Why LGBTQ+ history matters

I have always been a history nerd.

My Mom figured this out about me at an early age and all our family vacations were historic sites as a result – Civil War battlefields, historic homes, museums, we did them all. I majored in history in college and became a high school history teacher when I graduated 40 years ago, a job I absolutely loved doing for a decade, and even became president of the Tenement Museum later in my career. I guess the word “nerd” doesn’t even begin to describe my love of history.

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Yet, somehow, despite taking every history course I could in high school and college, I did not learn a single thing about LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) history during any of my schooling. When I looked for my own history in those classes, I found absolutely nothing. The impact was devastating. As the lesbian writer Adrienne Rich once said, “When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you...when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing.”

I have spent much of my adult life teaching myself that history and trying to teach it to others. I was on the founding committee for LGBTQ+ History Month in 1994, the same year I wrote the first book on LGBTQ+ history for high school students (Becoming Visible). On top of my “day job” as CEO of Lambda Legal, I am also an adjunct professor at the City College of New York where I am currently teaching a seminar on the history of the LGBTQ+ movement.

Sadly, too few students in America’s schools get the information I am teaching at CCNY. Research done by the organization I founded in 1990, GLSEN, tells us that only 16.2% of America’s LGBTQ+ high school students have had any instruction that included positive representations of LGBTQ+ people. This unfortunate fact correlates with the unhappy data that students in schools where there is not positive inclusion of LGBTQ+ material in their classes are 50% more likely to hear homophobic and transphobic language while at school. On the bright side LGBTQ+ students who attended schools that did include LGBTQ+ materials in a positive way were twice as likely to report that their classmates were accepting of LGBTQ+ people. They were also 50% more likely to say that they plan to pursue higher education after graduating from high school. The evidence is clear: inclusive curriculum leads to more acceptance and better educational outcomes for LGBTQ+ students, while the lack of it contributes to a school climate that is hostile to them.

Despite the evidence that inclusive curriculum is good for students and schools, America seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Since 2022 nine states – including my home state of North Carolina -- have passed so-called “don’t say LGBTQ+” laws, which censor what students and teachers can say in schools, and 28 more states have considered or are considering such laws. That’s a combined total representing ¾ of all states in the nation.

And now the Trump Administration has issued a series of executive orders seeking to erase transgender people from public life, and cleanse references to transgender people from history. Just last month the National Park Service implemented one of these orders by literally erasing transgender people from the website of the only national historic site dedicated to LGBTQ+ history (the Stonewall National Monument), removing the “T” from LGBT and purging LGBTQ+ history materials from the site’s website. There is a comprehensive and systematic effort to censor and rewrite history underway, to present our nation’s story as one devoid of LGBTQ+ people.

Why does this matter? As George Orwell put it in 1984, “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.” When we present young people with a version of history from which they are completely absent, they have trouble envisioning a positive future for themselves.

Including LGBTQ+ history isn’t being “woke”: It’s telling the full and complete truth about our nation’s past. It helps LGBTQ+ students feel safer in school and to aspire to bigger things when they graduate. It helps create school climates where name-calling and bullying markedly decrease. And it’s just the right thing to do.

It’s time to stop these efforts to erase and rewrite history. Lambda Legal recently filed two lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of executive orders seeking to repudiate the existence of transgender people and erase them from history. We will not remain silent as history is rewritten. Our students deserve better.

Kevin Jennings is the CEO of Lambda Legal and served as Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe & Drug=Free Schools in the Obama Administration’s Education Department.

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