Caroline Christensen: Thank you for talking with me today. I was wondering if you could share a little bit about your background and what made you interested in becoming a historian?

Don Romesburg: Because I do oral history, I am going to start this recording by saying I’m Don Romesburg and I am a visiting professor of Women, Gender and Queer Studies at Caly Poly San Luis Obispo. I had a high school teacher who taught U.S. history through the lens of attitudes, values and beliefs. So rather than being about a series of battles and facts and heroes, it was about understanding cultures and societies and change over time. I found that really interesting and it changed the way I thought about what the function of history was and there might be different values and perspectives at any given time and place. It was important to understand how those work with one another. I was a history major in college, after a few years of doing other things, I went back to graduate school and got my master’s and Ph.D. in history. I’ve been a professor of Women and Gender Studies for about two decades but also teaching history related classes. My areas of specialities are queer history, U.S. history, the history of gender, sexuality and race in America, and the history of K-12 history in America.

Christensen: I know you are very involved in the Fair Education Act. I was wondering if you could talk about the process of getting that passed.

Romesburg: Yes, of course. I had a book that came out in April called Contested Curriculum: LGBTQ History Goes to School. It is a history of the long struggle for LGBTQ inclusive history education in the United States. I wrote that in part because as a historian, when I was working with folks to get the Fair Education Act passed, I thought we can’t be the only people who have been trying to do this. So I wondered what came before this and how might that influence what comes next? 

In short, I was approached by people at what was then called the Gay Straight Alliance Network, now called the Gender and Sexualities Network, which is for GSA clubs around the state and around the country. They were working with parents, educators and students to pass the Fair Education Act and they needed a professor at a state university who was a specialist in this area who could say yes, there is a whole field of scholarship in this area and yes it could be taught in various ways in K12 schools. 

So I came on as the person to say that. So after the Fair Education Act got passed in 2011 and was supposed to be implemented in 2012, a lot of it had what I like to say is no carrot and no stick. Meaning that there was no funding for educators to do this content and none of them, more or less, had any training in this area. They certainly didn’t have it in their K12 education themselves. And it also didn’t have a stick meaning that there was no penalty if public schools didn’t apply the Fair Education Act. So that put us on a long journey to make sure that the History-Social Science Framework, which is like a thousand page document put out by the California Department of Education, which is best practices for the content that should be covered in K12 history and social science education. We worked to ensure that when the new version came out in 2016, that it had LGBT content in many, many grades. We were very successful at getting content in primary, middle and high school. It is covered in second grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, eight grade, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades.

The Fair Education Act was the first of its kind in the United States, the framework was the first of its kind in the United States. We then had to make sure that textbooks were aligned with the framework, and the law actually included the content. That was a whole other struggle that took another year. Then we had to work with teachers and districts, all sorts of folks for the last decade on training and making sure people feel really confident about doing this work and have access to what are now an incredible amount of teaching aids, lesson plans, guided primary source document exercises and things that now exist for LGBTQ content at the K12 level and didn’t before the Fair Education Act.

Christensen: That’s really cool. How did you go about taking the university studies that you had and putting them into a K through 12 context?

Romesburg: There were two things that were really important. One was that the content had to be relevant to what was already being taught. Rather than imagining that there would be some special, set aside week or during LGBT history month, something where you would just teach something like queer heros or trans heros and that would be that, making sure that it fit into the areas that already existed and themes that already existed. So in fourth grade California history, Indigenous history and the way it comes up against settler colonialism, the gold rush past, heroes and role models of the 20th century in California, those things would have LGBTQ content brought into them. And that would be true for every subject area. So instead of thinking what is the most interesting part of what I do as a university professor, with my college students, it was more about how do I take this content area knowledge and weave it into places so that when teachers teaching it, they could do a whole week or a whole day or two days on native Californian two spirit traditions and the ways in which that came into context with settler colonialism and the Mexican and U.S. governments they could do that or it could be something that is mentioned in passing when they are talking about the larger ways in whichthe California genocide of the Indigenous people of the 18th and 19th century was so impactful as as Europeans came north and west. 

