Pedagogy, like history, will never be able to contain all of America-a great country, an evil country, a place of tremendous generosity and welcome a… - Michael Bronski

The old saying that “history is written by the winners” is – to some degree – true for a great deal of traditional, written history. Only recently – maybe the past 100 years – have traditional historians been willing to look at the histories of minoritized groups and begin including them in mainstream narratives. But this is only focusing on traditional, mainstream histories – there are a number of ways that minoritized groups wrote, recorded, maintained, and saved their own histories. Often this was through alternative means – private correspondence, diaries, folk lore, songs, oral histories, visual cultures, theatre – and often dismissed by academic and traditional historians. The problem with how we conceptualise history is that it is prone to wanting to tell one story (usually the dominant one). The reality is that history – at its core – is multiple stories from multiple points of view. It is not a series of snapshots but many films, all shown at the same time. I do not think that history has a “responsibility” – that is very abstract – but that each and everyone one of us share the responsibility to not only insist on telling our own stories, but on encouraging everyone to tell theirs.

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.

language is both an entryway and a dead end.