I realize it can feel like a radical act to recover "queer" people from history but that act can also be one of erasure if you project back onto the past words and concepts we use to describe gender variant and same-sex attracted people today; words like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and, yes, queer. It erases the lived complexity of gender and sexual behavior in prior times and places. And sometimes those times/places organized sex and gender into systems of thought and behavior that don't look anything like ours. Imposing our way of thinking on the past can therefore be an act of violence, not one of liberation. We can recover our antecedents and ancestors without imposing contemporary terms and constructs onto their lives.