In those days, "families" were vast clans that traded, warred, intermarried and created culture on a growing scale. Eventually, the world over, confederacies of related clans who spoke the same language evolved into nations. Twelve clans came together to form the nation of Israel. Frankish tribes united to create "France." William Wallace united the Scot clans against English tyranny. After thousands of years of empire and nearly a century of Communism, China is still clan-conscious.

Today, the motley migration of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered clans are coming together to try creating a single nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are not necessarily created with the same kind of sexuality and gender identity. Yet how real is our own sense of generations passing? How committed are we to keeping track of each and every child? To making sure that no story is lost?

In current PC language, it is chic to call ourselves a "tribe" -- and some of us are actually creating the homosexual answer to the heterosexual unit family, complete with children. It all sounds good in print. But the fact is -- we often talk about "history" without being clear on what we're celebrating, or why. Once again GLBT History Month is upon us, with yet another round of bookstore displays, panel discussions and media lip service. All too often, that purported "history" comes from a narrow vision, because of disagreements among our politicians and academics.

Before Stonewall

Seldom, for example, does our "history" include mention of eras preceding the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, when drag queens fought back during a police raid on a downtown Manhattan bar. Starting our history at Stonewall is like starting American history in 1776, omitting three centuries of Spanish, French, Portuguese and English colonialism, as well as a dozen or two millennia of native culture.

Stonewall didn't happen like a bolt from the blue! That blaze of drag-queen spirit was sparked by World War II activists, both women and men, who served in uniform. They created our first post-war gay and lesbian networks and publications -- in a time when our people still feared arrest if they met in tiny political groups at someone's apartment. Yet the PC crowd don't like to mention our uniformed forebears, because of left-wing pacifist biases against the military. Likewise, Stonewall sprang from a rich and feisty drag culture with deep roots in the Hispanic and black communities. Today anti-drag politics make it hard for some to acknowledge the important role that drag played in our pre-Stonewall history.

Even less do we have a sense of "LGBT regional history." The Northwest, for example, can claim notable pioneers who deserve greater celebration today -- like playwright Doric Wilson, who grew up on a ranch in eastern Washington. Doric, who lives in New York City today, virtually created gay theater in the 1970s.

Generally, our view of "gay and lesbian history" is obsessively urban. And yes, we do have a historic pattern of migrating into cities, where we can hide more easily, and find one another more easily. Yet this narrow view belies the broad mass of roots that we put down in rural America. There is rural literature that deserves to be more celebrated, whether 19th-century writings like Willa Cather's "My Antonia", or contemporary novels like Ronald Donaghe's "Common Sons," that smell of earth and open spaces.

With our post-millennial world so dependent on microchips, it is easy to forget those horse-and-buggy days of ours. When I tell people that the word "punk," used today in men's prisons to denote a young male sexual partner, was common in old-time ranch lingo because of love relationships among cowboys, people are always astonished. "I didn't know that!" they say. I grew up on a ranch in the 1940s, and heard my father grumbling about this or that good-looking young "punk" on the ranch...and his meaning was always clear.

Who Burns the Books?

"History" is highly vulnerable to single acts of arson. Try to imagine the Vatican Library burning to the ground, and the fire's impact on the Catholic Church. Try to imagine the Library of Congress being destroyed, and the impact on Americans. Then try to imagine the loss of Morris Kight's archive, or the archives at the ONE Institute and Homosexual Information Center in California, or the Stonewall Library and Archives in Florida, or Joan Nestle's Herstory archives in New York. Among others, we've suffered the loss of the immense Berlin archive of LGBT history, including original manuscripts of Socrates and Sappho, that was burned by the Nazis in May 1933.

Today our U.S. archives are still few, and most of them limp along on tiny budgets, in locations that are often far from adequate. Our library collections are few in number. Yet every old paperback of lesbian pulp fiction, every yellowed men's magazine, or newsletter on bisexual organizing, or Web page of transgendered networking -- each and every box of documents, tape recordings and CDs is important.

Our history's greatest Achilles heel is the fact that history books get re-written by the winners of wars. The Bible itself was rewritten by different church councils, who took things out and put things in. The Catholic Church wrote pagans out of European history once Charlemagne had conquered Europe. Before the 1960s, Christian white Americans wrote the achievements of slaves and descendants of slaves, as well as non-white immigrants and pagan native peoples, out of U.S. history books. The gay community is no different. All the more reason why the winners of our own ideological wars should not misuse their positions of power at colleges and universities, or in the media, to tamper with our own history.

Unfortunately we are all too prone to rewrite our own history -- which can include too much bowing and scraping to straight celebrities who support us. After Princess Diana's death, she was hailed as a "pioneer of AIDS awareness." With all respect to Diana's compassion for AIDS patients, she was no "pioneer." Neither was Elizabeth Taylor, another so-called pioneer. The real pioneers were out on the battlefield fighting for awareness long before Liz got on the bandwagon. They included film actresses Zelda Rubenstein, Vivian Blaine and Mamie Van Doren, and gay publicist Tyler St. Mark, who created the first AIDS awareness campaign in 1983. But now these real pioneers are not acknowledged.

Now and then, too, I see instances where LGBT people launch into "burning" books or other forms of expression by other LGBT people they don't agree with. No, there's no actual bonfire. What happens is that the "offending" book is removed from community library collections. Community bookstores are pressured to withdraw them from sale. The offending painting disappears from the archive wall, while the problematical film disappears into a vault, or is blackballed from LGBT film festivals. We can't criticize Sarah Palin for removing gay books from the Wasilla library in Alaska as long as some of us continue to play the same game.

The Needs of Young People

Today our young people -- high school and college age -- enter the LGBT word with minds and memories that are understandably blank of any sense of our long history. Few are the straight parents, straight educators and straight media who will teach them anything positive about our contributions to history. As censorship becomes more a fact of American life, they are less likely to hear that poet Walt Whitman was gay, that Eleanor Roosevelt was bisexual, that homosexuals died in Nazi death camps, or that transgendered people enjoyed great respect in many native American tribes. We need to figure out more ways to make our history accessible to LGBT youth through the community institutions that deal with them.

Again and again, when I lecture in schools, I have seen kids' faces light up as they hear about these things. "Cool...I didn't know that!" they say.

A newborn sense of connecting into history can help a young person to know that he or she is not alone. They also like hearing that there's more to our history than entertainment idols. I remember the reaction of a black gay teen activist who had just discovered the existence of an era of ancient history called the "Sixties." I told him about Bayard Rustin, black gay Quaker who helped Martin Luther King construct the black rights movement of the Sixties. He devoured a book about Rustin I gave him. Today many of our historiographers turn up their noses at Rustin because (in their view) he was not "out" by today's lofty standards. But this teen activist leaped beyond that judgmental PC nonsense. His attitude was, "Wow...a guy like me did all those great things."

Creating and cherishing our real history is a gift that we give not only to ourselves, but to our young people -- the heirs of the traditions that we create today. But it will take commitment to create that history. It must be complete. It must be honest. It must be accurate. Most of all, it must reflect the many faces of sexuality, gender identity, ethnicity, spirituality, artistic taste and political conviction that teem in our tribal confederacy.

To survive through the jarring ideological changes that threaten American society right now, the LGBT world will need a powerful will to remember every single child in every generation behind us -- and every child in our own generation as well.

Note: I published an earlier, longer version of this article in 1997. Sad to say, most of the issues that divide the LGBT world have not changed -- indeed, they have only gotten worse. This is an updated version. --PNW