In times of rising intolerance and political regression in the U.S. and abroad, queer writers have long served as powerful witnesses and fierce resisters. This collection of excerpts from Walter Holland, John Boyce, and John McCurdy offers insight into the past and present threats to LGBTQ rights and dignity. These writers remind us that the fight for equality is far from over—and that resistance, history, and the voice remain essential tools in this struggle.
Intro By Allison Armijo
Sixty years ago, gay rights activists asserted that the American Revolution included queer people. From 1965 to 1969, members of the Mattachine Society held “annual reminders” when they picketed Independence Day celebrations in Philadelphia. The protesters carried signs that proclaimed: “Homosexuals are American Citizens Also.” Their message was clear: the United States, with its founding promise that “all men are created equal,” included them, too.
Only a handful of men—and no women—were executed for sodomy in the colonial era. Some early Americans even questioned if such laws were necessary. The Quaker founders of Pennsylvania disdained capital punishment and prescribed lesser penalties for buggery. This liberal stance only changed at the Crown’s instance that all American laws comply with English ones. Although Pennsylvania made sodomy a capital crime, its courts never meted out death for same-sex sex.
The colonial resistance to British views on LGBTQ+ people was, in part, a result of economic conditions. As colonists planted cash crops like tobacco throughout Virginia and the South, the high demand for labor made the loss of any life problematic. The plantation economy encouraged the importation of large numbers of young men which skewed sex ratios and left many men without a wife even if they wanted one. Male couples accordingly set up households across the Chesapeake. Although the intimacy of such relationships is unclear, Walter Gifford left a deathbed missive to his household companion whom he addressed as his “Loving Mate.”
The colonists also found themselves surrounded by queer people, queer communities. European explorers each encountered two-spirit people among several Indigenous nations that they came into contact with. Perplexed by the sight of a person, assumed to be a man, dressed in feminine attire, the newcomers labeled such a person “berdache” or boy prostitute. The enslaved Africans who replaced English laborers on the tobacco plantations also maintained their own sexual mores that were less dismissive of same-sex relations than were their enslavers.
John Gilbert McCurdy is Professor of History at Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh (Johns Hopkins, 2024).
