People like to make assumptions about the feelings of our queer ancestors. I spent a lot of my life, especially as a young person, doing the same. I’d learn about a new injustice and, rightfully in those cases, imagine how awful or horrifying it must have felt to experience it. But that imagining also often extended to other aspects of queer history. I’d read about secret queer spaces, lavender marriages, hidden relationships between artists I admired, and the coded ways queer people had to signal to one another prior to the 1960s and 1970s, and I’d feel a lot of heartache. I’d wonder if I would have the courage and wherewithal to live my life with the utmost confidentiality. Could I live a life of only revealing who I truly was once I entered into extremely specific spaces? I’d make calculations in my head, placing myself in a moment much different than the one of my early 2000s teendom, and try to figure out who in my life I’d confide in, where I’d have to live for even a modicum of safety, and how I’d live. My thoughts were heavily focused on only the difficulties of being anywhere besides South Florida in the early 2000s, and I’d make conjectures based on what I learned through studying the lives of queer people who didn’t have the “privilege” to be out like I was.

I didn’t have the language to speak about it then, but I knew I was queer when I was 11 years old. I spent three years pretending I didn’t know before coming out at 14 in 2003. I wouldn’t argue it was perfectly safe to be queer in 2003, and I didn’t exactly come out because I felt safe. I came out because I was pissed off.

I was also tired of everyone around me talking about the big queer issues of the day — “same-sex marriage” and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, mostly — as if they didn’t know anyone who might be directly affected by their reluctance to fight or vote for initiatives that would protect others. Coming out in this way wasn’t an answer to a prayer for freedom so much as it was the start of one. Through the rudimentary political education I had at 14, I’d hoped that people around me — from some of my family and friends and my friends’ families to acquaintances at school — would at least be willing to entertain the idea that LGBT people deserved the same rights as them simply because they knew some of us. It was a ludicrous responsibility to put on myself, but one very much in line with my general disposition as a hopeful kid obsessed with solving the problems of the world around me.

It wasn’t easy to be a queer teen in 2003, but I assumed it felt easier than not coming out, and I assumed it would get even easier as I grew up. Back then, I was so skilled at letting hope be my most prominent emotion that I believed the world would look much different than it does right now. Even as I got a little older, became more politically and radically engaged, and started fully understanding how and why oppression operates, I figured we’d be much better off in 20 years’ time, and I was grateful to be who I was in the moment I was forced to live through. I didn’t have many queer role models at the time, so even though it was hard for me to imagine what my queer future looked like, I felt like I at least knew enough to say I would rather live with that uncertainty than live without the ability to hold my girlfriend’s hand at the mall. Potentially, it’s from this place of hope, of feeling safe enough, and having the privilege not to hide my queerness early in my life that some of those assumptions I was making about our queer ancestors were born.

In my youth, I read a few novels dealing with queer characters and queer life in the past, but I didn’t begin looking into real-life details of those experiences until my sophomore year of high school. At the time, we were studying some poems by W.H. Auden in my English Honors class. During one of our class discussions on “The More Loving One,” my teacher offhandedly and cryptically mentioned Auden was gay. At my Catholic high school, these kinds of messages from my teachers were not only rare, they were practically nonexistent. Our teachers barely ever discussed the personal lives of the people we studied. My attention shifted from thinking about what I’d provide to the conversation and locked squarely on my teacher, hoping he’d provide a little more information on Auden’s life and sexuality. But we never discussed what Auden’s queerness implied about some of the works we were studying, even for more explicitly homosexual texts like Auden’s “Lullaby.”

That didn’t stop me from becoming absolutely fixated on my teacher’s coded admission about him, though. The following weekend, I immediately went searching through the limited resources at my local library, finding just enough to lead me on new searches on the internet even though it was harder to navigate and a lot less revelatory. The curiosity to know everything I could about his life was still boiling over in me, so I rummaged the shelves at the Barnes & Noble store my friends and I frequented.

It wasn’t hard to confirm what my teacher said: Auden was gay, but he was also married to a woman, Erika Mann. In what I found on Auden, it described their marriage as one “of convenience,” but it didn’t explain that the “convenience” was a way to protect Mann from becoming stateless when the Nazis took control of Germany. I wouldn’t learn that until much later. When I first learned about Auden and Mann, I said to a friend: “Isn’t it sad that they couldn’t be with their actual lovers? That they had to hide who they were like that?”

