Public History and Queer History

Lara Kelland

Bio: Lara Kelland is an assistant professor of history and public history at the University
of Louisville, where she teaches and practices oral, public, and digital history. Her book,
“Clio’s Foot Soldiers: Twentieth-Century U.S. Social Movements and the Uses of
Collective Memory,” comparatively examines the uses of history by activists within the
Civil Rights, Black Power, Women’s, Gay Liberation, and American Indian Movements.
As a public history practitioner, she has worked on a variety of museum, archival, and
community-based projects.

Abstract: During the past half-century, queer public history has transformed from a
grassroots cultural form of movement activism to an widely accepted cultural and
intellectual practice that blends queer collective memory with the professional practices
of the larger field of public history. Beginning with cultural activism in the 1970s Gay
Liberation Movement, activists developed methods for queer public history. By the
1990s, these practices became institutionalized in LGBT organizations, and by the 2000s,
mainstream historical institutions began to engage LGBT history.

Public historians create projects that interpret the past outside of textbooks and

scholarly debates. Museum exhibits, walking tours, preserved historic buildings,

podcasts, websites, archival collections, and other curatorial efforts nurture collective

memory and provide various publics with an opportunity to engage with the past. Queer

public history has experienced a significant growth in the past few decades, but it first

emerged as a part of the cultural front of the Gay Liberation Movement. During the past

half-century, queer public history has transformed from a grassroots cultural form of

movement activism to an widely accepted cultural and intellectual practice that blends

queer collective memory with the professional practices of the larger field of public

history.

 The rise of queer public history is deeply interwoven with the emergence of

LGBTQ historical scholarship. Although most other twentieth-century social movements

used historical narratives and public history projects to build identity and justify political

demands, such cultural work usually enhanced or corrected existing scholarship. By

contrast, the LGBT liberation movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s nurtured

scholarly and popular history projects simultaneously, many of which became the

institutional homes for late twentieth- and twenty-first-century queer public history. Such

projects took varied forms, including travelling slide shows, community archives, and

other visual and aural projects. This work also often intertwined with new scholarship, a

fact which reflects the simultaneous development of queer public and academic history.

As language and identity labels have changed significantly during the past half-century, I

use “queer” and “LGBT” somewhat interchangeably here, although when possible I

reflect the language that activists used to describe their own work. In most cases, I use

“queer” as an umbrella term to indicate same-sex loving and gender-diverse history.

Beyond simple recognition of the longstanding existence of same-sex loving

practices, a public articulation of a collective past was especially integral to developing of

a shared identity that was based on visibility and resiliency. As many LGBT people had

been disowned by biological family and thus estranged from more traditional forms of

heritage, the need to craft a new lineage was fundamental to the movement’s success. By

asserting the endurance of same-sex loving and gender diverse practices and individuals,

activists (most of whom had recently came out of the closet and connected with other

queer people for the first time) developed historical narratives of success and happiness

 as well as celebrations of the legacy of resistance. This quest for origin stories, as

historian Jonathan Ned Katz declared in 1979, served as “an important contribution to our

current struggle to dispossess the professionals and repossess ourselves” while

simultaneously “finding spiritual nourishment in knowledge of our historical foremothers

and fathers.”1 Thus, queer public history needs to be understood as a cultural front of a

movement for social justice as well as an intervention into various public history

professions.

Like other popular history practices, queer public history practices varied across

place and changed over time. The homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s invoked

prior same-sex loving figures as a rudimentary step towards creating a public identity.

The Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian homophile organization active during the 1950s and

1960s, drew its name from a literary figure associated with the Greek poetess Sappho, an

act that laid claim to the classic era of human accomplishment while also underscoring

the literary focus of their monthly publication The Ladder. Though not explicitly offering

historical essays, Ladder articles often mentioned other classic female literary figures,

including references to their passionate relationships with other women. In one example,

reprints of Sappho's poems lamented "with grief that so much has been lost."2 This call to

the past reflected a push by gay men and lesbians to begin to claim well-known historic

figures as their ancestors. Such early approaches to gay and lesbian history stood in

contrast to the cohesive cultural and social history that LGBT scholars would begin

writing during the late 1970s. The Gay Liberation and lesbian feminist movements

shifted public history efforts away from reclamation of famous figures and towards the

 exploration of a populist and broad-based gay and lesbian (if rarely bisexual and

transgender-affirming) history.

