They were among some of the country's great icons, from Emily Dickinson to Calamity Jane to perhaps even Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt. In his new book, A Queer History of the United States, the cultural critic Michael Bronski runs the film backward, through 500 years of American life, showing there were gays and bisexuals in every scene, making and remaking America. For people who talk incessantly about honouring American history, they have built a historical picture of their country that can only be sustained by scrubbing it clean of a significant part of the population and everything they brought to the party (if not the Tea Party). The statements of Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, or Mitt Romney insistently hint that the fag does not belong under the flag. The American right presents homosexuality as something alien to the American experience – an intruder that inexplicably gate-crashed America in 1969 in the form of a rioting drag queen clutching a high heel in her fist as a weapon.