Even though I was wrong about Auden’s reasons for agreeing to marry Mann, I became obsessed with what I correctly and incorrectly surmised were the lengths queer people had to go to in order to live their lives as safely and clandestinely as they possibly could. Of course, there are tons of marriages like Auden and Mann’s throughout queer history that were undertaken to hide true identities, but many were also as equally nuanced as theirs. I just could never — or maybe I refused to — parse the specific circumstances of arrangements like this. Instead, for years, I favored my original projection: that they mostly created and underwent these rituals in order to hide themselves in plain sight in a world that was hostile to, dismissive of, and disgusted by them. And, most egregiously, I assigned feelings I had no business assigning them. I presumed they were miserable, fearful, anxious, and trapped in a situation they couldn’t see a way out of. In my 21st century arrogance, I concluded that liberation was less important to them than comfort and that, despite all evidence to the contrary staring me in the face, they were too scared to just be who they were.

Luckily, by the time college started, I was already growing out of this. In college, I had access to a lot more resources and a lot more time to do the kinds of research I wanted to do. My obsession with queer history never really subsided, and if anything, it grew. I became more and more invested in knowing about the lives of the people who came before us, about how they fought for themselves and others, their secret spaces and keywords, their hidden getaways and parties on the outskirts of their towns, their relationships with other queer people all across the world, their New York City and their Berlin and their New Orleans and their Key West, and everything else I could find in between all of that. I quickly learned the specific details of Auden and Mann’s marriage and many marriages like theirs, about the many pioneers who tried in their corners of the world to fight for equitable treatment under the law, and about the actual lengths queer people went to in order to protect themselves and their community.

During that time, I got to know people like the men and women who distributed gay and lesbian materials, like the German magazine Der Eigene, through underground channels in the 1890s;  Eve Addams, who, at her immediate peril, owned and operated a “tearoom” for lesbians in New York City in the 1920s; the Black men and women in Harlem, Philadelphia, and Atlanta (among other cities) who threw invite-only queer parties at their homes throughout the early part of the 20th century; Miami underground nightclub owners like Al Youst, who defended the club La Paloma against both municipal powers and the Ku Klux Klan; Harry Hay, who founded gay rights organization the Mattachine Society in 1950; the founders of the lesbian secret social club the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955; Reed Erickson, a trans man who lived in Baton Rouge and used his fortune to help other queer and trans people throughout the 1960s and 1970s; even Virginia Woolf, whose 1928 novel Orlando was one of the first explorations of trans life I read in my youth and whose queerness was rarely discussed in my college Literature courses; and many other pre- and post-Stonewall queer and trans activists, artists, advocates, allies, and every day people who, against all odds, lived their lives in varying degrees of furtiveness and prudence while still trying to change the present and future for others just like them.

Reading about and researching their lives and their actions helped me reorient the way I understand their privacy. If they wanted to live the full, joyous, healthy queer lives they longed for, they had to do it in their own way. For most of the late 19th century and the 20th century, that meant doing it out of the eyes of the people who had the impulse and power to follow them, report them, and destroy them. Being “known” and in the mainstream wasn’t as much of a concern as creating some paths — any paths — to freedom somewhere. It wasn’t as important as just living their lives and surviving until the next day.

It wasn’t just about not feeling shame or being shamed in public or feeling comfortable; it was about actually feeling safe in whatever ways made sense to them. I couldn’t understand this earlier because even though I tried to make these decisions through pretend calculations in my head, I was missing the part where it’s possible to do what makes sense to keep yourself alive and still live a full, joyous life regardless. The more digging I did, the more fullness, happiness, and resistance I found amongst the hiding. And the more incredible their lives seemed to me. I don’t say this to erase the difficulties of living so many queer people experienced prior to the 1960s and 1970s, after that, and how many still do today, but as I studied and researched, I kept proving my young self wrong about these people.

Most recently, I’ve even come to fully understand what that complicated pull towards living an “unknown” life feels like. As a queer and trans educator in Florida, the last few years have felt impossible to navigate without leaving the profession entirely, which I ultimately ended up doing. At the start of the 2023-2024 school year, a group called “Fathers for Freedom” somehow infiltrated my private social media accounts, received some of the emails I sent to parents before the beginning of the year, and used the information they gathered to produce a smear campaign about me on their website and through their social media accounts. They were angry about my gender and sexuality and that I didn’t hide it from my students. But more specifically, they truly seemed to believe I could use my identity to influence kids to be just like me.

