September 18: Before We Could Google Ourselves, We Had to Find Each Other
🏳️🌈 THIS DAY IN LGBTQ+ HISTORY
Today, finding LGBTQ+ information can happen in seconds. Type a few words into a search bar and suddenly there are articles, books, organizations, videos, support groups and thousands of people discussing experiences that may look like your own. It is easy to forget that earlier generations didn't have that luxury. There was a time when simply finding honest information about homosexuality could be difficult, and even purchasing a book about gay life could feel like an act of courage. September 18 reminds us that LGBTQ+ visibility didn't begin with social media. Long before hashtags and search engines, people were using books, letters, organizations and personal connections to find one another.
One of the people connected directly to this history is Edward Sagarin, born September 18, 1913. Writing under the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory, Sagarin published The Homosexual in America in 1951. The book became an important early nonfiction discussion of gay life in the United States. At a time when homosexuality was routinely discussed through the language of crime, illness and immorality, Cory approached homosexual people as a social minority and argued against the discrimination they experienced. His work reached readers who rarely saw their lives discussed seriously outside medical studies, criminal reports or sensationalized newspaper coverage.
Think about what that meant in 1951. Stonewall was still eighteen years away. There was no Pride Month. There was no marriage equality. There were no LGBTQ+ sections on major streaming services, no queer TikTok, no YouTube creators discussing coming out and no phone capable of connecting someone instantly with millions of LGBTQ+ people around the world. Many people lived without knowing whether anyone around them shared their sexuality. For someone struggling privately with being gay, finding a book that acknowledged homosexual people as an actual community could change how that person understood themselves.
Sagarin took that idea even further. Using the response generated by his writing, he established the Cory Book Service, an early mail-order operation devoted to books dealing with homosexuality and related subjects. Readers could gain access to material that local bookstores might not carry or that they might have been too frightened to purchase publicly. In an era before the internet, something as simple as a mailing list could become a network. A book catalog could become a doorway into an entire world someone didn't know existed.
His legacy is also complicated, and that deserves to be acknowledged. Sagarin's later views did not always align with the increasingly liberation-focused direction of the gay-rights movement, and his positions evolved in ways that created tension with activists. LGBTQ+ history doesn't require us to turn every historical figure into a perfect hero. People can contribute something important and still hold views later generations challenge. Understanding that complexity gives us a more truthful history than pretending everyone who helped move the conversation forward agreed about where that movement should ultimately go.
What remains significant is the larger idea represented by his early work: information creates connection. Once people discover that others share their experiences, isolation becomes harder to maintain. Once people begin communicating, community becomes possible. And once a community realizes it is a community, organizing becomes possible.
That lesson becomes even more important when we look at Black LGBTQ+ history. Black queer people often had to search for community within spaces that didn't fully understand every part of their identity. Mainstream LGBTQ+ organizations could reproduce racism, while Black institutions could carry homophobia and rigid expectations surrounding gender and sexuality. Black LGBTQ+ people responded by building their own networks, organizations, archives, literature and cultural spaces.
Black queer writers and thinkers became especially important because the written word gave people a way to see experiences that mainstream publishing often ignored. James Baldwin wrote openly and powerfully about sexuality, race, love, masculinity and belonging. Audre Lorde, who described herself as a Black lesbian mother warrior poet, insisted that none of those identities should be separated from the others. Essex Hemphill wrote directly about the experiences of Black gay men, including sexuality, racism, masculinity, family and AIDS. Barbara Smith helped create Black feminist and lesbian political thought that challenged movements unwilling to recognize how race, gender, class and sexuality operated together. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture emphasizes that LGBTQ+ and same-gender-loving African Americans have helped shape American history and that Black communities have always included a wide range of identities and experiences.
Their writing did more than produce literature.
It told Black LGBTQ+ people: You exist. Your experiences are real. Your story belongs somewhere.
That is why preserving Black LGBTQ+ history is so important. If we only look for Black people in Black-history books and LGBTQ+ people in LGBTQ-history books, people living at the intersection can disappear between the chapters. Black queer people were present during the Harlem Renaissance, the civil-rights movement, gay liberation, lesbian feminism, the AIDS crisis and the continuing struggle for LGBTQ+ equality. The National Museum of African American History and Culture notes that Black queer artists and intellectuals were influential contributors to the Harlem Renaissance even though many had to navigate an era in which openly expressing sexuality or gender difference carried serious consequences.
September 18 also carries another meaning that deserves recognition. It is observed as National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day, drawing attention to HIV prevention, treatment and care among older adults and to the experiences of people aging with HIV.
For LGBTQ+ history, that subject is especially powerful.
There are older LGBTQ+ people alive today who remember a completely different America. Some remember when homosexuality was still officially classified as a mental disorder. Some remember police raids on gay establishments. Some remember hiding relationships from employers and family members. Some survived the AIDS epidemic while watching friends, partners and entire social circles disappear. Some fought for rights that younger LGBTQ+ people were born already having.
Growing older as an LGBTQ+ person can therefore represent something deeper than age.
For some people, aging is evidence of survival.
That is particularly meaningful when discussing HIV/AIDS. During the worst years of the epidemic, many gay and bisexual men and transgender people watched members of their generation die extraordinarily young. Black communities were also deeply affected by HIV/AIDS, and racial disparities in healthcare, testing, prevention and treatment became another part of the epidemic's history.
The people who survived carried those memories forward.
They remember hospital rooms.
They remember funerals.
They remember discrimination.
They remember activists demanding that governments and pharmaceutical companies respond.
They remember when an HIV diagnosis could feel like a death sentence.
And many lived long enough to witness medical advances transform HIV into a manageable chronic condition for people with access to effective treatment.
That history deserves respect.
Our LGBTQ+ elders are not simply older members of the community. They are living archives.
They remember what the books don't always capture. They remember the bars that no longer exist, the people whose photographs never made it into museums, the organizations that operated from somebody's apartment, the lovers who couldn't legally marry, the chosen families that cared for one another and the people who died before they had the opportunity to see how much the world would eventually change.
September 18 therefore connects two ideas that may initially seem unrelated: finding our history and preserving the people who lived it.
Edward Sagarin's early work represents a generation searching for information about homosexuality when that information was difficult to obtain. Black LGBTQ+ writers and organizers demonstrate what happens when marginalized people decide to document their own experiences rather than waiting for someone else to do it. National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day reminds us that some of the people who lived through those earlier chapters are still here.
We should listen to them.
We should document them.
We should honor them while they can still hear us say their names.
Because LGBTQ+ history isn't only something sitting inside an archive.
Sometimes history is sitting across the table from you.
Before Google, WE SEARCHED FOR EACH OTHER.
Before social media, WE CREATED NETWORKS.
Before mainstream publishers regularly told our stories, WE WROTE OUR OWN.
Before Black LGBTQ+ history received the recognition it deserved, BLACK QUEER PEOPLE WERE ALREADY CREATING CULTURE, BUILDING COMMUNITY AND DOCUMENTING OUR LIVES.
And during one of the darkest periods in LGBTQ+ history, when HIV/AIDS took far too many people from us, SOME SURVIVED TO TELL THE STORY.
September 18 reminds us that finding our history is important.
Preserving it is even more important.
🏳️🌈 Read the history. Honor our elders. Remember those we lost. Celebrate those still here. Preserve Black LGBTQ+ stories. Keep telling the truth.
I AM ME INC.
This Day in LGBTQ+ History is presented by I Am Me Inc. as part of our commitment to informing, empowering, connecting and celebrating LGBTQ+ people and our Allies.
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Our History. Our Voices. Our Legacy.
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