I’ve been talking for a while about doing a celebration of Queer History Month (which is October! You’re learning something already, aren’t you!) here on my blog. Well, here it is.

Here’s what we’re gonna do. Every day I’ll put up a new post, talking about some event or perspective of queer history.

I started researching and writing this when I realised that all my knowledge of queer history came from random tweet threads and Tumblr posts. It was all given to me in stream-based formats, ephemeral and easy to miss, hard to reference. None of it was taught in school, most of it was unsourced, and it was hard to talk about with anything more than a passing recollection.

And I think that’s a shame. Queer people have struggled for rights and acceptance for a long time. People have fought, bled, and sacrificed their lives to win me the rights I have today, and it’s rare for them to be remembered. Great injustices have been overlooked and forgotten, and real and present dangers are being dismissed through short memories.

And I think that’s wrong. So I’m gonna do my part to combat it, and try to spread some of this information as far as I can. Because that’s all I can do.

Some Ground Rules

Who the hell am I to teach you about queer history? I’m nobody. My name’s Paddy. Charmed, I’m sure. I’m a software engineer living in Tri-Cities, Washington. I’m a married gay man. I went to school to teach English, then dropped out.

I’m not a historian. I’m not really qualified in any way, shape, or form to teach queer history. I also can’t promise this will be an exhaustive or definitive compendium of queer history. For one thing, it’s going to focus almost exclusively on the United States, because I don’t have the context to talk about anywhere else, and also the world is big and I only have 31 posts to work with here. If you think this is wrong or unjust, I encourage you to write the Queer History Everywhere Outside The United States posts, and would be either deeply impressed or suitably vexed, whichever you find a greater motivation. For another thing, I’m going to be mostly talking about modern history, meaning the 20th century–honestly, the second half of the 20th century–and onwards, because that’s when a lot of the history I could find became open instead of implied or taboo. We had queer people actively identifying as queer, and that’s the earliest I’m seeing stories about that phenomenon. Again, if you have stories from before that time and think I’m a hack for leaving them out, one, you’re right, and two, you should tell them.

But what I can promise is that I will write about queer history here, which means there will be 31 more days’ worth of writing about queer history than there were in September. And that felt like a good enough justification to me.

I’ll endeavour wherever possible to cite sources, not the least because I already feel like I’m just chopping up the books I read and putting shittier versions of them online, and that feels icky. So they at least deserve the citation. But also, y’know, history is history. I did my best to research multiple sources and try to at least present my own “lesson plan” here.

Also, a note on terminology: I use queer instead of LGBTQIA2+. There will be a longer post about the word queer, the controversy around it, and some of its history later this month, but for now, suffice to say I find it an elegant and easy way to inclusively denote people in a community marginalised for their sexual orientation, gender, or related aspects of their identity. If you don’t like it, that’s probably fine, just know it’s gonna keep popping up in this series, and if you decide this isn’t your cup of tea over it… I mean, that’s fair.

That’s all my warnings and my disclaimers. See y’all tomorrow to get this thing well and truly kicked off.