A representative from the group showed up at my school’s Back to School Night with the intent of gaining access to me and confronting me in person. Thankfully, I wasn’t there. As the situation went from bad to worse over the subsequent weeks, I wondered what it would have been like if they just had much less opportunity to gain information about me and my life. I wondered if I absolutely needed to disclose who I am in my classroom in order to keep teaching the radical curriculum I’d built. I tried to figure out how to balance my own safety and contentment with doing the work I wanted to do with my students. Their actions certainly felt threatening, but mostly, I just felt as if my privacy had been violated in a way I couldn’t fix or control. I was never, not once, ashamed of who I am and how I show up in my classroom, but I longed to be in a space where I wasn’t and couldn’t be seen except by the people I allowed to see me, just like so many of the other queer and trans people I’d gotten to know over the last few years.

Over the last 14 years since I graduated college, more and more of this early queer and trans history we had limited access to has been made available in the best ways possible. Many queer and trans archives, such as the ones at U.S. universities and through various LGBTQ non-profit organizations dedicated to archival work, have been made free and available to any person who happens to be looking. Outside of that, there are tons of free resources outside of the limitations of academia that queer and trans people can access to learn more about those who came before us. Public Instagram accounts, like @queerloveinhistory for example, have made it their mission to bring these archival materials to the social media space where they often get thousands of views and likes. All of the pieces of our histories I was searching for and desperate to find are no longer impossible to see or completely inaccessible. No doubt, we still have a long way before we’ll ever recover all that there is to see or know, and many things are lost forever. But the wealth of information available to us now is much, much larger than my 21-year-old self could have imagined when I was deep in the Stonewall National Museum, Archives, & Library in Ft. Lauderdale, trying to discover anything I could about the queer and trans people who made our gay village here, Wilton Manors, come to life.

Now I’m not only constantly reading the nonfiction books that tell our early stories of resistance and liberation, but I’m also scrolling through these digital archives and social media accounts looking at the images of the people who lived those stories and reading the words they wrote about themselves in real time. These digital spaces can transport you back in time, grant you access to the underground places where queer and trans people built community. You can see black and white pictures of queer and trans people living their lives in these secret spaces, smiling and kissing and holding hands with their partners, laughing with their friends, and enjoying their time together. You can see them expressing their genders in a multitude of ways, unafraid of being themselves wholly and unconcerned with whatever terrors the next day will bring them.

Again, I don’t believe these images tell the whole story of the horrors they encountered as queer and trans people in an unforgiving and unaccepting world. I know that many of these images were taken right before these secret spaces and meetups were raided by police or other groups acting as the police. I know many of the people in these images were subjected to violent threats and actual acts of violence. I know that many of them never lived to be my age because of those acts of violence, their own guilt and shame, and because of an illness that would be practically ignored for years and years simply due to the fact that it mostly afflicted gay men. Despite all of that though, these photos and ephemera of the time certainly do reinforce the fact they weren’t merely miserable, fearful, anxious, and trapped in a situation they couldn’t see a way out of.

As I’ve gotten older, my feelings about our queer ancestors and their queer lives in the past have undergone yet another evolution. I know I’m not alone in feeling as if the push for queer and trans assimilation into the heteropatriarchal culture of our society was, in many ways, completely misled. Like so many others, I’ve grown particularly distrustful of our appearance in the mainstream, of how we’re “tolerated,” of rainbow capitalism, of the corporate takeover of Pride and our other originally radical traditions, of the crowd who believes representation is good even if it’s actually not very good at all, and of the ways queer and trans people are supposed to fall in line and be grateful for the crumbs we’ve been given so far. I’ve grown especially weary of other queer and trans people who do not look to our radical past to help inform the way we show up in the present and of queer and trans people who do not see our fight for liberation as deeply entangled with the fight to destroy racial capitalism altogether. The commercialization and exploitation of queerness — more like gayness, if we’re being completely honest with ourselves — has definitely helped us gain some necessary protections. But much like every other marginalized group in the U.S. and abroad, those protections are never as concretized as many think they are. You only have to look around you and see what’s happening in our state legislatures, public schools, and doctors’ offices to see that’s as true as it’s ever been. And yet, many queer and trans people are convinced we can somehow make heartfelt and apologetic appeals to those who want us out of the public sphere in order to gain the liberation we so rightly deserve along with every other oppressed class of people in the world.

