Sexual and Gender Minority History: A Counter-Narrative tells the story of sexual and gender minority people and communities in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is normally erased from the history that Americans learn. This story is presented as a counter-narrative, since it is history from the perspective of marginalized people. As a counter-narrative, the telling of this history serves to resist ongoing efforts to silence and disempower sexual and gender minorities.

This history begins in Germany, where sexual and gender minority identities originated and the first movement for sexual and gender minority rights flourished before it was brutally destroyed. The story then moves to the United States, where conservative European traditions were imposed on a land in which diverse expressions of gender and sexuality had flourished. The book describes how a variety of sexual and gender minority identities appeared among people who gradually formed communities in large cities across the United States, and how these developments occurred differentially across race, ethnicity, social class, and gender. Periods of development and greater freedom of expression were followed repeatedly by periods of political and social repression. The book also describes the increasing separation of sexual minorities from gender minorities, their progress toward equal rights, the limitations of that progress, and the longer road toward freedom travelled by gender minorities.