2025 marks the 32nd anniversary of Queers in History, first released in 1993 on diskettes and later on CD-ROMs as the first widely available “new media” title in bookstores. Constantly updated, it was republished 16 years later in 2009 as a trade paperback, marking the beginning of an era when many public figures began coming out, making it difficult to keep up with new entries.

Now, another 16 years later, this revised edition expands further with new people, updates, and a continued focus on a historical timeline spanning 5,000 years. Trans people have been in-cluded since the start, though earlier editions had omissions this update aims to address. The hardcover has outgrown the bounds of a single volume and must now be split in two parts (A–K and L–Z) by last name. This format will be easier for readers to handle.

One of the original intentions for Queers in History was that it should eventually become unnecessary. The hope was that the value of the contributions queer people have made and continue to make to society would become widely known and accepted. In the years following publication of the paperback, that seemed to be happening.

In 2025, however, we see governments erasing words like “trans,” “non-binary,” “gender” and “pronoun” from publications, websites, libraries, archives, scientific studies, schools and even the signage of national monuments like The Stonewall Inn. In the US, Executive Orders mandate dropping the “T” from LGBT+ (as if they didn’t exist) and promulgate the easily-disproved fiction that people are born and remain as one of only two pure genders. The “B” is next to go and eventually “L” and “G” too. It looks like there may be as much need for this book and more like it, as ever there was.