Lately, when I scroll through these archives and social media accounts, I feel a twinge of envy and a desire to be as “unknown” as they were. I wonder what it must have felt like to sit at their day jobs or family dinners and know there’s something about them no one else there knows without feeling the immediate urge to tell them. I think about meeting lovers and friends in covert and camouflaged locations that require a password to enter. Or, more, I imagine being the bouncer or manager at these spaces asking people for the password as they walk up to the door. I imagine how uniquely liberating it must have felt to dance on the sweaty and low lit dance floor of a club only 40 or 50 other queer and trans people knew about, to flirt and make out with other queer and trans people without worrying that straight people are going to show up and kill the vibe, to “Cheers” each other before our last shot before we have to return back into our fake lives, to feel as if everyone there was on the same wavelength as I am, and to be back at work the following day dreaming about the next time we all get to be together in that space again. I think about the exclusivity of those house parties and how it would feel to finally get invited to one only to spend the whole evening waiting for a good time to duck into one of the empty bedrooms with my girlfriend. I envision myself in the early meetings of those secret queer social clubs, reading and distributing radical and communist literature among my peers, imagining a way out of the world as we know it and making plans to get us there, believing we could make it happen through our confidential channels, and being completely indifferent to anything that didn’t ensure each and every person’s unshackling from our global systems of oppression. I think about sneaking around dark corners and having a world of knowledge at my disposal that is inaccessible to almost everyone who isn’t one of us. I imagine how powerful it must have felt to truly escape to these places that were not only run by us but meant for our pleasure and our pleasure alone.

I daydream so much about these spaces lately I can sometimes experience the emotions I might feel if I was back there. Dream with me, if you will. It’s the mid-1960s, and you and your queer friends are looking for some place to go to meet others like you when you hear rumors about a members-only club called Gateways tucked away in a hidden corner of the city. Gateways isn’t explicitly a club for queer people, but lots of lesbians and people of all gender presentations frequent it during its limited working hours. You have to appeal to the club’s owner, Gina, to get a membership but once you do, you can flash your membership card at the door and a new private, queer, racially and ethnically diverse world is opened up to you. You and your friends are free to dress however you want, kiss whoever you want, fuck whoever you want in the bathroom stalls, and perhaps, most crucially, be whoever you want in a place that straddles the line between public and private without fear of harassment or condemnation. I’m sure you’ve been in a place similar to this before, but it wasn’t all ours because places like this aren’t all ours anymore. But here, the rapturous joy of queer privacy is real.

It’s not that I don’t know this world I’m fantasizing about presents a different and, possibly, more intense kind of danger than the one we’re living in. It is, after all, a fantasy — one that is controversial and comes from a place of incredible privilege at that. The “unknown” lives queers and trans people were forced to live weren’t necessarily safer than the ones some of us — mostly the white, middle and upper class versions of us — are “allowed” to live in the present. Rationally, I know that to be true, but none of that makes it feel less enviable or desirable to me even when I feel guilty and ashamed of that desire.

In the space of my mind where I let myself create this fantasy, I’m hoping that being a little more “unknown” might actually help many of us stop being satisfied and comforted by the scraps afforded to us in the present. When we really stop to examine what’s going on around us, the most vulnerable amongst us are still suffering and dying every day for the same reasons many of our ancestors did. I struggle to fully see what all of this representation, commercialization, “acceptance,” and exposure is actually doing. Many LGBTQ people get caught up in such momentary and superficial solace for our current place in the global systems of oppression that they forget we’re on the same chopping black as everyone else who is subjugated by those systems. And as a result, many are content to leave their places in our racist, classist, heteropatriarchal society unchallenged. This, too, is a means of survival, I know, but to what end? When will they decide that Bank of America sponsored Pride events, rainbow-colored Absolut vodka bottles, Pete Buttigieg, and the focus we’ve placed on assimilating ourselves into these systems aren’t actually doing anything to make us freer?

Some people will read this in bad faith and believe I’m making an argument for us to go back “into the closet” or remove ourselves from public life. But the reality is, I’m not really making an argument for anything at all. Like so many other queer and trans people I know near and far, I’m trying to cope with the latest backlash against our mainstream existence and our public “acceptance.” I’m trying to figure a way out of the grief I feel for having to leave my job as a high school English teacher because I was publicly doxxed, misgendered, and given no protection by my institution afterwards. As I’ve done my entire life as an organizer and as a student of history, I’m attempting to use what I’ve learned to push forward. And, perhaps most importantly, I need to remind myself of a time when people like us used their anonymity and the “unknown” nature of their true lives to not only forge an unexpected path to liberation but also carve a way out of these systems entirely by creating new worlds of their own. In this current moment, this seemingly unorthodox practice of dreaming about myself, my partner, and our friends blitzed out of our minds at an invite-only underground queer party or meeting with other queer and trans people in secret to build a world where we can live without having to sacrifice so much of ourselves is how I’m doing it.

I mean, can’t you see it? Wouldn’t it be something to have places where we can truly escape to?

This piece is part of UNDER COVER, an Autostraddle editorial series releasing in conjunction with For Them’s underwear drop.

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