If you think about it, it’s kind of funny that almost everything we know about the personal lives of historical figures we learned by snooping in their letters and diaries. Without phones and email and DMs, the things that weren’t said out loud were only written down on paper and lucky for us, sometimes saved for posterity. 

Today on Pride, we’ll read some things that were written between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. There are some surprisingly suggestive letters between Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens,the diary entries of two women in Vermont in the early 1800s, and also a few pretty explicit letters from early frontiersmen. Best-selling author and LGBTQ+ historian Dr. Eric Cervini is with us again as we dive into part 3 of our series on The Queer History of the United States, which we originally aired in 2020.