In the 1970s, I launched a campaign to end LGBT invisibility on television. Years later, that mission to show the public who we were expanded to another arena we’d long been written out of: American History. Just as television producers ignored us, so too had historians. Sadly, such erasure is happening again today, this time because of both the glaring absence and defamatory framing of LGBT people in Ken Burns’ new PBS documentary “The American Revolution.” How can LGBT people be both omitted and defamed in the documentary? Simple: the use of age-old stereotypes.
