Long before activists began jockeying over which letters to include in "LGBT" or which colors to add to the rainbow flag, everyday people in early America and the United States experimented with sex, sexuality, and gender in private and public ways, using a wide variety of words and symbols to express identity and forge community in the shadow of state control. Starting with the colonial occupation of Turtle Island and ending with the fight for same-sex marriage, this course will chart developments in American science, medicine, and law alongside personal and political experiments in queer liberation, asking how people have made sense of gender and sexual orientation within and against hegemonic discourses about "normal" and "abnormal" sexualities and genders. The course will examine changing approaches to sex, sexuality, and gender at the intersections of race and class, placing sexuality at the center of major historical developments in the United States. The course will introduce students to a wide variety of primary sources by and about queer and trans historical subjects, including documents, periodicals, oral histories, artworks, and memoirs. Students will learn methods of queer reading that empower them to approach these texts with a critical eye and place them in historical context. Students will learn to analyze primary sources alongside secondary readings on the history of sexuality as well as contemporary documentaries, news articles, and artworks. The course will culminate in a final in-class presentation based on archival research.