Just a few days ago historian Wendy Rouse published the article “Confronting the Rainbow Panic: Historical Erasure and Censorship of LGBTQ+ History in the 2020s.” Rouse is a historian whose research focuses on the history of gender and sexuality, and she has published three books on the history of women and children.
The article highlights the dramatic actions we have seen from the Executive Branch in 2025, but it puts these actions within the context of a larger history of erasure.
An excerpt from the article reads as follows:
“This erasure has a long history. Suffrage leaders themselves, concerned with countering antisuffrage criticism, obscured the queerness of the movement by promoting a public image of suffragists as womanly women and respectable wives and mothers. In uplifting an image of ideal femininity and heteronormative respectability, suffrage organizations marginalized gender nonconforming and nonheterosexual suffragists, pushing them out of the movement or concealing their queerness from public view.”
We encourage our community to read the article in full to understand the full impact on queer history and individuals through to today.