| Introduction | 12 |
| Early Explorations | |
| When heroes love The earliest evidence for LGBTQ+ people | 18 |
| Never bury my bones apart from yours, Achilles Gender and sexuality in ancient Greece | 20 |
| You whom of all women I most desire Sappho of Lesbos | 24 |
| The passion of the cut sleeve Favorites in Han China | 28 |
| Every woman's man and every man's woman Gender and sexuality in ancient Rome | 30 |
| Who does what, where, when, and why, who knows? The Kama Sutra | 36 |
| The Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire The early Christian Church | 38 |
| This type of love rebels against nature Sodomy and the medieval Catholic Church | 42 |
| I die of love for him The Abbasid Caliphate | 46 |
| I want to be like nature made me Intersex rights | 48 |
| Renaissance and Retribution | |
| Infinite beauty Renaissance Italy | 58 |
| A thousand naughty conceits and lusty words Homoeroticism and the French Renaissance | 60 |
| A nightingale among the beautiful Ottoman gender and sexuality | 62 |
| The abominable vice will be eliminated The Spanish Inquisition | 64 |
| Christian guilt is still very strong Colonial Latin America | 66 |
| Cruel, indecent, and ridiculous The criminalization of sodomy | 68 |
| You have me all on fire Pornography | 72 |
| My joy, my crown, my friend! Early modern lesbianism | 74 |
| O thou, my lovely boy Male-male love poetry | 80 |
| My clerk judged they were both women AFAB cross-dressers and "female husbands" | 82 |
| The Great Mirror of Male Love Male love in Edo Japan | 84 |
| Subcultures and Publicity | |
| Making what use I please of my own body Molly houses | 90 |
| Conversing with my beloved Erotic friendship in America and Europe | 92 |
| Making love with one's own likeness Same-sex narratives in Urdu poetry | 96 |
| Finding yourself in the bosom of your kind Sapphism | 98 |
| Wearing the man's attire and putting on the sword AFAB people in combat | 99 |
| Far from outraging Nature, we serve her Revolutionary France | 100 |
| I love, and only love, the fairer sex The diaries of Anne Lister | 102 |
| This scandalous tumult Changing Ottoman society | 104 |
| An entirely different law of nature Defining "homosexual" and "heterosexual" | 106 |
| They say it's the soul which is hijra Hijras and British colonialism | 108 |
| Not seeking men, but seeking each other Belle Époque Paris | 110 |
| We're all born naked and the rest is drag Drag | 112 |
| Two ladies, living sweetly and devotedly together Boston marriages | 118 |
| Simultaneously a beautiful woman and a potent man Gender nonconformity and colonial constraints in Africa | 120 |
| That which appears in nature is natural First recognition of asexuality | 122 |
| The Love that Dare not speak its Name The trial of Oscar Wilde | 124 |
| I could express myself better dressed as a boy Male impersonators | 126 |
| Bona to vada your dolly old eek! The secret language of Polari | 127 |
| Sexology and Sexual Identities | |
| Homosexuality is no vice, no degradation Sexology and psychoanalysis | 132 |
| Visions of transformation Gender transgression in modern China | 134 |
| Nature made a mistake, which I have corrected The first gender affirmation surgeries | 136 |
| To show what it means to be gay LGBTQ+ films | 142 |
| A powerfully queer place The first gay village | 146 |
| Surely as gay as it was Black The Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age | 148 |
| You're more than just neither, honey Butch and femme | 152 |
| We who wore the pink triangle Persecution during the Holocaust | 156 |
| I am a realist and not an Obscene writer Ismat Chughtai's Obscenity trial | 162 |
| We do not speak of love. Our faces scream of it The Beat Generation | 163 |
| Not an all-or-none proposition Kinsey's research on sexology | 164 |
| It was a witch hunt The Lavender Scare | 166 |
| A love of our own kind Female writers' rejection of labels | 168 |
| I am with you, I am like you Brazilian Pajubá | 169 |
| Gay is good Toward Gay Liberation | 170 |
| Democracy with repression is not democracy Latin American LGBTQ+ movements | 178 |
| Queer parody Camp | 180 |
| Screaming Queens The Compton's Cafeteria Riot | 182 |
| Not the law's business The decriminalization of same-sex acts | 184 |
| Protests, Pride, and Coalition | |
| I'm gay and I'm proud The Stonewall Uprising | 190 |
| Equally valid, equally justified, equally beautiful Transgender rights | 196 |
| You have nothing to lose but your hang-ups CAMP Australia and the Sydney Mardi Gras | 204 |
| Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice Political lesbianism | 206 |
| To be free, to come out, to play sports LGBTQ+ athletes come out | 208 |
| I am stronger for all my identities Black lesbian feminism | 210 |
| Whatever you want to be, you be The spread of ball culture | 214 |
| One small step for genkind Pronouns and neopronouns | 216 |
| Self-contained sexuality The Asexual Manifesto | 218 |
| Depathologizing homosexuality Removal of homosexuality from the DSM | 219 |
| Thailand has three genders Kathoey in Thailand | 220 |
| Homosexuality began to speak on its own behalf Foucault's History of Sexuality | 222 |
| Our Sexuality is all of the colors The creation of the Pride flag | 224 |
| Let that bullet destroy every closet door The assassination of Harvey Milk | 226 |
| We're Just another family LGBTQ+ parenting | 228 |
| Lesbians are not women "The Straight Mind" | 232 |
| Heterosexuality is a political institution Compulsory heterosexuality | 233 |
| We did it for the underground The birth of queer punk | 234 |
| Together I am everything I am Maori gender and sexuality | 236 |
| A plague that was allowed to happen The AIDS epidemic | 238 |
| Solidarity in struggle Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners | 242 |
| Silence = Death AIDS activism | 244 |
| The crossroads of being Anzaldúa's Borderlands | 246 |
| Legalized prejudice Section 28 | 248 |
| Out in the Open | |
| We await the day when we can lift the clouds LGBTG+ activism in Asia | 254 |
| We're here! We're queer! Get used to it Reclaiming the term "queer" | 256 |
| It is the spirit that is your gender Indigenous American Two-Spirit people | 258 |
| A whole, fluid identity Bisexuality | 262 |
| Nobody really is a gender from the start Butler's Gender Trouble | 266 |
| Sexuality constituted as secrecy Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet | 268 |
| Fear of a queer planet Heteronormativity | 270 |
| To lie in order to serve Don't Ask, Don't Tell | 272 |
| Tomboys and wives Chinese lala communities | 276 |
| It was not God that rejected me LGBTQ+ Muslims | 278 |
| Not a puzzle with a missing piece The aromantic and asexual spectrum | 280 |
| His legacy has inspired us to erase hate The Murder of Matthew Shepard | 284 |
| I don't need to be fixed Conversion therapy is banned | 286 |
| Love wins Marriage equality | 288 |
| I like the wine, not the label Pansexuality | 294 |
| A queer psychology of affect Affect theory | 296 |
| We learned to be quare, Black, and proud Queer of color theory | 297 |
| Disability is queer, queerer than queer Queer disability studies | 298 |
| The violence of liberalism Homonationalism | 302 |
| I see myself as my own surrogate Transgender pregnancy and reproductive health care | 304 |
| We need our oxygen to breathe The LGBTQ+ struggle in modern Africa | 306 |
| Where 49 lives were taken, 49 legacies began The Pulse shooting | 308 |
| Safe, fair, and science-based Laws lifted against MSM donating blood | 310 |
| Directory | 312 |
| Glossary | 324 |
| Index | 327 |
| Quote Attributions | 335 |
| Acknowledgments | 336 |
