Foreword by Professor George Chauncey

The establishment of GLBT History Month sends an important message to our nation’s teachers, school boards, community leaders, and youth about the vital importance of recognizing and exploring the role of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in American history.

Why do we need to know this history? Because we can only understand where we stand today if we understand how we got here. In recent years the United States has embarked on a great moral debate over the rights of GLBT people—their right to marry, to adopt children, to stop hiding who they are in the schools, the Boy Scouts, the church, and the military. Ignoring the historical origins and development of this great debate makes it harder to sort out what’s at stake in these issues and why they matter so much to so many people. Greater historical knowledge can only strengthen our understanding of the present. Ignorance can only confuse us.

We also need to know GLBT history because our understanding of the past is weakened whenever we ignore the distinctive histories and contributions of any minority group, be they gay people, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, or others. It’s important to know that part of what inspired the great nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman’s vigorous defense of democracy and equality was his love for his fellow man. We learn a great deal about the black civil rights movement—and about the forces arrayed against it—when we learn that Martin Luther King’s opponents tried to use the homosexuality of Bayard Rustin, one of his key advisors, to discredit the movement. We learn vital lessons about the growth of freedom in the United States when we study the work of Barbara Gittings and other pioneers in the GLBT civil rights movement.

GLBT History Month builds on the important models of Black History Month and Women’s History Month, and serves a similar purpose. Acknowledging the importance of gay people in our past tells gay and nongay students alike that we value and respect the role of gay people today. No young person should have to grow up thinking otherwise.

- George Chauncey, Professor of History, Yale University