Moving beyond articles in community newspapers and magazines, activists

identified an explicit need for popular education of movement members. In the mid-

1970s, activists and scholars, some working independently and others in community

organizations, developed a variety of queer memorial practices, including slide show

lectures, conferences, films, and other programming to bring the new scholarship to the

community. Many community historians developed their projects into books, videos, and

exhibits, while others organized community archives and developed more

institutionalized history projects. As a broader history began to emerge out of gay

liberation and lesbian feminist movements, LGBT public historians struggled over

whether community-based organizations or mainstream liberal institutions were the best

place to preserve the community’s historical assets. The outcome was development in

tandem, sometimes in tension and often in close relationship, of LGBT history in both

community and academic settings. The result was transformative: In less than two

decades, a few loosely affiliated movement intellectuals produced to a significant body of

knowledge and constellation of institutional homes in major cities across the country,

such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the ONE archives (originally the Jim Kepner

collection), the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, The History Project in Boston,

the Gerber Hart Library in Chicago, Canada Gay and Lesbian Archives in Toronto, and

others.

 Like many other social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Gay Liberation

activists sought to use revised historical narratives as the basis for new political identities.

Unlike other movements that had some scholarship (which was usually pathologizing or

absurdly negative) from which to react or refute, LGBT activists had to craft a new

history out of fragmented memories and closeted documents that had mostly been kept

from the scholarship records. To this end, a handful of academics and community

intellectuals gathered in a New York City apartment in March 1973 and found both

personal and intellectual kinship with one another, as well as a desire to change scholarly

and popular representations of LGBT experience. This informal meeting led to the

formation of the Gay Academic Union (GAU), a critical network during the early years

of LGBT collective-memory building. The first GAU activists met to address the fear,

hostility, and rejection they often experienced in the academy, as well as to begin

networking around LGBT scholarship, although their efforts and interests were not

confined by the walls of academe. Although this first incarnation of GAU was relatively

short-lived, it generated critically important social networks that came to be fundamental

for cultivating queer collective memory. Out of the GAU, several lesbian and gay

community-based history projects emerged, notably the Lesbian Herstory Archives in

1974 and The History Project in Boston in 1980.3

One of the oldest and most significant lesbian feminist history organizations in the

United States, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, formed out of GAU meetings in late 1973

or early 1974. Women members of the GAU who felt a need for a women-only space

formed a consciousness-raising group to address both a political need for self-

 determination and a cultural need for lesbian history and representation. As the group

focused its efforts more on the collective queer women’s past, its members began to pool

their personal collections and actively collect additional materials pertaining to women-

loving-women. For LHA collective members, the personal commitment to archival work

did not end with the donation and collection of materials. Many of these women

committed labor and leisure time to the project. Perhaps most notably, founding member

Joan Nestle cared for the entire archives in her Upper West Side apartment from 1974 to

1991. Born and raised in New York City by a single mother, Nestle came out as a “Fem”

in the late 1950s. Her experiences in the pre-Stonewall lesbian community grounded her

own sense of self, even as post-Stonewall lesbians began rejecting butch-fem labels and

expressions. In the early 1970s Nestle, unsettled that Lesbian Feminism dismissed the

significance of butch-fem community and experience, determined to incorporate the

earlier generation's experiences into the contemporary movement. During the years that

Nestle maintained the collection in her apartment, the holdings grew from a few boxes to

an archive filling several rooms of the apartment. Women from all over the world began

to travel to the archives, and Nestle and other volunteers welcomed them, offering

research support, camaraderie, and warm mugs of tea. This intimate space of the archives

echoed the ethos of lesbian feminism, as LHA members were committed to creating a

safe and personal space to preserve the community’s collective past.4

At the same time, local gay and lesbian history projects continued to emerge

across the country. In most instances, such endeavors came out of community researchers'

own work, like that of Greg Sprague and Allan Bérubé. Sprague, a Chicago-based

 graduate student in Education, got involved with the Gay Academic Union and began to

organize community history endeavors in Chicago during the mid-1970s. Sprague's

informal educational project, the Lavender University, led to the founding of the Chicago

Gay History Project, which would eventually become the basis for Gerber-Hart Library,

the LGBT library and archives in Chicago. Similarly, Bérubé, a college dropout turned

antiwar activist, similarly pursued research interests in gay history and co-founded the

Gay and Lesbian History Project in San Francisco. Both Bérubé and Sprague exemplified

the intellectually diverse backgrounds that underpinned the new community historian in

the LGBT movement, as neither were formally trained in history yet both were deeply

committed to community education and the development of historical organizations.

