Fellow time travelers: creating queer heritage in the detritus of untold genealogies

The invitation to provide an assessment of the growing, outstanding historiography on nineteenth-century queer sexuality is an honor. I immediately imagined writing an essay that would span from Jen Manion's award-winning book, Female Husbands to Rachel Hopes Cleves's overnight classic Sylvia and Charity: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America to Marc Stein's fascinating new online exhibit, "Sodomites and Gender Transgressors in 1840s New York" to many other smart interventions in the field.Footnote1 But as I sat down at my desk to ponder the very notion of queer history, which for me has always been informed by the inspiring discourses that have emerged from Black Studies, especially the work on the archival turn, I began to realize the necessity, if not urgency, to first acknowledge the way that queer people, long before the formal invention of gay studies in the 1970s, attempted to document their past. As a scholar who has written on both gay liberation in the twentieth century and the possibility of queer sex and identity in the nineteenth century, I have witnessed countless times the ways that queer people were often in search of their history and worked assiduously to document it.Footnote2 Therefore, I want to use this valuable space both at the BrANCH conference in 2023, among a group of committed nineteenth-century historians, and now on the pages of this flagship journal, to teach audiences about how queer history, despite its relative novelty within the broader profession, has its own fascinating history.