‘We’re Still Here, and We Are Part of This History’

An interview with Joan Ilacqua of Queer History Boston.

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In 1980, a small group of volunteers founded The History Project to collect and share the history of the LGBTQ+ communities in Boston, Massachusetts, and New England. For decades, its focus on those communities operated on an “if you know, you know” basis, says Executive Director Joan Ilacqua. It wasn’t until 2025, however, that the organization renamed itself Queer History Boston to “come out” as an archive of queer life in Boston and New England. The Progressive spoke with Ilacqua about the power and importance of queer history, as well as the podcast the organization is releasing to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Can you tell me about the mission and evolution of Queer History Boston?

Joan Ilacqua: We are a community archives in Boston, Massachusetts. Our mission has stayed the same, essentially, since our founding in 1980: to document, preserve, and share LGBTQ+ history. Essentially, the work we do is to ensure that queer history is visible and accessible to queer people, that our records are protected and safe and for the purpose of being available to the community to access, and then we do a lot of public programming and education around queer history. Our first project in 1980 was literally to go back and do research about queer people in Boston’s history, and we found folks from the 1600s through today.

Along the way, we started collecting records. So we have more than 250 collections in the archives. The largest ones are about twenty boxes, and those include records of organizations, individuals, and information about different events or topics related to the queer community. And as a community archives, we are free to use. Anyone can come in and do research or reach out to us with questions. We work with everyone from students, Ph.D.s, and journalists to folks who just want to come in and learn something about queer history.

Q: Can you talk more about the materials you found from the 1600s related to queer people?

Ilacqua: Until fairly recently in history, queer people oftentimes haven’t had the opportunity to share their own story in their own words. And so a lot of the folks we know about from the pre-gay liberation era, pre-Stonewall, pre-1969, are folks who either had privilege and safety to be out in certain ways—authors, poets, artists in Boston—and people who were arrested or tried or institutionalized because of their sexuality and/or gender expression. And the way we define queer people through history—because the language has changed enormously in the past twenty years, much less throughout all of history—is that we’re looking at folks who transgress the societal gender and sexuality norms of their times.

A good example from the 1600s are people who cross dress. Massachusetts put in an official anti-cross dressing law in the 1690s but before that, they’re still arresting people for, you know, you’re assigned male at birth dressing in a dress. You’re assigned female at birth wearing men’s clothing. And some of those folks, we only know their names because they’re put on trial for this. It’s just as important for us to honor those people and their experiences as it is to talk about larger, historic, and more modern figures as well, because that’s part of our story, that fight toward safety and visibility for all of us in our everyday lives.

Q: Why do you think queer history is important to study and share, in general but especially in our current social and political situation?

Ilacqua: I am from Massachusetts. I went through public school here, and the first time I remember encountering a queer person was an independent research project I did on Andy Warhol, who’s not even from here. So it’s important to see people whose stories and experiences resonate with you. I think that’s part of knowing that you yourself are an important part of your community, that people like you have made contributions to how we got to where we are today.

Studying it right now is important, partially because we are witnessing the federal government and conservative groups attempt to minimize the experiences and contributions of queer people and people of color and people with disabilities and immigrants and everyone who’s not a straight, cisgender, white Christian man. We at the archives look around at our records, and we have the receipts. We have the proof that we were here. We are here. We didn’t just emerge miraculously in 1969 when Stonewall happened. I think it’s important to remember that; it’s important to be out and open and kind of militant to continue to prove and say over and over again, “We’re here, we’re still here, and we are part of this history.”

It’s also important to read and, if not understand, at least reflect on the experiences of people who are not like you. That leads to a better understanding of how the world works. It leads to better empathy and neighborliness and all those other good things that it feels like this political climate is trying to stamp out of all of us. It’s not just queer history for queer people; it’s queer history for everyone.

Q: How has queer history as an area of study grown and changed over time?

Ilacqua: As an academic study, the first people doing queer history—Jonathan Ned Katz, George Chauncey, Lillian Faderman—these are all historians who wrote these books that are very like, “Here’s the whole story,” and they’re big, and there’s lots of details and lots of information. It’s an opportunity to prove the existence of a community.

Over time, it has evolved to focus on individuals and communities. A really interesting thing about queer history is that often when we’re looking at a legal history, it really is a state-level or even city-level community that we’re looking at. So there are these examples of marches on Washington, which are big and important, and Supreme Court cases, which are big and important, but an organization like ours looks at what’s happening here locally. We go to what was called a Gay Civil Rights Bill in 1989—we were only the second state to get one [after Wisconsin], and being able to point to that and look at the progress, but also who is left out, and what work do we still need to do? That’s sort of where I see queer history as a field.

And Gen Z and Gen Alpha are enormously queer. It’s a really high percentage of young people, and I think we’re going to continue to see, regardless of what’s going on federally, more of a push toward inclusion and celebration of queer and trans identities, because there are just too many of them to stop them, which is amazing.

Q: What are some histories that are unique to Boston and Massachusetts?

Ilacqua: You can look at history like a story of progress, and progress is not linear, so we’re always moving forward and moving back. I don’t think all of the important parts of our story’s history are necessarily those big wins, but one of the fun sort of stories is we are known for what’s called the Boston marriage.

In the latter half of the 1800s, a lot of women’s colleges open in New England. You suddenly have all of these educated women who are affluent or privileged enough that they don’t have to have husbands, and they pair off with each other and become life partners. Some of them were platonic, and others were definitely not. There are so many in Boston that it becomes called the Boston marriage. Henry James coins [the term] in his 1886 book The Bostonians, and the two characters he’s talking about are modeled on his sister and her partner. In Massachusetts we talk about gay marriage, and we’re the first state to legally have gay marriage in 2004, but more than 100 years earlier, women were cohabitating in their own form of marriage, which is just really fun and wonderful.

Today, we are home to the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, which is the oldest continuously operating trans advocacy organization in the country. It’s their twenty-fifth anniversary this year. They were founded to work on bills to protect the rights of trans people, because trans people are not included in that 1989 Gay Civil Rights Bill. So they continue doing work around advocacy, but also a lot of community support and other really wonderful things. That’s another example of a historic moment, but our history is still unfolding at the same time.

Q: How are you and the Queer History Boston staff reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States?

Ilacqua: Anniversaries are both important and difficult. They give us an opportunity to look back on what we’ve achieved, but also what we have not. Who we’ve left out of the progress. To celebrate the 250th, we decided to work on a podcast focusing on those questions of “Who gets the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Who is not included in that in-group that writes the Declaration of Independence?” We’re looking at people who we’re calling queer revolutionaries. We have folks from the Revolutionary War up through the gay liberation era, and some of the ways that they transgressed and progressed to gain rights for all of us in different ways.

Rather than us being like, “Yay, it’s the 250th,” it’s us being like, “All right, it’s the 250th, and this is an opportunity for us to look at what are we still working on 250 years later, and whose stories haven’t we elevated to talk about.” 

More information regarding the podcast can be found at queerhistoryboston.org. The show will be available in June on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast directories.