Similar efforts in Toronto led to the establishment of the Canadian Gay Archives just a

few months before the founding of the GAU. Canadian activists formed alliances with

their American counterparts in the GAU and other smaller community projects, and from

these cross-national partnerships emerged the Lesbian and Gay Researchers Network, a

professional organization that fostered dialogue around the challenges to and methods for

preserving lesbian and gay history.

From the beginning, many LGBT public historians were deeply concerned about

what sorts of control to impose over materials and collections. They expressed both a

desire to make materials accessible to their community members and a need to reclaim

intellectual control over their pasts from organizations that had closeted or pathologized

their histories. As LHA grew, members of the collective fiercely held to their

commitment of being a grassroots organization in the service of lesbians across the

 world. To this end, in a conversation with other lesbian and gay historians, Nestle

underscored the importance of keeping the archives entirely separate from a patriarchal

institution, insisting that lesbians “should be in control of our own materials, our own

history.”5 Similarly, LHA prohibited men from using the space and collections, a policy

that lasted well into the 1980s. LHA also maintained a strict commitment to a non-elite

atmosphere. While LGBT researchers often found themselves barred from established

institutional or academic archives due to a lack of institutional credentials, LHA upheld a

policy of accessibility for all lesbians, a commitment which led to exclusion of non-queer

women in addition to men.

Policies such as these produced archival spaces that functioned as much as

community centers it as repositories for historical materials. Book and slide show

researchers comingled with recent mastectomy survivors who came to look at erotic

images as a means of reclaiming sexuality. Throughout its organizational history,

collective members remained committed to the LHA as “a cultural institution which,

though it plays a dynamic role in the Lesbian community, is, at its core, a safe, nurturing

environment, a mixture of library and family album.”6 This commitment led to the

organization not simply serving as a historical resource for lesbians, but as a social and

political organizing space informed by the project of lesbian public history.

Although all agreed on the importance of making materials more broadly

available, LGBT public historians passionately debated one another over whether or not

their materials should be kept within the community or mainstreamed into liberal

institutions. Chicago GAU member Jim Monahan urged gay historians “to integrate the

 past into [mainstream] historical thinking.”7 Although Monahan recognized the

importance of early community-based public history work, he argued vehemently against

keeping such materials in separatist organizations, explaining that the “only separation

and faction this archival movement can tolerate is one that allocates tasks, and divides the

labor required to bring the gay archives into, and thereby creating, the major research

centers that hold them.” 8 While Monahan advocated for sensitivity and security for

LGBT historical materials, his main concern was the consolidation of gay materials into

one or a few centrally located repositories located within academic libraries.

In response, Joan Nestle came out against the removal of local and community

control of historical materials. The occasion gave Nestle the opportunity to put forth a

practic she termed radical archiving. Applied to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, radical

archiving called for not only community ownership, but also for community

responsibility for the archives. It included unfettered access of the archives to all lesbians

in a lesbian-housed noninstitutional space, LHA engagement in lesbian political

struggles, and egalitarian collection policies, community-based lesbian collection,

curation, and funding.9 For Nestle, the practices connected with maintenance of the

archives were woven into the daily fabric of the community, and as such were intertwined

with the political struggles and other needs of the community.

Part of the reason for mistrusting mainstream institutions was due to the closeting

practices of librarians and archival staff. Early efforts at finding archival sources for

same-sex loving experiences in the past proved to be daunting. Yet one of the first

researchers to undertake a sizeable gay community history research project, Jonathan Ned
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 Katz, remembered not a dearth of sources, but mainstream institutional barriers that

silenced love letters and buried other traces of queer history, a result of what historian

Michel Trouillot has called archival power. Tracking rumors proved to be a fruitful

method for Katz, who received leads from other movement activists at parties or during

informal chats about his work. Queer librarians and archivists, although often closeted

themselves, also proved quietly useful in the early days of Katz’ research, as they would

surreptitiously point him towards useful boxes. Early scholars and public historians

working on LGBT topics shared information with one another on both methods and

resources. Gregory Sprague corresponded with a variety of researchers regarding his

projects to “hit pay dirt” as he mined what he could from traditional repositories. Judith

Schwartz also corresponded with Jonathan Katz, alerting him to archival items in the FBI

files at the National Archives that documented numerous lesbians who had not yet been

written about. As Katz’ papers at the New York Public Library show, scholars doing

research for books, slide shows, films and community history courses wrote letters to one

another, passing hints back and forth regarding how to locate sources. These letters

illuminate the creative strategies necessary for LGBT historians working within an

archive organized by forms of knowledge that did not recognize nor document gay and

lesbian historical experiences.

