Contested Curriculum: LGBTQ History Goes to School Book Talk

Contested Curriculum navigates the rocky path to LGBTQ-inclusive K-12 history education in the United States and recounts the fight for a curriculum that recognizes the value of queer and trans lives. California’s landmark FAIR Education Act in 2011 ensures that LGBTQ history has a place in the K-12 classroom. Historian Don Romesburg, the lead scholar who worked with advocacy organizations to pass the act, recounts the decades-long struggle to integrate LGBTQ content into history education policy, textbooks, and classrooms. Looking at California and states that followed its lead, he assesses the challenges and opportunities presented by this new way of teaching history. Romesburg’s powerful case for LGBTQ-inclusive education is all the more urgent in this era of anti-gay book bans, regressive legislation, and attempts to diminish the vital role that inclusive and honest history education should play in a democratic nation.

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Author Bio:

Romesburg is the author of Contested Curriculum: LGBTQ History Goes to School (2025) and editor of the Routledge History of Queer America (2018). In addition to advocating for the FAIR Education Act, he helped usher LGBTQ content into California's 2016 K-12 History-Social Science Framework and subsequent textbooks. He now trains educators on implementation. For these efforts, he is the namesake of the LGBTQ+ History Association’s Don Romesburg Prize for K-12 Curriculum. Romesburg is also a co-founder of the GLBT Historical Society Museum in San Francisco and managing editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, which is housed at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford. He is a visiting joint professor in history and women’s, gender, and queer studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.