ABSTRACT
The 1970s historians and other scholars have amassed a mountain of evidence demonstrating that same-sex attraction and sexual behaviors, and a wide variety of gender expressions and identities, have been practiced throughout time and across cultures. This chapter provides a general overview of these practices in what is the United States, noting both the similarities and differences between their manifestations and the ways in which they were understood. It offers historians have struggled with the impulse to use words like gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender to describe individuals who might not have known, understood, or embraced these words or concepts. The chapter describes same-sex sexual behavior and same-sex romantic or affectionate relationships using the terminology appropriate to each culture or era discussed. In the United States the emergence of a consumer society around the turn of the twentieth century brought discussions of sexuality and sexual expression into the public sphere.