To counteract these struggles and to lay the groundwork for future queer scholarly

and public history, LGBT activists and organizations engaged in the task of making

same-sex loving histories intelligible and accessible to all. For example, in April 1980,

the Boston Area Lesbian and Gay History project published A Beginning Handbook for

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 Researching Lesbian and Gay History in the Boston Area. This guide advised researchers

to employ a long, oftentimes offensive, list of terms in card catalogs and indices,

including amazon, berdache, convent, flash in the pan, houseboy, interior decorating,

lesbos, pederasty, social reform movement, spinster, suffragist, tribadism, uranian, and

the ever-useful vice. The handbook also republished a portion of the index from Jonathan

Ned Katz’s groundbreaking 1976 primary source book Gay American History, as well as

etymological entries on lesbian and gay.

Similarly, the Circle of Lesbian Indexers produced a voluminous index of lesbian

periodicals and subject thesaurus “to foster in our community a sense of continuity with

the lesbian past.”10 The index, a project of LHA collective members as well as author J.

R. Roberts and historian Claire Potter, served as a guide for researchers working on

lesbian topics. The index was divided into sections, including a file of authors and subject

entries; book reviews; lesbian writings; poems; and reproduced visual art. The 39-page

subject file offered an extensive annotated topical list, traversing topics as broad as the

Back to the Land Movement, Feminist Wiccans, Conformity in the Lesbian Community,

Plumbing Repair, Psychosurgery, Taxation and the Orange Juice Boycott. While each of

these initiatives had an impact on professional archival practices, their efforts also

underscored a commitment to creating a community historical culture in the movement,

where anyone might be inspired to undertake a new research project.

Throughout the development of queer public history, oral history interviews have

served as a vital source for historic information, as a tool for community building, and as

a memory practice that validated experiences and identities. Early oral history projects
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 like the Buffalo Women’s Oral History Project, which led to the book Boots of Leather,

Slippers of Gold, as well as projects like Alan Berube’s Coming Out Under Fire and the

1984 documentary Before Stonewall laid the groundwork for centrality of oral history

methods in queer public and scholarly history. For the past half-century, oral history has

provided source material that fills in the significant gaps in the more traditional archival

record. As queer public history has enjoyed unprecedented growth in the past two

decades, the methods of queer oral history have been honed by a new generation of

practitioners and researchers, as an edited volume by Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horcio

Roque Ramirez attests.

While activist-archivists worked to improve the collection of and access to raw

materials, movement historians also sought to return their research to the community in

the form of curated projects that supported the development of new political identities.

Out of this desire, they developed slide shows that were joyfully delivered and eagerly

received. As improvised community centers filled to capacity with cheering crowds,

young LGBT people coming of age during the 1970s and 1980s received an informal

education in their own histories. The community slide show format was a central early

medium through which to share findings. These events gave scholars an opportunity to

show visual materials like photographs, art, and book covers as they narrated LBGT

historical narratives to enthusiastic audiences. John D’Emilio recalled a giddy euphoria

sweeping over the audience as they watched images and listened to narration of a history

they had long craved. Scholars would often travel with their shows, booking a full tour of

LGBT gatherings and relying upon local organizers to turn out a full house, a task that

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 seemed to be anything but difficult in communities filled with those eager to learn more

of a past they could claim as their own.

Organizations such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives also embraced the slide

show format, in one instance sending “Archivette” Alexis Danzig out on a cross-country

motorcycle tour to promote the collections and share the stories of lesbian history. The

slide show format emerged rather organically for LHA. As archive volunteers sought out

opportunities to connect with the community, they also found travelling with archival

objects a challenging task. Slides gave the presentation an exciting visual focus and were

easily transported from one location to another. LHA representatives including Alexis

Danzig, Deborah Edel, and Joan Nestle traveled significant distances to present in

Toronto, Winston-Salem, NC, Louisville, KY, Santa Cruz, CA, Washington DC, and

around New York City and Upstate New York. Some slideshow screenings, such as the

one at the Women’s Studies Forum at SUNY Plattsburgh, complemented scholarly

discussions, while women’s bookstores organized others, sometimes as benefits for local

women’s groups.

