Book Review: Making Gay History by Eric Marcus

By Al Preston

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            The first book I ever read about queer history was Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights by Eric Marcus. I was fresh to the field, working on my first ever paper on the LGBT+ movement in the United States. I wanted to investigate the language of the community and how it has morphed and changed since the beginning of the movement.

            My professor, more versed in women’s history than queer history, and I had only found some articles, little bits of information about the queer movement from the perspective of straight society. I knew I needed more, I needed to hear how queer people spoke about themselves and others, but I also needed to understand the movement far more than the little bits I had.

            Marcus made my search rather easy with a title like Making Gay History. I fell in love. I cried. I realized a history buried nearly alive. I felt like I finally saw myself in the past.

            Prior to this, I wrote a paper about Transgender Saints, but it wasn’t really a queer history. I was arguing against scholars of the seventies ignoring the gender bending of the story to suggest that nuns had more power than the average medieval woman. I saw the opposite in these stories, when these saints transitioned from female to male and back again, their abilities and importance notably decreased when they were female.

            That is a women’s history view of transgender saints, not a queer history. My undergraduate professors did their best to help me, but they had never considered queer history before. I had to devote pages to explaining language, to defending of my use of ‘transgender’ to describe these saints.

            Even reading Marcus’s collection of oral histories within Making Gay History, I didn’t know anything. I had no idea what the history was or the people doing the work. What sources I needed to read, what I might be getting myself into. I fell into a rabbit hole decades further back than I thought. I was still naïve. I was still ignorant of the nuances of what I was reading.

            Re-reading this book has been a ride. I not only know more now so I can understand what is being said, but I also can see where ideas, beliefs, and motivations came from. I can see interwoven threads from person to person and I can appreciate this book more than when I first read it. With that experience, I can also confidently say that this book is not for someone new to queer history.

            As much as I adore this book, it is most certainly for historians who have some idea of what has happened in the history of LGBT+ movements. Marcus does provide some context at the beginning of the different parts—short overarching histories of the time range that part focuses on. Before some of the oral histories, he will introduce the speaker and where the interview is taking place, little notes that give the interviewee their character.

            However, these bits of context are definitely more for an audience who already knows what has happened. They’re just short reminders placing the following oral histories in the context of what the interviewees are talking about. There is very little help given to the reader when organizations, bills, or other important historic events are brought up by the interviewees.

            I have the second edition of the book as well, adding updates on all of the interviewees and a continuation of queer history after the end of the first edition around 1990. This edition was published in 2002.

            The different interviews are not shown all at once. Marcus weaves the many people he has spoken to together to give a more complete picture of an event or time. Opposing views are shown right next to each other. The reader can see the different ways people viewed activism and their own queerness. The way their stories are positioned next to each other creates a powerful way to see how, despite their differences, and clear dislike between interviewees, they worked alongside each other anyway.

            In the moment, they couldn’t understand each other, but after some time, they began to realize that their viewpoint was not the only one. Their beliefs about activism and what the queer movements should do weren’t better than anyone else’s. They may not fully understand each other, but they couldn’t deny the good work the other put in.

            Marcus had many, many voices in this book. Quite a few that are rarely heard from despite their role in organizations and events. People of color, lesbians, gays, bisexuals. There is a noticeable lack of transgender folks, the only interviewee I noted was Sylvia Rivera, who was in Stonewall: the Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising that Changed America. Her account of Stonewall is a little different in this book from Martin Duberman’s work. This is probably because human memory can be rather faulty, and we may forget or remember certain details almost at random depending on the day. That does not discredit her account, but it is a nuance to be aware of.

            On the other hand, Marcus dives into topics that are seldom talked about. The impact the AIDS crisis had on queer folks was immense and the way the epidemic was initially handled says a lot about the mentalities of activists at the time. Free sex was often intertwined tightly with free love. Sex was a corner stone of the ‘gay lifestyle’. It was the reason queer folks were considered to be pedophiles for a long time, their entire existence boiled down to their sexual acts. It was so ingrained into the movement that some activists were hiding the fact that AIDS was spread sexually from the people they claimed to be working for, just to avoid a worsening image of queer folks as sexually diseased.

            We cannot know how deeply AIDS affected the community. Many of the people who lived through the worst of it often talked about having their friend one day then losing them the next. Some people just died, having told no one of their infection status. Others had to watch their loved ones fade away by the hand of diseases that should have never infected them. It’s heart breaking, it’s painful. You never knew who you would lose next, or if it would be your life on the line. Marcus and the interviewees don’t talk too much about the struggles communities faced trying to get the medical help they needed. Like other topics, this book covers how people thought and felt about things more than it explained the actions they took and their widespread effects on the nation.

            AIDS is a topic that will be dug into more seriously in other works. Disease often gets covered up in history. We know plagues happen and we can see the numerical losses, how the medical system handles them, but the trauma and psychological loss they create can be lost in individuals who can’t or won’t share that part of their stories. It’s a hard, sad topic, and it’s one that has often been hard to uncover.

            Religion was another topic that is often glossed over in discussions today about queerness. Our society in 2024 is far more spiritual than it is religious, meaning we find spiritual or religious experiences outside of a church setting. We practice more on our own than with guidance, but until the 2000s, people were deeply religious and churches fostered a lot of the hate queer people faced. Labeling same-sex love as a sin gave politicians the ‘moral right’ to criminalize queerness. Marcus highlights some people who fought against that, who made churches for the LGBT+ community and even people in high places of religious power were making great strides in removing that stigma from queer people.

            While I don’t recommend this book for beginners looking for entry into queer history, I do recommend the podcast Making Gay History (Link). All of the interviews the Marcus conducted with these interviewees were recorded on tapes that Marcus and his team have put into a podcast format. Each episode covers a different interview with more in-depth explanations about queer history and the interviewees roll in it. You can get the same information as the written transcripts in the book, but with more beginner friendly context and you get to hear these people talk about their experiences (for keen listeners, they may notice that the oral history podcast episodes on this website take great inspiration from Marcus and Making Gay History in style).

            For the more well-read historian, I highly recommend this book as it allows different viewpoints to share the same pages and highlights moments that otherwise get rather buried. I will warn that there is some language that would be considered offensive today. Some of the interviewees can also have racist or sexist opinions. There are also some rather unfavorable views on the United States military (primarily about the “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” discussions). You will disagree with some of these folks, and you will agree with others. Even more, you may disagree and agree with them all within the same interview section. That’s all part of the experience.

            We humans are confusing creatures and learning about activism tends to make that abundantly clear. I adore this book, even more now that I understand more of it. I hope you find it just as good of a read.