In 1995, Kelli Peterson started a gay and straight club at her high school in Salt Lake City. The story of her ensuing battle with school authorities is interwoven with excerpts from the diary of 17th-century Puritan cleric Michael Wigglesworth, the 30-year love affair between Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Adams Fields, Henry Gerber’s post-World War I effort to establish a gay rights organization, Bayard Rustin’s role in the civil rights movement, and Barbara Gittings’ opposition to the American Psychiatric Association’s view of homosexuality as an illness. One person comments, “To create a place for ourselves in the present, we must find ourselves in the past.
