GLR September-October 2025

“we were all heroes” and “we changed the world” tropes in dis cussing the pandemic: “That’s just too rah-rah and simplistic; we deserve a more nuanced understanding of those times and how it affected us.” Also interviewed is LGBT historian Martin Duberman, a professor emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has writ ten a celebrated biography of actor-singer-activist Paul Robeson and a joint biography of singer-activist Michael Callen and poet-activist Essex Hemphill ( Hold Tight Gently ), as well as his groundbreaking Stonewall (1993). Ever the radical thinker, Du berman laments that the LGBT movement has devolved from its early radicalism toward assimilationism, going along to get along: “The Human Rights Campaign manages to get comfort ably affluent gay people accepted, but that’s not going to help those who are economically marginalized.” But greater assim ilation into heteronormative social structures may be inevitable: “Maybe groups like the Gay & Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign are all that one can hope for in a coun try as basically conservative as ours.” He does, however, seem optimistic about contemporary young people who reject old-hat labels and ways of living. There are many not-to-be-missed gems among Pizzoli’s in terviews: Jay Parini discussing the genesis of his authorized bi

ography of Gore Vidal; Michael Carroll, husband to Edmund White, talking about his two collections of short stories; Salman Rushdie contemplating gender identity and the state of LGBT people in majority-Muslim countries. The one I enjoyed most was the interview with John Rechy, perhaps because City of Night is the first gay book I ever read, and I’ve never forgotten it. In this interview, Rechy’s reputed super-sized ego is on display, but he seems to have grown a sense of humor about his multifaceted life and career. And he re mains rock certain of his opinions. Although a couple of the other authors included in this collection balked at the notion of a “gay sensibility,” Rechy responded forcefully: “Of course there’s a gay sensibility ... we are shaped by exile, born into the ‘heterosexual camp’ with all that implies. Very early, we deal with ‘camouflage’ in various ways, and that shapes a unique ‘sensibility.’ I uphold our differences and resent them being ‘erased.’” And although he still disdains the word “gay” and Pride parades, he did relent and marry his partner after many years together. Passionate Outlier is one of those rare books that is both great fun to read and historically significant. It will be an invaluable re source for anyone researching the LGBT authors who gave birth to and nurtured queer literature in the 20th century.

The Fight for Inclusive Education

W E ARE LIVING through a time when LGBT books are being banned from many public libraries. “Don’t Say Gay” laws preventing LGBT topics from being taught in schools have passed in sev eral states. The Trump administration’s as sault on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies is threatening the existence of queer-related resources in many institu

they sometimes found themselves having to challenge their firing in court. By the late 1980s, a bottom-up effort by students and teachers to form gay-straight alliance groups in schools and build a safe-schools movement was taking form. But regarding class content, at best these decades saw what Romesburg describes as “modest, sporadic, and generally short-lived curricu lum interventions.”

J OHN D’E MILIO

CONTESTED CURRICULUM LGBTQ History Goes to School by Don Romesburg Rutgers University Press 284 pages, $28.95

tions, schools, and colleges. Yet as awful as these developments are, it is helpful to remember that the present reaction is occur ring in response to substantial gains made by LGBT communi ties over the last generation. These gains, including in schools, came through much hard work and struggle in the face of re sistance. Author Don Romesburg’s Contested Curriculum: L GBTQ History Goes to School traces the fight to have LGBT materials taught in history and social science classes across sev eral decades. Romesburg was a major actor in this effort in Cal ifornia, where significant inclusion first occurred. He brings both the interpretive insight of a historian and the passion of an ac tivist into his account. Romesburg begins by recounting what his first chapter de scribes as a prehistory. In the 1970s and early ’80s, there was al most no literature available on LGBT history for inclusion in school curricula. The first LGBT teachers were coming out, and John D’Emilio’s books include Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties and Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.

In the 1990s, there was an expanding scholarly literature of LGBT history. The founding of GLSTN (the Gay-Lesbian Straight Teachers Network, later changed to GLSEN ) created a national structure for school-related organizing. G LSTN worked with Rodney Wilson, a Missouri schoolteacher who promoted what he called “Gay History Month,” to make this a national effort in 1994. But curriculum inclusion remained a dream. Mainstream movement organizations avoided the issue because they considered it too controversial. In a front-page story about safe school organizing in Massachusetts, a 1993 Boston Herald headline captured how marginal and unpopular curriculum in clusion was: “There’ll Be No Gay School Lessons,” it declared. The tone was celebratory. As the book’s timeline moves into the 21st century, Romes burg focuses on California. Sheila Kuehl, an out lesbian state legislator, had been trying since the 1990s to mandate curricu lum reform and inclusion through legislation. In 2006, when both houses of the state legislature passed such a bill, Republi can Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it. After Jerry Brown’s election as governor in 2010, a renewed effort finally

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