Almost four decades ago, theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identified an epistemological tension between what she characterized as ‘minoritizing’ tendencies where conceptualizations of sexuality are concerned, and ‘universalizing’ ones. For historians of sexuality, this insight has been enabling in several ways, including helping to clarify the stakes in longstanding debates between those who are committed to historicizing the emergence of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer consciousness, including transgender consciousness, and those who remain suspicious of identitarianism as such. This talk considers what other lessons Sedgwick’s work might still have to teach historians of gender and sexuality today, particularly at a moment when it feels as if minoritized subjects of all sorts are being scapegoated around the world by reactionary movements whose adherents would love nothing more than to have attention drawn away from their own festering insecurities, disappointment-fueled resentments, kinks (because we’ve all got them, even if they’re banal), and occasional (or frequent) lapses in judgement. In other words, how do we write the stories of history’s gendered and sexual “underdogs,” to borrow a term from Heather Love, without allowing everybody else, including all the “everybody elses” the underdogs regularly had sex with, to escape from view?