Many community historians and LGBT history project activists utilized the

communicative power of the slide show. On a given Friday or Saturday night during the

mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, queer people in towns across the country could take in a

traveling slide show on an impressive array of same-sex loving and gender diverse topics.

Some focused on historical inquiries bounded by space and time, such as Lesbians and

Gay Men in Early San Francisco, 1849-1880; From the Gay and Lesbian Rights

Movement to the Holocaust, 1860-1935; and 100 Years of the Lesbian in Biography. In
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 other cases, slideshows reflected the growing transnationalism of the movement, covering

non-U.S. topics as broad as Mayan and Mexican Goddesses and Gay Germany. Topics

that echoed gynocentric themes flourished within the lesbian community, including The

Goddess and the Witch; The Mother Goddess and Lesbian Erotica by Women Artists.

Cultural history themes also proved popular, including What the Well-dressed Dyke Will

Wear--Dyke Fashion, 1900-present; Gay Science Fiction; and Lavender Letters: Lesbians

in Literature.

Documentary films that attended to the historical experiences of same-sex loving

folks such as Word is Out and Before Stonewall also blossomed during this period, further

generating interest in LGBT history. As the production of both fiction and nonfiction

queer film increased, communities began to organize film festivals across the country in

the 1970s and 1980s. Film historian Vito Russo began to show his research in public as a

filmography that featured same-sex attraction or gender-varient scenes from Hollywood

films. This work would ultimately be published as The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality

in the Movies (1981), but its origins as a public performance reflect the significance of

Vito’s work to queer public history. Other filmmakers like Barbara Hammer followed

suit, using archival clips as a kind of queer public history via cinema.

Although public history projects like slide shows, films, and exhibits continued to

be the focus of most community-based LGBT archivists and historians throughout the

1980s and into the 1990s, an imperative to mark the lost lives taken by the AIDS

epidemic emerged and took hold. In 1986, San Francisco based activist Cleve Jones

founded the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt as a physical manifestation of grief

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 and community rupture. Grieving friends and family from around the country began to

send in panels commemorating the deceased, and in 1987 the quilt was displayed for the

first time on the National Mall. As one scholar has noted, the quilt served “an alternative

site of memory for many who have been excluded from traditional means of mourning.”11

As other acts of LGBT memory had, the quilt was also deployed for movement building

purposes when activists toured it around the country in 1988. In addition to providing a

space for grief, the tour served an educational purpose, raising money for AIDS service

organizations and awareness about the epidemic. Thus, in the 1980s and 1990s, many

young LGBT folks who had heeded Harvey Milk’s rejoinder to come out to their families

of origin and found themselves isolated from traditional networks of support, used new

means of commemoration such as the quilt to mark loss, process grief, and rearticulate

their own meanings of family.

Over time, the quilt, which became the largest queer public history installation in

history and finally became too big to display in any one place, sought to remember the

deaths of many individuals as a collective loss, a gesture that functioned as both an

expression of grief and a demand for policy change. The quilt became a potent marker of

queer memory, but it also expanded its function, as it by nature of the disease extended

beyond LGBT identities. Although the disease was culturally marked as belonging to gay

men, the fact that the memorial reflected the indiscriminate nature of infection rendered it

a queer memorial that transcended simple identity categories. Beyond that shift, activists

involved with the quilt envisioned the project as explicitly and broadly public,

particularly using the quilt as a tool of education about the epidemic. Although certain

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 other projects like documentary films prior to this had sought to realize broad educational

potential, the quilt marks a definitive shift in queer public history towards a commitment

to reaching the widest possible audience.

LGBT academic and public history, borne out of private collections, rumors,

living room conversations, letters exchanged between friends, and informal networks,

changed remarkably during the 1970s and 1980s. Although LGBT history still has a

strong connection to community organizations like archives and libraries, by the

mid-1990s historical authorship had transitioned from primarily being located in

grassroots community projects and individual labors of love towards a highly

professionalized academic endeavor. As LGBT studies became a legitimate area of

research in the academy, the lines between community and scholarly history became

more clearly drawn. However, even as the field became more polarized between popular

and academic projects, collaborations between community groups and more traditional

scholars echoed the grassroots origins of the field. Initiatives like the Twin Cities Queer

Oral History Project and the expansion of outhistory.org promoted dialogue between

scholars and communities of memory exemplify both the collaborative ethos of early

queer history projects and the professional standards of public history that foreground

“shared authority” in the production of historical knowledge.

