When my grandmother was nine, she took up a gun to fight the British because her older brother had passed out next to her in a ditch and the other option was to die. When I see people justifying the murder of Palestinian children because they might "be terrorists" it's her I see My grandmother made sure I knew from a young age the awful things colonization had done to Ireland. She was no revolutionary - in American, she voted Republican, except for JFK. But she'd grown up a sharecropper & seen her neighbors burned for the crime of being Irish Catholic.

For #WomensHistoryMonth, a short 🧵on how 19th Century Americans created a new system of "women's justice" post-Civil-War, which specifically targeted working-class queer and Black women, and how that system indirectly made Greenwich Village the great gayborhood it's known as (All of this is drawn from research for my book, THE WOMEN'S HOUSE OF JUSTICE, the eponymous prison that soared 12 stories high in Greenwich Village for most of the 20th Century boldtypebooks.com/titles/hugh-ry…)

It is impossible to separate gay history from trans history, & attempts to do so inevitably collapse into bad scholarship. This has been a theme in my work for decades, and I'm honored that the Digital Transgender Archive invited me to write about it: digitaltransgenderarchive.net/learn/LGBTHist… One key insight into why this oppositional approach to queer history is unworkable: "most people in the 19th century who understood themselves as queer likely believed they were improperly gendered, or had deviant bodies...

Since #QueerHistoryMonth starts this weekend: I think we are undergoing a massive shift in the meaning of queer identity RIGHT NOW - the 2nd one in American history [🧵] First, something to keep in mind as we go: this Gallup poll from February, which saw upticks in every category of queer identification among Gen Z, but in particular, bi and trans identities  news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lg…

Iconic queer artist, author, and agitator #DavidWojnarowicz died 30 years ago today. He's been a major influence in my work since the mid-90s, and the direct inspiration for the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, so I thought I'd do a little thread of my work about his work! When DW's piece "A Fire In My Belly" was censored at @smithsoniannpg, it prompted me to (accidentally) found the Pop-Up Museum in protest - and also pushed me on a deep dive into the tangled origins of the piece (or is it pieces?) called A Fire In My Belly amazon.com/About-Face-Woj…

Today is the 53rd anniversary of the first night of the Stonewall Uprising! Did you know Afeni Shakur - Black Panther leader, community organizer, author, mother of Tupac - was involved in the riots? [THREAD] During Stonewall, Shakur and Joan Bird - another Panther leader - were incarcerated at the Women's House of Detention, the infamous Greenwich Village prison that was just a few hundred feet from the Stonewall Inn

150 years ago, ppl we think of as trans women, effeminate gay men, and intersex people mostly would have understood themselves as a singular "invert" category; gender-normative homosexuals mostly didn't see themselves as an identity at all. This idea that our current categories of "gay" and "trans" are permanent, ahistoric identities that are diametrically opposed is ridiculous when looked at with any historical rigor. Same with the idea that "too many" gen z folks are identifying as trans and not gay.

The (probable*) first lesbian love song on #Broadway, and why its forgotten: a #Pride #queer #history thread (SPOILER ALERT: it isn’t this )