I often note how the far right and the Christianists in particular re-write history - especially U.S. history - to suit their own intolerant and often hate filled theocratic agenda. Hence why I state that in general, when a Christianists lips are moving, the safest assumption is that they are lying. A new book by Michael Bronski, entitled "A Queer History of the United States," looks at the constant presence and contributions of LGBT individuals throughout the history of America - including long before Columbus brought an often scourge like form of Christianity to the shores of the Americas. The UK publication, The Independent, has a review of the book which, in my opinion, ought to be required reading for American students as a method to counter the near incessant lies of the far right and Christianists. Here are some highlights from the review (NOTE: I recommend reading the entire review):*
The American right presents homosexuality as something alien to the American experience – an intruder that inexplicably gate-crashed America in 1969 in the form of a rioting drag queen clutching a high heel in her fist as a weapon. The statements of Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, or Mitt Romney insistently hint that the fag does not belong under the flag. But there's something odd here. For people who talk incessantly about honouring American history, they have built a historical picture of their country that can only be sustained by scrubbing it clean of a significant part of the population and everything they brought to the party (if not the Tea Party).
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In his new book, A Queer History of the United States, the cultural critic Michael Bronski runs the film backward, through 500 years of American life, showing there were gays and bisexuals in every scene, making and remaking America. They were among some of the country's great icons, from Emily Dickinson to Calamity Jane to perhaps even Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt.
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The gay alternative to Puritan America began before the first white settler ever arrived. The day before Christopher Columbus set foot in North America, it was a safer place for gay people than it was ever going to be again for several centuries.
The limited-but-sturdy evidence provided by historians that Bronski draws on suggests homosexuality was treated matter-of-factly among most Native American tribes. In the records of the Lewis and Clark expeditions, Nicholas Biddle observes: "Among the Mamitarees, if a boy shows any symptoms of effeminacy or girlish inclinations he is put among the girls, dressed in their way, brought up with them, and sometimes married to men."
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[I]n most places, different sexualities were granted room for expression, much of it consensual. The Europeans looked on in revulsion, like Jerry Falwell in a powdered wig. In the 1775 diary of Pedro Font, a Franciscan on a trip to what is now California, he warns that "the sin of sodomy prevails more among [the Miami] than in any other nation" and concludes with a cluck: "There will be much to do when the Holy Faith and the Christian religion are established among them."
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There was a lot to do and it was done with extreme violence. These practices were stamped out by force, which Bronski notes "provided a template for how mainstream European culture would treat LGBT people throughout much of US history".
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Yet here's a strange wrinkle. The ideas of the Enlightenment were at the core of America's founding, yet they didn't percolate into its view of sexuality until far later. In France, the implications of Enlightenment values for gays were obvious almost immediately. In 1789, the French National Assembly declared that "liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else" and abolished all punishments for sodomy two years later. The United States kept, elaborated on and enforced its sodomy laws for another 212 years. Why?
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The historian RI Moore has tried to unpack how societies create "dangerous" groups that need to be shunned – Jews, heretics, lepers, gays – in his book The Formation of a Persecuting Society, and Bronski subscribes to his perspective. Nothing helps to solidify a group, and to make its members feel they belong, more than identifying an enemy, or somebody who has to be expelled from the tribe. To have Us, you need to have Them. Perhaps precisely because America was admirably a country of immigrants, it needed to cling to the embers of Puritan homophobia to reinforce a sense of unity.
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My view – since reading Andrew Sullivan's masterpiece Virtually Normal when I was a teenager – is that the point of the gay-rights struggle is to show that homosexuality is a trivial and meaningless difference. Gay people want what straight people want. I am the same as my heterosexual siblings in all meaningful ways, so I should be treated the same under the law, and accorded all public rights and responsibilities. The ultimate goal of the gay-rights movement is to make homosexuality as uninteresting – and unworthy of comment – as left-handedness.
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That's not Bronski's view. . . . He believes that while the persecution in this 500-year history was bad, the marginality was not. Gay people are marginal not because of persecution but because they have a historical cause – to challenge "how gender and sexuality are viewed in normative culture". Their role is to show that monogamy, and gender boundaries and ideas like marriage throttle the free libidinal impulses of humanity.
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It's bizarre that Bronski – after a rousing historical rebuttal to the right-wing attempt to write gays out of American history – ends up agreeing with Santorum, Beck and Bachmann that gay people are inherently subversive and revolutionary, longing for the basic institutions of the heterosexual world to be torn down. . . . . they were all Americans. And no, they didn't choose marginality and exclusion. They were forced to the margins. It would be a betrayal of them – not a fulfilment – to choose to stay there, angrily raging, when American society is on the brink of letting them into its core institutions, on the basis of equality, at long last.
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