So we were zeroing in on how, how do we make this something that teachers don’t feel like it’s adding to the work that they have to do in an already busy schedule. It becomes an enhancement to what they are already doing that will excite the students, be a greater cause to engage in historical thinking and critical thinking, and also help expand the cultural competency that represents many different peoples instead of just a narrow story of history that represents the very few. 

Christensen: For high schoolers, since our AP Women’s History class is proposed for high schools, what stories about LGBT history do you think are the most important for high school students to learn, whether they are in APUSH [AP U.S. History] or WAPUSH [Women’s AP U.S. History]?

Romesburg: What’s great about what’s been done in California is that the history of the state is spread out over the K12 curriculum. It starts meaningfully in fourth grade and fifth grade is early American history and eight grade is 19th century history, eleventh grade is modern US history and twelfth grade is American government. There are places that you can draw on in the history and social sciences framework that really show the most important kind of places to do that work in a high school context. So even though in a fifth grade context you are not going to do the same kinds of things you would do in a high school context.

For example, in early American history, thinking about the ways in which family diversity, gender diversity, two spirit traditions within Indigenous societies come up against European understandings of them, and how that is part of the longer story of colonization. That is something that absolutely could be woven into the first semester of the course. If women’s history as an AP topic is broadly conceived through the lens of gender as opposed to just women per say, if it’s about putting a gendered lens on understanding America’s past, then there are all sorts of ways in thinking about how different colonial regions had disproportionate gender ratios in their early formations and how that created different kinds of societies and possibilities in those societies. For example, how was the Chesapeake region different from how it was in the Northeast? Those are the kinds of things that you could absolutely explore. 

A huge one is the way in which there were aspects of the revolutionary era that invited people to think in all sorts of expansive ways. I’m thinking about Deborah Samson in the Revolutionary War and how there were many people who either temporarily or over a lifetime chose to pass or live in different genders for different kinds of opportunities in their life. I think in the revolutionary and Civil War there were many examples of people who were female birth assigned who lived as men in order to serve in the military and have those kinds of opportunities. Those kinds of stories are really engaging for students. My favorite one about the American Revolution is Public Universal Friend. Do you know this story?

Christensen: Yes I do.

Romesburg: Someone who finds divine inspiration during the revolutionary era to become what today we would call a non-binary or agender person and then encourages their followers to refer to them not even as a pronoun but as Public Universal Friend all the time. There’s a legal case around heresy where the courts say in this new nation, you can no longer prosecute people for expressing different religions beliefs than the ones that are the majority. So it’s an early freedom of religion case, of the separation between church and state. 

There’s all sorts of examples. In each period, urbanization and industrialization, westward movement, enslavement and emancipation, progressivism, in every era there is strong LGBTQ related content to use.  

Christensen: It’s so interesting how in the beginning freedom of religion was used to protect queer identities and now it is sort of a way to target queer people. It’s an interesting juxtaposition.

Romesburg: It is very interesting, this might not be something you would talk about in high school, but prosecution for sodomy laws could be a lesson after the American Revolution. There’s even a way in which the American Revolution is America’s first sexual revolution, not exactly, but there is a loosening of restrictions in that era, particularly for white property owning men.   

Christensen: Are there any women by name you recommend we include in our course proposal?

Romesburg: Yes, there are people who are already probably part of the course proposal who deserve to be understood through a queer lens in addition to a feminist lens. Wendy Rouse is super articulate about this and I know you’ve already talked to her. Jane Addams is an obvious one, Eleanor Roosevelt is an obvious one, there are many women in the suffrage movement who were involved in romantic or companionate relationships with other women and saw themselves more wedded to the cause than men. 

You could look at the traditions of Boston marriages and the role of African American women and how that wasn’t something that just wealthy white women were engaged in during the 19th century. Rachel Cleves has a book about [Charity and Sylvia] Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake who were seen as being in a marital relationship in Vermont. They were accepted by their community. 

