Making Queer History

This March marks 10 years of Making Queer History.

For a decade, we’ve been telling queer stories that don’t always make it into textbooks, museums, or mainstream media — stories rooted in complexity, politics, joy, grief, and survival. We’ve done that work independently, intentionally, and in community.

If Making Queer History has ever taught you something, named something, or helped you feel less alone, here are a few ways to support the work right now.

Thank you for being part of this history — with us, and still in the making.

✨ Become a Patreon supporter Patreon is what makes our work sustainable. It funds research time, pays contributors, supports audio production, and keeps MQH independent.

📅 Get the Making Queer History 2026 calendar A year of queer timekeeping — designed to keep queer history visible all year long while directly supporting our work.

💖 Support queer creators MQH is part of a broader ecosystem of queer writers, artists, historians, and organizers doing work that often isn’t institutionally funded. Supporting us is one way to keep that ecosystem alive.

Wonderful question! Yes, I actually have read a bit about this!

For a more modern look at how homophobia is enforced and expanded culturally:

The Pink Line

(Affiliate link)

For a very expansive historical look at this discussion:

The Construction of Homosexuality

(Affiliate link)

For a book that looks at specifically the heterosexual experience of this:

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

Selected Works from Alice Austen

Alice Austen is known for her photographs of everyday people in New York, which managed to capture New York's immigrant population throughout their days, Victorian women's social activities, and New York's own rapidly changing culture. Her work captured not the posed and proper, but the very real lives of people on New York's streets. We want to especially highlight her work showcasing queer people of the era. You can see some of those works, like "The Darned Club" as part of the Collection of Staten Island Historic Society.

Coming to her work as a lesbian absolutely affected how she approached her work, her subject, and the outcome of her photos. She and Gertrude Tate met and began their 53 year long relationship at the turn of the 20th century, though they were only able to live together for about 30 of those years and were sadly buried apart, despite their wishes. Fortunately, in the past decade or so, there has been some push to see the pair reunited, though no plans have been made.

How to Defend Books and Why

Danny Caine

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You're invited to the book revolution!

Fight back against censorship and empower your community with this close look at the book banning movement.

In a moving, compulsively readable call to arms for readers everywhere, Danny Caine, bestselling author of How to Resist Amazon and Why and How to Protect Bookstores and Why, offers an expertly-crafted confrontation of far-right, Christian nationalist attempts to reshape American culture through ban campaigns targeting schools, libraries, bookstores, and prisons, with the aim to silence marginalized identities in life and in literature.

From the first-ever banned books display at San Francisco's City Lights in the 1950s to the rapid rise of so-called Moms For Liberty during the COVID-19 pandemic to attempts to silence Palestinian authors, Caine charts the course of repressive censorship campaigns, along with the creative and sometimes unlikely activists who've stood up against them.

Each chapter is based on a particular book banning episode, bolstered by research and legal precedent, and concludes with helpful takeaways for further reading or resistance.

Throughout, Caine approaches these heated issues with gentle openness harkening back to his work as a public school teacher and a bookseller.

He emphasizes our collective responsibility towards art, free speech, and each other.

Selected Works from Christopher Strachey

Christopher Strachey was born in Hampstead, London, on July 16, 1916. Strachey is known as a pioneering British computer scientist and early game programmer. He gained recognition for some of the earliest experiments in what we now call video games, including a checkers (draughts) program, a music generator, and a computer-generated love letter program which has been considered by some to be a kind of queer critique.

Strachey had professional, platonic, and romantic relationships with fellow gay scientists, including his friendship with Alan Turing and long-term relationship with Mike Woodger. We know all too well from Turing's story how challenging life for gay men was in England, and yet Strachey managed to bring a playfulness and levity to computer science. His work often depicted play, creativity, and emotion — challenging the idea that computers were only useful for calculation.

Strachey’s legacy is seen in the games we have today and in the queer computer scientists he inspired — and in some ways supported with University of Oxford's Christopher Strachey Professorship of Computing. While there aren't a myriad of visual works to share from Strachey, we think one of the earliest — perhaps first — video game is worth sharing.

People Without History Are Dust

Queerness remains one of the most stigmatized and overlooked aspects of Holocaust history, often erased due to the lingering homophobia of survivors. People Without History Are Dust challenges this silence, weaving together compelling stories of German, Dutch, Czech, and Polish Jewish Holocaust victims and survivors - including Anne Frank, Molly Applebaum, Margot Heuman, and Gad Beck - whose experiences help illuminate the hidden history of queerness in a time of genocide.

Drawing on extensive archival research, this groundbreaking book uncovers the lives of those who were doubly marginalized, not only persecuted as Jews but also as queer individuals. In doing so, it confronts the ways in which history has excluded or minimized their experiences, urging us to question normative accounts of the Holocaust.

By shedding light on these long-overlooked stories, People Without History Are Dust deepens our understanding of identity, survival, and memory, reminding us why an inclusive and complex approach to history is essential - not just for the sake of the past, but in service to the present and the future as well.

A place for subtext, authors believed to be queer, and classics beloved by the queer community.

Strangers on a Train

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Patricia Highsmith

In Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world—where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.

The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction, and proved her mastery of depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.

Selected Works from Grant Wood

Grant Wood was born in rural Iowa in the US on February 13, 1891. Wood is known for his role in American Regionalism, an art movement that highlighted rural American life and believed that to be the solution to the problems plaguing the country during the Great Depression. Though Wood studied in France, he dedicated his work to the American Midwest, most notably through his painting American Gothic (1930). Fun fact: American Gothic depicts a man and his daughter or wife, but the subjects are based on Wood's sister and their family dentist.

Though Grant was closeted during his life, he had a circle of friends who knew about his sexuality and supported him. Regardless of how we might feel about Wood's idea of rural America being the "solution" to American cities and the Great Depression, his work did have a large impact on defining a uniquely American art style for the time period.

A place for subtext, authors believed to be queer, and classics beloved by the queer community.

Strangers on a Train

Listen on audiobook

Patricia Highsmith

In Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world—where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.

The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction, and proved her mastery of depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.