This course will take students on the first part of an exciting journey through an alternative version of U.S. history, exploring the experiences and treatment of men who love men, women who love women, and people with unconventional sexual and gender identities, telling this story as it unfolded in the British colonies established in North America, through the revolutionary period, and in the United States over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into the early twenty-first century. The first part of this two course sequence begins in the colonial period and ends around 1900 as modern categories of sexuality and sexual orientation came into existence. We will examine the ways in which individuals who craved intimacy with members of the same sex understood and negotiated their desires in an often hostile world. And we will consider how Early America's remarkable diversity shaped this history of same-sex love and desire. (Same as WGSS 322.)