This seminar surveys the long history of language, gender, social organization, ideas about pleasure and domesticity, economic and political formations among LGBTQ and genderqueer people in North America. Weekly topics will allow us to explore distinct methods for understanding, writing, and interpreting evidence about the queer past, and using this past to challenge established historical narratives about gender and sexuality. Using the concept of “queerness,” we will explore three centuries of history in which “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual” “passing” and “transgender” identities did not always exist, but creative rearrangements of conventional intimacies and social roles (sometimes under other names) did. Understanding that our queer past is intertwined with structures of power usually studied as “American history,” we will often scrutinize well known events, institutions, people, and public spaces for what they reveal about both “heteronormative” and “queer” sexualities; cisgender and genderqueer selves. Our unifying theme, beginning with the inauguration of English settler colonialism in North America, will be the historical significance of contact and (mis)recognition; how moments of contact give new meaning to ideas about sex and gender differences; to the emergence of sexual subcultures and communities; to medical discourses and naming practices; and to the emergence of national and international queer citizenship.