At 250 Years: LGBTQ People and the Unfinished American Story

July 4, 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the United States. Across the country, there will be celebrations, parades, speeches, fireworks, and patriotic displays. We will hear speeches from many about how “they,” meaning their direct ancestors, triumphed in “conquering and civilizing” this land.

Anniversaries like this one invite us to celebrate achievements. But they also should invite us to remember those whose stories were left out of the historical retellings.

LGBTQ+ people are not a recent addition to the story. We have always been here, loving, worshiping, creating families, and helping shape the communities around us, just like everyone else who has called this land home.

The challenge is that our stories have more often been forgotten, hidden, or erased, especially as later generations reinterpreted religious and cultural traditions in ways that obscured our presence. And that loss means the world has forgotten some fascinating folks who also deserve to be remembered.

Long before the United States existed, there was an incredible human named Thomas or Thomasin Hall living in colonial Virginia in the 1620s, Hall moved between what society understood as male and female roles. Hall wore different clothing at different times, performed different social roles, and refused to fit neatly into categories that colonial authorities considered fixed and unquestionable.

The local court became so unsettled by Hall’s existence that officials ultimately ordered Hall to wear a combination of men’s and women’s clothing at the same time all the time, a public declaration of difference intended to satisfy the colony’s demand for certainty. But four hundred years later, the questions raised by Hall’s life remain remarkably familiar.

Who gets to define another person’s identity? And what happens when a human being refuses to fit within them?

Here’s another story.

In 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed, a young Quaker named Jemima Wilkinson experienced a severe illness and later announced that the person known as Jemima had died. From that point forward, this individual insisted on being known only as the Public Universal Friend. The Friend rejected gendered titles and gendered language, traveled throughout the new nation preaching and gathering followers, and they eventually established a religious community in western New York.

The Friend’s life stands as one of the clearest examples of a gender-expansive religious leader in the Revolutionary era. While a new nation was arguing and struggling whether to define freedom for all or based on racial categories, the Friend was already challenging assumptions about identity, authority, and belonging and found a place to thrive. There were many others like Universal Friend.

Couples likeCharity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, who met in Vermont in 1807 and began a life together that would last more than forty years. They shared a home, a business, finances, responsibilities, and a deep commitment to one another. Their relationship functioned like a marriage, and many neighbors appear to have accepted them as a household. They were respected members of their community and active in civic and religious life.

This LGBTQ history is not only a collection of stories of people living beyond gendered expectations, but stories of love and those who found acceptance by their communities even though their relationships or lives were unusual for their time.

These stories complicate the assumption that LGBTQ people have always existed entirely on the margins. The reality is more complex. There were moments and places where communities made room for people whose lives did not fit conventional expectations.

Again, we are not new to the story. We were just left out of the history books.

Yet, as we approach this 250th anniversary, many LGBTQ people find themselves living in a moment of profound uncertainty. Across the country, questions of who is allowed to belong once again dominate public life.

That reality makes this 250th celebration complicated for some LGBTQ+ people. How do we celebrate a nation that has often failed to live up to its own ideals?

Perhaps the answer is to tell the truth.

The United States was founded on aspirations of liberty and equality while permitting slavery and then Jim Crow, Indigenous dispossession and erasure of traditional societal and gender roles, and the exclusion of women from equal rights. The promise was real. The practice was incomplete.

The work of every generation has been to widen the circle.

LGBTQ people have farmed this nation’s fields, fought its wars, preached from its pulpits, taught its children, built its communities, and dreamed its dreams.

The lives our LGBTQ ancestors lived are not footnotes. They are history.

As we mark 250 years, the most important question is not whether LGBTQ people belong in the story. The question before us now is whether the United States is willing to remember the fullness of its own story and whether, at last, it is ready to become a nation where all of us belong and thrive.