Conference Programs

If you are a scholar working on queer history, please consider submitting a paper for the next meeting of the American Historical Association under the aegis of the Committee on LGBT History. If you work on queer history, this is an excellent way to participate in the AHA. The CLGBTH meets in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) and both cosponsors AHA sessions and sponsors affiliate sessions of its own. The result is an exciting LGBT history conference and network of participants within the larger AHA meeting. Participation ensures the presence and promotion of queer history within the broader historical community while providing LGBT historians with access to a network of dedicated senior and junior scholars interested in learning about and promoting new work in our field.

The following is a list of CLGBTH sessions from each year of the AHA.

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About Us

Welcome to the homepage of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, an affiliated society of the American Historical Association.

The Committee on Lesbian and Gay History was founded in 1979 to promote the study of homosexuality in the past and present by facilitating communication among scholars in a variety of disciplines working on a variety of cultures.

The name of the committee was changed to Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in January 2009, and to The LGBTQ+ History Association in 2024.

Since 1982, the Committee has been officially recognized as an affiliate of the American Historical Association and meets annually in conjunction with the AHA conference, where we sponsor sessions on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history. One need not be a member of the AHA to join the Committee.

Join the CLGBTH! If you are a scholar of LGBT/queer history, we need your support. Become part of our community and join our collective endeavor to enrich the historical profession with LGBT perspectives, voices and histories. Together we can ensure that LGBT and queer histories remain powerfully and visibly present in our field, in our educational institutions, and in our society at large.

Membership is available on an annual or lifetime basis. Members receive our twice-yearly newsletters, which include book reviews, conference updates, a co-chairs’ column, and other information about the vibrant field of LGBT history. Membership also grants access to our email list-serv. Membership dues support our status as an affiliate organization of the American Historical Association, whose annual meetings host our own slate of over a dozen queer-themed sessions, medicines. Your support also enables us to offer cash prizes for outstanding books and articles in the field. Finally, if you are committed to our mission, and want to get involved as a member of our governing board, we would love to hear from you. And if you are a former member whose membership has lapsed, we invite you to update now.

Your membership ensures that queer history remains a vibrant part of the broader historical community. Join the CLGBTH NOW!

The CLGBTH supports and similarly adopts the American Historical Association’s Sexual Harassment Policy (2018).

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New Member Publications

Vicente, Marta V., Debating Sex and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Spain

The book studies the creation of a two-sex model of human sexuality based on different genitalia within Spain, reflecting the enlightened quest to promote social reproduction and stability. Drawing on primary sources such as medical treatises and legal literature, this study traces the lives of individuals whose ambiguous sex and gender made them examples for physicians, legislators and educators for how nature, family upbringing, education, and the social environment shaped an individual's sex.

Johnson, David K., Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement

Providing a vivid look at the producers and consumers of physique magazines, Buying Gay explores the connections―and tensions―between the gay market and the gay movement. It chronicles a network of photographers, artists, book club owners, and pen-pal club organizers that fostered community while challenging Post Office surveillance, paving the way for open expression of homoerotic desire. It argues that gay commerce was not a byproduct of the movement but a catalyst to it.

Stein, Marc, ed, The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History

This book brings together 200 primary sources from before, during, and after the Stonewall Riots (1965-1973), with an introduction that reviews multiple ways of interpreting and analyzing the transformative LGBT uprising.

Ross, Andrew Israel, Public City/Public Sex: Prostitution, Homosexuality, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris

This book traces the struggle to control sex in public and argues that it was the very effort to police the city that created new opportunities for women who sold sex and men who sought sex with other men. Placing public sex at the center of urban history, Ross shows how those who used public spaces played a central role in defining the way the city was understood.

Escoffier, Jeffrey, American Homo: Community and Perversity

Escoffier explores sexual revolution as an historical process rather than a single event and he identifies the formative role of LGBT struggles within it, and how LGBT agency and queer vernacular knowledge were essential elements in establishing the conditions for radical change. Although every new success enabled a normalizing form of domination, the exercise of democratic action helped to increase the benefits of community and the freedom of sexual perversity.

Morris, Bonnie J., Sappho's Overhead Projector

A tribute to the cultural power of twentieth century lesbian literature, this time-travel mystery is set at a haunted Library of Congress. Ghostly lesbian authors begin to reach out to a scholarly intern, begging her for help in saving their works from being shredding or digitized out of circulation.

Howard, Clayton, The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California

This book traces the ways that suburbanization reshaped the history of sexuality from World War II to the late 1970s. Focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area, it follows the outward migration of white, married couples with children to the Peninsula and South Bay and the growth of LGBT communities in San Francisco. During the sexual revolution, many suburbanites distanced themselves from what they saw as the extremes of the religious right and gay liberation.

Newsome, Jake W. Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust

Pink Triangle Legacies traces the transformation of the pink triangle from a Nazi concentration camp badge and emblem of discrimination into a widespread, recognizable symbol of queer activism, pride, and community. W. Jake Newsome provides an overview of the Nazis' targeted violence against LGBTQ+ people and details queer survivors' fraught and ongoing fight for the acknowledgement, compensation, and memorialization of LGBTQ+ victims.