Also, the category of who is a woman is problematic, right? I think considering, for example, Public Universal Friend, or considering the stagecoach driver Charlie Parkhurst who is mentioned in fourth grade and eighth grade in the history and social science framework in California is someone who is birth assigned female but who lived most of their life as a man. Pankhurst was a really famous stagecoach driver who was arguably one of the first female bodied people to vote in California, although did so because they were understood to be a man at the time. Even after their passing in primary sources, newspaper articles and things, a lot of their community members referring to them by he/him pronouns. They are a story of gender in the west that I think is important.  

There’s also the story of Mrs. Nash who was a birth assigned male who was the wife of someone who was part of the Union army as it marched west, with General Custer. So there’s an opening and an opportunity in the 19th century to really think about how industrialization, westward movement, urbanization, invite these other kinds of possibilities for people to have other kinds of mobility, including gender, and there are specific individuals that could be used to showcase that for the curriculum. 

For the 20th century, there were so many people. I think the blues women, such as when you’re talking about the great migration and the Harlem Renaissance and everything that’s possible with that. For example, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith would be really important. Also, the emergence of the homophile movement as the modern lesbian and gay civil rights movement in the late 1940s through the 1960s. You had all sorts of prominent figures, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon are the ones who started the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights organization in the United States. 

You have Pauli Murray who is female birth assigned. Historians have more recently reinterpreted them as possibly trans or exploring a masculine personhood that doesn’t leave womanhood entirely, so it’s interesting. Pauli Murray is a really important figure to the civil rights movement because they coined the concept of Jane Crow, which is an early way of thinking about intersectionality and the ways that Black women were oppressed by systems of segregation. Murray’s work becomes important to the NAACP in considering Brown v. Board of Education. It becomes important to Ruth Bader Ginsburg as she argues before the Supreme Court in the 1970s as a lawyer that starts to carve out a constitutional right to gender non-discrimination. I could go on and on, there are so many clear entry points to LGBTQ people in a women’s history course that explores America’s past.  

I also think it would be important to include people in the rise of the new right who were anti-LGBTQ, people like Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant, who helped roll back some of the progress LGBTQ people were making by that time. They also helped tank the Equal Rights Amendment. So it’s important to not just tell the stories of women who are doing substantial and incredible things for queer and trans people, but the people who help us make sense of the continuing anti-trans bias and anti-queer attacks that we see today from the right.    

Christensen: My final question is do you support the creation of an AP women’s history course? If so can you share why you support it? 

Romesburg: I think it’s really important. Yes, I do support it. I think it’s really important for students to understand the history of gender and the history of women is not just a sideshow, to the “real story” of the American past. Arguably, you can’t understand the American past without understanding the history of gender and the history of women. I think there’s a real advantage to focusing on women in a class like that because it opens up space for more intersectional thinking and more gendered lenses of analysis. It also invites what is now 50+ years of historical scholarship centered on women’s history as a field squarely into the AP process. 

We are so far away from there being an AP LGBTQ history course. If we look at the long history of inclusive curriculum in the United States for K12, people had to push for the inclusion of African Americans in the K12 curriculum of America’s past, they had to push for the inclusion of women, as well as the history of immigrants. That sort of creates the early space for the possibility that in the future LGBTQ history should be seen as an area that should be understood in the K12 curriculum. So I think it’s really important to see how women’s history is this field that is deeply mature, very sophisticated and is a place that students can really grapple with the American past that people will find very empowering. 

Christensen: Thank you so much! I really want to thank you for all your work.

Romesburg: That’s lovely to hear. The bottom line is that history should be honest and inclusive. History education at its base, at K12, is about how do we have everyone from these diverse backgrounds come to understand the American past in a way that invites all of us into this pluralistic democracy that we live in. For far too long we left a whole group of people out and it’s good to see that there’s progress being made.