Traditional Marxist historical materialism employs a material analysis that privileges how capitalism interacts with subject formation and has been used in recent historicizations of sexuality. This paper understands that line of analysis to be gendering, racializing, and pathologizing and examines LGBTQ history as a starting point to decenter capitalism from the analysis. Using Roderick Ferguson's "queer of color" critique, this paper maintains that more specifically, history should attend to the emergence of surplus populations which capitalism keeps hidden. Under the umbrella of queer of color critique, migration studies, transnational perspectives, and the destabilizing nature of queer theory all have the capacity to provide a fuller view of sexual difference and the histories of LGBTQ and other surplus populations. Furthermore, a legal framework provides an opportunity to take theory into practice by examining legislation with the analytical scope of queer of color and from an anti-capitalist vantage point.