality under the law is a complicated affair. Certainly it is true that while laws are for everyone, they are often enforced mainly aga… - Michael Bronski

My earliest involvement in the gay community was in the gay liberation movement of the early 1970s. We had very strong opinions then. I have come to realize that in life and politics, there is always more to take into consideration. If there is one clear, unambiguous argument here, it is that the LGBT history of America is, and has always been, U.S. history. (Author's Note)

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 reducible to a word, an identity, or even a set of behaviors.

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.