Event Recap: Queers In History at Powell's Books on Hawthorne

This post is authored by contributor, Teresa Bergen.  Ms. Bergen is the author of the novel Killing The President, and in addition to writing, transcribes and edits oral histories, paints animal portraits, makes costume devil horns, teaches yoga, and plays bass in an indie rock band.

How do you know if someone who’s been dead a hundred years was gay? Or how about two thousand years? This is what I hoped to learn by attending Keith Stern’s reading at Powell’s on Hawthorne.

A dozen folks gathered to hear about historical queers on a bleak Thursday night. Stern had enlisted two of his friends to assist from the audience. He proceeded to put on a sort of monologue about gays in history. It was kind of charming, and somewhat confusing, as he was playing himself and one other character who I guess was supposed to be a generic naysayer. His two friends contributed occasional lines from the script, mostly challenges to his statements, and additional suggestions of queer historical figures.

Stern was in the music biz in the 1970s, and opened a punk club in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1979. He moved to Hollywood at some point and has been building celebrity websites for the last decade. His obsession with historical queers began in the early nineties. He published an earlier version of this book on CD-ROM in 1991 or 1993, depending on if you believe his website or his talk. Now BenBella Books has released a printed version.

Stern wants to set the historical record straight. Wait, that’s the wrong word. He says historians have covered up the fact of homosexuality for too long. “Most people don’t want to believe it, and they’ll make up stories to explain it.” For example, he said historians claim that a young Abraham Lincoln lived with another man for four years – even sleeping in the same bed – because there was a bed shortage. “But there wasn’t a bed shortage in the White House,” he pointed out after describing Lincoln’s sleeping with his body guard whenever Mary Todd was away.

He also outed Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben, who trained Washington’s troops at Valley Forge; John Travolta; Emily Dickinson; Shakespeare; some ancient Egyptian manicurists; and quite a few others.

When asked by an audience member if Tom Cruise was in the book, Stern admitted to self censoring. People who have more expensive lawyers than he has, and who won’t hesitate to use them, can keep their privacy. But he has only gotten one complaint so far, from a man who was upset about seeing his father in the book.

Stern said he must have read at least one book on each of the 900 people he wrote about. But it wasn’t difficult to find his subjects. One led to another. “Once they knew I was doing this,” he said, “everybody in the world was calling, saying, ‘Do you know so and so was gay?’”