Why is it so surprising that I care about LGBT history if I'm straight?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/19/lgbt-history-gay-straight-american-alexis-coe

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“It’s the trifecta,” a disappointed editor sighed as she waved for the check. “You wrote a book about lesbians, you went to Sarah Lawrence and you live in San Francisco.”

When Alice+Freda Forever was published four months ago, I was somewhat amused by people’s determination to find the personal connection that motivated me to write my first novel on a same-sex love and murder. Even the so-called progressives in my life – the ones who made a point of telling me that their own wedding vows included a line about supporting same-sex marriage – persevered. If I wasn’t gay, surely my father or childhood friend or beloved teacher had to be.

The real answer – that I was a young historian who found a relatively unknown, heartbreaking turn-of-the-century Southern tragedy –rarely sufficed. Did these same people think that an Elizabethan scholar must have direct ties to the 16th century, or that I, as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, should only write about World War II? I’ve always thought events that proved significant in the past are about something much more fluid than dates and historical actors, conditions and consequences. History is about our values as a society. That’s an ever evolving story, and it needs new storytellers from every generation.

Alice and Freda’s story is one of collective importance. Issues of American injustice have implications beyond any one community, and yet books like Alice+Freda Forever are most often found on the Gay & Lesbian shelf, with no regard for the Library of Congress’ history, true crime, and gender categorization. (I’m looking at you, Barnes & Noble.) Automatically assigning Alice and Freda to an identity category is probably well-intentioned, but in practice, we should consider how this reinforces discrimination. By setting some stories apart and calling them “LGBT History”, we risk carelessly implying that their history is not a part of our shared American history. We are saying that “their stories” are not “our stories”, and then we shelve those books in the farthest corner of the bookstores.

My grandfather, Poppy – the Holocaust survivor – never quoted pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous poem, “First they came” – and he didn’t need to. Poppy’s stories about his youth in Poland and Germany weren’t just about mass atrocities and genocide, but about the ways in which we perpetuate difference, how “othering” is a choice we make. I saw him work against this, when he embraced the diversity of Los Angeles, resisting pressure to only associate with and hire other survivors in order to rebuild family through community. I thought about him when I spoke at a youth center in Memphis, Tennessee – the very same city Alice and Freda had lived in, and in which they are now buried. These teenagers, facing no small amount of discrimination at home, school and church in the Bible Belt, drove in from cities hours away, and they said that sitting there, listening to me in this refuge, made them feel something rare: lucky. They were there, together, in a safe place that didn’t exist for Alice and Freda.

It was such a safe place that they didn’t feel the need to dance around their curiosity about me, and why I cared so much about the gay community. I talked about democracy and civil rights, all of which were received with respectful nods, but then I heard myself saying something I hadn’t said before: we could be more than just one thing, and certainly more than the thing we’re told we are. As the words were coming out of my mouth, I feared they sounded precious, but the audience’s eyes grew wide, their heads nodded, and they began clapping. The emails they sent me, so raw and hopeful and sincere, focused on this moment more than any other.

I never planned for anything about my own personal history, much less my sexual orientation, to enter into the conversation, but it did, and while it still surprises me, I think it raises important questions. That’s the real work of history.