Before Illegality: Queer Families & the Law in the United States, 1830–1918

Legal historian Brianne Felscher delivers the 2025 Dovi Afesi Lecture focusing on how queer individuals and families navigated legal institutions in the United States before World War I. Felscher’s research challenges assumptions that queer families were inconceivable or illegal in the 19th and early 20th centuries and reveals the creative legal strategies queer people used to form, maintain and dissolve relationships. Drawing from extensive legal and archival research, Felscher reveals how queer families were often acknowledged by spouses, children, communities and even legal institutions—complicating dominant narratives of exclusion and erasure.
Brianne Felscher is a Ph.D. candidate in jurisprudence and social policy at University of California–Berkeley and a recent graduate of Berkeley School of Law (J.D. 2023). They live outside of Indianapolis with their partner. This summer, Brianne will join the GCC to teach queer history. In collaboration with GCC adjunct instructor member Shay Olmstead, Felscher recently co-authored an article for the L.A. Times titled “To Protect Transgender Rights, We Must Look to the Past.”
The Dovi Afesi Lecture Series was created in memory of a beloved GCC history faculty member who passed away in 2016. Afesi was born in Ghana in western Africa and studied at Clark University and Michigan State University. He taught at UMass Amherst for several years before he began teaching at GCC in 2000. Passionate about promoting racial justice, Afesi made a lasting impact on the GCC community.
Free and open to the public.