ESTABLISHMENT HISTORIANS like to construct closets around certain chapters of American history, and they reserve a special closet for any “founding father” who wasn’t a Bible-quoting Protestant heterosexual. They snarl when revisionist historians point out that many of the founders were Freemasons who didn’t subscribe to their idea of traditional Christian beliefs. One can only imagine their reaction to the suggestion that some of the founders expressed same-sex affections for one another.

The following is excerpted from Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig, by Judith A. Peraino. University of California Press, Copyright 2006.

AIDS has been a plague since 1982, although officially it never has been called one. I was recently asked by The New York Times to participate in a public forum entitled “AIDS at 25: What next?” I was not allowed to make the following remarks

DUTCH POET and novelist Jacob Israël de Haan was born in Smilde, the Netherlands, on December 31, 1881, and murdered in Jerusalem on June 30, 1924. As a writer, he is perhaps best known for his first novel Pijpelijntjes, which appeared in 1904 and caused a considerable uproar on account of its explicit description of a homosexual relationship, the first such description in Dutch literature.

WIDESPREAD INDIGNATION at the suggestion that Abraham Lincoln might have enjoyed sharing his bed with other men, that he delayed marriage to make it last as long as he could, and that he occasionally returned to the practice even in the White House when Mrs. Lincoln was away, suggests the fragility of tolerance for homosexuality.