I found queer history in literature, and it changed my life

I grew up during the 1980s in a small Rust Belt town. My childhood home had also been my mother’s childhood home; my elementary school had been her school; my teachers had been her teachers. It was a world that tasted of potato salad and ketchup, that smelled of Fourth of July fireworks, gasoline and manure. A world where cars filled and emptied the church parking lots as regularly as the tides, and weathered flags flew from every porch. You can’t get much more all-American.

I remember those early years in flashes. Sensations. Mostly, I recall a sharp sense of absence — not of family, nor love, but something that somehow transcended both. It felt deep, ancient and nameless. Like many lonely children who would one day grow up to be writers, I survived by telling myself stories. Many were based on the stories I imbibed through my third parent and best friend: the rabbit-eared TV. Except in my world, the heroes were always the outsiders, the sidekicks, the scapegoats, the comic-relief; even the villains and the villainized. Whatever I felt was missing from my life, I found it in these characters. I just didn’t have a word for it.

It was only as I neared adolescence that things began, gradually, to click. I started to read voraciously, stealing books off my parents’ shelves, none of which would have been considered “age appropriate”: Herman Hesse (my namesake), Ralph Ellison, Shirley Jackson, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde, Christopher Marlowe. It was as if I were following a trail of footprints through a forest, now and then catching a glimpse of something glimmering through the trees. To call the thing I was chasing “myself” feels a bit corny. What it felt like, above all, was hope.

I had no way of knowing that many of the authors I gravitated toward would one day be included in the queer canon of literature. How could I? In the 1980s and '90s, art, literature or education aimed specifically at queer youth was completely unthinkable. Criminal, even. At the height of the AIDS crisis, mass hysteria over the encroaching threat of “disease-carrying gays” dominated what little I saw of queer people in mainstream media. Even as U.S. culture entered the “Will & Grace” and “Ellen”-influenced phase of teeth-gritting “tolerance,” queer people remained exotic, one-dimensional, alien creatures. They might be “funny,” “charming” even, but also “lonely,” “tragic,” “doomed.” Sexless fairy godmothers, punchlines, murder victims and murderers. So hungry was I for representation, any kind of representation, that I didn’t dare hope for much better.

At the same time, it brought me immense comfort — a sense of righteousness, almost — to discover that many of the books I’d grown up reading proved queer people had existed for hundreds, even thousands of years. But it wasn’t until I arrived at college that I learned there were whole disciplines devoted to digging up that very proof, much of which had been hiding in plain sight for centuries. Now, finally, the same-sex cohabitations which prior historians had dismissed as “deep friendships,” the gender nonconformity which had been written off as “eccentricity,” the explicit literary odes to queer love mischaracterized as “metaphor” were all reopened to examination. Within forgotten archives, overlooked poems and crumbling court records lay the traces of innumerable queer ancestors, their lives unspooling vividly across time.

Here, in their stories, was what I’d been searching for: hard evidence of our survival, the rise and fall of our fortunes, our long resistance and resilience in the face of impossible odds. Here was the proof that we belonged to humanity, and humanity belonged to us.

Queer history, I can honestly say, saved my life.

Thanks to the diligent work of queer historians and artists, the past decade or so has witnessed an explosion in LGBTQ+ media of every description, all of which is now a part of our story, as well as the broader story of humanity. But visibility always brings danger. Those of us who have studied queer history, especially in the 20th century, are all too familiar with the pattern of increasing acceptance followed by violent backlash, often occurring on the cusp of devastating global conflict.

Notably, queer moral panics preceded both World Wars within Germany, beginning with the Eulenburg Affair in 1907, and later, a spate of Nazi-led attacks against queer people such as the mass book-burning at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology in 1933, the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, and of course the imprisonment of ten to fifteen thousand queer men and AMAB (assigned male at birth) people in concentration camps, which continued even after other prisoners had been liberated. The United States has also seen its share of queerphobic hysteria in dark and uncertain times, particularly the Cold War era Lavender Scare, in which queer people were painted as inherently “anti-American” traitors and hounded out of public life. Now, it seems, another backlash has come, a herald of possibly far worse trouble ahead.

A world wherein queer youth have access to their own history, to language — to stories that prove they are not and have never been alone — is a world where queer adults are not powerless.

Queer history has also taught me that libraries often serve as canaries in the coal mine for broader cultural unrest. There’s a good reason why LGBTQ+ books have recently come under attack by a novel crop of moral crusaders. It’s the same reason why a queer research library was among the earliest known targets of Nazi book-burners: because, to those whose most precious possession is a presumption of their own supremacy over others, a world wherein queer youth don’t grow up with holes in their hearts is a world upside-down. A world wherein queer youth have access to their own history, to language — to stories that prove they are not and have never been alone — is a world where queer adults are not powerless. Queer history is queer power.

It is not hyperbole to state that a wholesale effort to erase queer art, literature and history from the public record is coming. Now is a time to rally around our libraries, our creators, our archives. Now is a time for true allyship — the kind that comes with significant risk. With each new assault on our rights, it grows increasingly vital to champion queer stories. A flourishing queer culture, informed by our long, shared history and sustained on our faith in a better future, is fatal to the hateful idea that we might be silenced with the stroke of a pen.

As queer people, history teaches us exactly who our oppressors are, and how to survive them. It teaches us that we not only exist – we are inevitable. But the idea that “existence is resistance” is cold comfort for those of us who must now find a way to protect ourselves and the ones we love. As we buckle down for the fight of our lives, part of our task is to make sure no one ever forgets how far we’ve come, nor how much further we still hope to go.

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