This piece was originally posted to the UC Davis College of Letters and Science Magazine

Geraldine Portica might have known the risks every day when she wore a dress. In a 1917 portrait, she wears a dress and a wide-brimmed hat. She stands with one hand on her hip as her other hand extends the loose fabric of her skirt as if to show its cut.

A handwritten note on the photo's bottom margin explains that she had lived her whole life as female since her birth in Mexico.

That year, San Francisco police identified Portica as male and charged her under the city’s anti-cross-dressing law passed in 1863. Government officials then used a 1907 federal immigration law against “moral turpitude” to deport her.

Geraldine Portica
Photo from the Jesse Brown Cook Scrapbooks Documenting San Francisco History and Law Enforcement. UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library.

When Olive Garrison, a high school history teacher in Bakersfield, shares Portica’s story in class, students are shocked to learn about laws dictating what a person could wear based on their gender.

“The lessons led us to talk about gender and what it means when you don't fit into those boxes in history and what it means today, because what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman changes all the time,” said Garrison, a 2024 California Teachers Association Human Rights Award winner.

Stories like Portica’s from LGBTQ+ history are required by California law to be part of every history and social science class in the state's public schools. However, when that law passed in 2012 those materials didn’t exist. 

Garrison is among the leading teachers and scholars that partnered with the UC Davis California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP) to create a LGBTQ+ curriculum that connect all students to a richer history of California and the nation. Today, these materials are part of every history and social science class in the state.

“Our goal as teachers is to get students to understand the diversity of the human experience and the ways in which someone's identity is shaped off of a whole host of factors,” said Beth Slutsky, a historian and deputy director of CHSSP.

New California law, no materials to meet it

In 2012, the California legislature passed the SB 48 FAIR Education Act, which mandated a much more complete representation of everyone who contributed to the state’s and nation’s histories. This includes people of different ethnicities and cultures, people with disabilities and people in the LGBTQ+ community. 

“There was this mandate from the state that we need to tell the stories of all Californians, but the curriculum for LGBTQ+ history hadn't been created,” said Wendy Rouse, a professor of history and teacher training at San José State University. 

Rouse knew about the need for materials teaching LGBTQ+ history. Even as a Ph.D. student in history at UC Davis, she encountered little scholarship on the topic. As a professor at San José State, she scoured for references to primary sources. She searched through newspaper articles, photographs and any other documents from the period.

“History is asking questions about why things happened the way that they did and looking at an endless number of sources to help us understand why people made the choices that they did in the past,” said Slutsky.

CHSSP, headquartered in the Department of History in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, is part of a statewide network of California Subject Matter Projects (CSMP) administered by the University of California Office of the President. They bring the latest scholarship by leading historians to classrooms in forms that students in all grades can understand.

When CHSSP was designated lead author of the guidance that would integrate LGBTQ+ curriculum to meet this requirement, Rouse, who had worked for CHSSP as a graduate student, joined the effort.

Accurate language in the classroom

Studying history highlights how the language people use to describe themselves and others has always changed over time and continue to evolve. 

Garrison explained that LGBTQ+ — an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and more — are words for identities that weren’t always defined or named. 

People in the 1800s or early 1900s may have dressed differently than expected based on their gender. They might have loved in many different ways. But even if they did, it still might not be historically accurate to apply modern day identities to people in periods when those identifying words weren’t in use. 

Rouse thought the photograph of Portica dressed in women’s clothing and the larger story of her arrest and deportation was compelling. Portica chose she/her pronouns. It’s possible that today she might identify as a trans woman, and that’s how society would label her, but Rouse doesn’t know that for a fact.

The term “queer,” the “Q” in LGBTQ+, doesn’t necessarily refer to a person’s gender or who and how they choose to love. Instead, it describes a person who breaks their society’s cultural norms about how men and women are expected to dress and act.

“It's a rejection of what's normal rather than a specific identity,” said Garrison.

Primary sources on histories nearly forgotten

One of the biggest challenges poised to the CHSSP was finding primary sources accessible to students in middle school and below. 