Vider, Stephen. The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, & the Politics of Domesticity after World War II

From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histories of queer and trans politics have almost exclusively centered on public activism. In The Queerness of Home, Stephen Vider turns the focus inward, showing that the intimacy of domestic space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life.

Riseman, Noah, Shirleene Robinson, and Graham Willett, Serving in Silence? Australian LGBT Servicemen and Women

This is the first book to examine the histories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who served in the Australian armed forces in the post-Second World War era. It uses four life stories to chart the changing experiences of LGBT service members, from times of tolerance, witch-hunts, abuse, through to the present-day when the Australian Defence Force advocates policies of inclusion.

Chiang, Howard, After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China

From anticastration discourses in the late Qing era to sex-reassignment surgeries in Taiwan in the 1950s and queer movements in the 1980s and 1990s, After Eunuchs explores the ways the introduction of Western biomedical sciences transformed normative meanings of gender, sexuality, and the body in China.

Royles, Dan. To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS

In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning of the AIDS activist movement. They struggled not only to overcome the stigma and denial surrounding a "white gay disease" in Black America, but also to bring resources to struggling communities that were often dismissed as too "hard to reach." To Make the Wounded Whole offers the first history of African American AIDS activism in all of its depth and breadth.

Sutton, Kate. Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German Speaking World, 1890s-1930s

Ideas about human sexuality and sexual development changed dramatically across the first half of the 20th century. This is the first book to closely examine vital encounters among this era’s German-speaking researchers across their emerging professional and disciplinary boundaries. Sutton charts how the emergence of two separate approaches to the study of sex, sexology and psychoanalysis, were always part of a dialogic and competitive process.

Griffiths, Craig: The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany

This book explores ways of thinking, feeling and talking about homosexuality in 1970s West Germany. By drawing attention to ambivalence, the book reveals that gay liberation was never only about pride, but also about shame; characterised not only by hope, but also by fear; and driven forward not just by the pushes of confrontation, but also by the pulls of conformism.

Bost, Darius, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Culture Renaissance and the Politics of Violence

In Washington and New York during the 1980s and ’90s, gay black men banded together, using creative expression as a tool to challenge the widespread views that marked them as unworthy of grief. At once a corrective to the predominantly white male accounts of the AIDS crisis and an openhearted depiction of the possibilities of black gay life, Evidence of Being above all insists on the primacy of community over loneliness, and hope over despair.

Gutterman, Lauren Jae. Her Neighbor's Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage

Well into the 1980s, many women remained ambivalent about divorce and resistant to labeling themselves as lesbian, therefore complicating a simple interpretation of their lives and relationship choices. By revealing the extent to which marriage has historically permitted space for wives' relationships with other women, Her Neighbor's Wife calls into question the presumed straightness of traditional American marriage.

Johnson, Emily Suzanne, This is Our Message: Women's Leadership in the New Christian Right

Women have been at the forefront of the modern religious right since its emergence in the 1970s. This book examines the careers of six prominent conservative evangelical women over the past fifty years. Their stories act as microcosms for the movement as a whole, including its complicated relationship with sexuality; from Marabel Morgan’s spicy (but firmly heterosexual) sex advice, to Anita Bryant’s anti-gay-rights campaign, to Tammy Faye Bakker’s surprising second act as a queer icon.

Thuma, Emily L., All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence

During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prison forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily Thuma explores the work of these activists who placed criminalized women, and the multiple violences they confronted, at the heart of their organizing. In the process, All Our Trials illuminates a crucial chapter in a struggle that continues in today's movements against mass incarceration and for transformative justice.

Berman, Stacie. LGBTQ+ History in High School Classes in the United States since 1990.

From grassroots campaigns and activism to top-down initiatives for and against curricular reform, this book investigates the movement to integrate LGBTQ+ history into high school history courses in the USA. The book offers the first detailed portrait of a prophetic minority of educators and activists championing a more inclusive and accurate vision of American history.

Enszer, Julie. OutWrite: The Speeches That Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture

This collection gives readers a taste of this fabulous moment in LGBTQ literary history with twenty-seven of the most memorable speeches from the OutWrite conference, including both keynote addresses and panel presentations. These talks are drawn from a diverse array of contributors, including Allen Ginsberg, Judy Grahn, Essex Hemphill, Patrick Califia, Dorothy Allison, Allan Gurganus, Chrystos, John Preston, Linda Villarosa, Edmund White, and many more.

Romesburg, Don, ed., The Routledge History of Queer America

The Routledge History of Queer America presents the first comprehensive synthesis of the rapidly developing field of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer US history. It features 28 chapters on essential subjects and themes from colonial times through the present, gathering field authorities to define the ways in which sexual and gender diversity have contributed to the dynamics of American society, culture and nation.