My previous books and many of my other publications have focused primarily on LGBTQ history, and for a long time I imagined this book as a project that would queer the bicentennial. My Ph.D. dissertation and first book, which addressed gay and lesbian history in Philadelphia, was originally supposed to conclude with 1976, but I only made it to 1972, the year of Philadelphia’s first gay pride march. I long wanted to return to the stories I had researched but not addressed in that early project but kept getting distracted by other research interests. I had in mind an irreverent triptych, addressing the bicentennial queer courtship of Nixon and Rizzo, bicentennial queer commerce as represented in a gay porn magazine feature called “Philadelphia Freedom,” and bicentennial queer activism as captured in the oral histories I had conducted for my dissertation and first book.

When I finally made the bicentennial my research priority in anticipation of the commemoration of US 250 in 2026, I slowly came to the realization that the book would be queer-inclusive but not queer-focused. Mostly that’s because I realized that there were so many untold stories about African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, Native Americans, people with disabilities, and women, but I also realized that I could make another intervention by treating LGBTQ history as important but not primary in my book. We now have hundreds of great books on LGBTQ history, but non-LGBTQ historians rarely address LGBTQ history in their works. I hope Bicentennial provides a model for how to do so and shows that LGBTQ history is American history. As for the queer material that ended up on the cutting room floor, I plan to present this in an upcoming OutHistory website exhibit.