“The priority in elementary school is having students understand their communities, and their communities are made-up of lots of different people,” said Slutsky, who earned her Ph.D. in history from UC Davis and was the lead writer for the U.S. history curriculum. “It's just giving them a sense of who is in their world.” 

Slutsky included scholarship on Native American communities with a history of Two Spirit people. She included the California stagecoach driver Charley Parkhurst, who lived as a man until it was discovered after his death that he had been born female.

We’wha weaving on a loom, circa 1871-1907
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/523797 John K. Hillers, photographer, Record Group 106: Records of the Smithsonian Institution, 1871-1952, Series: Photographic Negatives of Native American Delegations and Archeology of the Southwestern United States, National Archives and Records Administration

When older students learn about the Red Scare, a period of paranoia about an internal Communist threat during the 1950s, they can also learn about the Lavender Scare during that same period that would cost gay men and women their government jobs. This history of government firing based on self-expression continues to resonate today.

However, teaching LGBTQ+ history involves a lot more than focusing only on oppressive laws or tragedies. It also includes heroism and even joy. In a recent blog post for CHSSP, Rouse wrote about We’wha, a Zuni potter and weaver who lived in New Mexico and Albert Eugene De Forest, a prominent actor in the Bay Area.

“These are very dark times for LGBTQ+ people,” said Rouse. “There are oppressive times throughout history that we as a community have gone through, but examples of queer joy allow us to see ourselves as part of a long history of queer people who have lived joyful and loving lives.”

Students have mentioned to Garrison they were the first teacher to ever talk about gay people in the classroom. For Garrison, teaching LGBTQ+ history is a reminder that queer people have histories and that those histories are important. This is especially true for students who identify as LGBTQ+ but who might not know personally anyone else who does. 

“You might not have queer people to tell you about your history and your culture,” they said.

Bringing LGBTQ+ curriculum to California classrooms

Slutsky worked with about 100 different historians statewide across all topics in that area. In 2016, the entire curriculum was part of public hearings and comment. All together, the comments totaled about 12,000. Slutsky responded to every single one and worked with the California Department of Education to explain the team’s recommendations before the curriculum’s full adoption.

“It was a deeply democratic process,” said Slutsky. “People care very deeply about what their children learn in schools.”

Letter from Esther Herbert to Marvyl Doyle, April 7, 1944

Garrison, who had been teaching LGBTQ+ history for years on their own, shifted over to building lessons from CHSSP materials. Today those lessons are available to every teacher in their school district. 

“They’re really professional materials,” said Garrison. “I have a legitimate argument for why that work was necessary and important. It’s done a lot for my district.”

Because teachers seldom have time to add complete lessons to their classes, Rouse liked the idea of offering different types of documents with brief overviews so teachers could add them to what they’re already covering. For example, if a lesson covers World War II, a class might read letters soldiers sent back home to loved ones, including from queer soldiers. 

“Teachers were mostly just grateful to have these sources and to be able to tell this history and to have the language to be able to talk about it too,” said Rouse.

Reflecting every student’s history

Rouse thinks about teaching history as a way of creating mirrors and windows. 

The mirror is showing people their own history through the stories of people who lived like they do. The window is sharing the history of people who are different, which might lead to more empathy for others. 

Building a bridge between the two creates a better understanding of everyone who shares society today.

“Some people might say it's really important for LGBTQ+ kids to see themselves in the past,” said Rouse. “I think it's even more important for non-LGBTQ+ kids to see that LGBTQ+ people have always existed.”

Many of Garrison’s students who do not identify as gender non-conforming or transgender saw themselves in figures like Portica and others. Portica was arrested for wearing a dress, but students today wear pants regardless of their gender.

“As a trans, non-binary person, I finally get to show them someone like me in history,” said Garrison. “What I guess was kind of ironic for me is that in fact so many people see themselves in this trans person from the past.”

See CHSSP LGBTQ+ classroom materials.