Similarly, as LGBT scholarly history enjoyed acceptance within the academy,

mainstream public history organizations began to express interest in representing same-

sex and gender-diverse historical experiences. Over time, the policy-oriented portions of

the LGBT movement enjoyed much success in redefining same-sex relationships as

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 normal loving human experiences, in significant part through the development of a

political identity premised on the historical achievements and survival of same-sex loving

individuals and communities. Some historians used their institutional affiliation and

professional clout to argue for policy-based interventions, such as those who participated

in producing the Amicus Brief for the landmark Lawrence vs. Texas. Acting as public

intellectuals, beyond the scope of public history practice, they deployed historical

arguments in support of federal policy revision. As the movement shifted away from

community educational efforts towards a larger social intervention, the terrain of LGBT

history shifted also from community-based organizations towards larger liberal

institutions, from public history initiatives to K-12 curricular projects.

Because LGBT politics had experienced significant gains in mainstream US

culture, by 2000s queer historical representations had become part of the broader national

narrative, making significant inroads into universities, museums, and other educational

and cultural institutions. Although there have been museum representations of LGBT

historical experience since the development of queer historical societies and archives, the

2000s brought about a new level of museumification of LGBT history, both within

mainstream and community-based cultural organizations. Short-term, interaction-oriented

exhibit practices emerged as an innovative method for reaching diverse audiences. In

2011, the Pop Up Museum of Queer History was founded in NYC, beginning as a one-

night event and then developing into a museum-without-walls model of curation and

interpretation. This model had precedence, as the LGBT Historical Society had developed

a collaborative curatorial project called “Making a Case for Community History.” This

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 initiative brought diverse communities contained within the LGBT identity into the space

of the museum and produced a series of touring exhibits. The popularity of these small

informal exhibits sparked a desire for a permanent gallery space, and in 2003 the society

moved to a new space, rooting the grassroots community history initiative in one of San

Francisco’s significant cultural institutions. The 1990s and 2000s witnessed many

LGBTQ historical organizations building new spaces, enhancing programming, and

increasing professional engagement with other cultural institutions, including Lesbian

Herstory Archive’s new home in Brooklyn in 1993, Chicago’s Leather Archives and

Museum in 1999, and the ONE Archive’s move to the University of Southern California

Campus in 2000,

At the same time, some mainstream museums began to engage with LGBT

historical topics to both build connections with queer communities and to tell stories to a

more mainstream audience. In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall

Uprising in 1994, The New York Public Library mounted the “Becoming Visible: The

Legacy of Stonewall” exhibit. Similarly, major museums like the Chicago History

Museum and the Minnesota Historical Society began to undertake major interpretive

projects and programming related to LGBT historical experience. Historic house

museums like Chicago’s Hull House Museum also began to experiment with interpreting

same-sex-loving experiences through methods such as exhibit labeling that promoted

dialogue about identity and history. Likewise, the 2011 opening of CHM’s Out in

Chicago was the first major exhibit on LGBT experience in a major history museum.

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 Other forms of queer public history have experienced significant development in

the past few decades. Digital history has provided new opportunities for the sharing and

cultivation of LGBT collective memory. Founded by Jonathan Ned Katz, the OutHistory

project is a model crowdsourcing archival project, gathering digitized documents and

images from around the world. Many mainstream archives have prioritized the

digitization of LGBT collections, including the New York Public Library and other mutli-

repository collaborations like LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 have greatly

enriched the number of resources available to online researchers. Public historians have

also been working to increase the designation of significant built environments and public

space. In 2014, the National Park Service announced a new initiative to identify historic

sites relevant to the LGBT past. This project is intended to provide historical context for

future nominations to the National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic

Landmarks program, as well as provide a survey of significant heritage sites across the

country. Beginning with a scholarly roundtable in 2014, the National Parks Service

initiative sparked a two year project of gathering information on site-based queer public

history, culminating in the 2016 publication of LGBTQ America: a Theme Study of

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History. The initiative signaled a federal

commitment to the preservation and interpretation of the queer past, and institutionalized

many grassroots projects attending to local queer historical experiences.

Activists seeking to change hearts and minds have long worked within cultural

forms to alter perspectives and attitudes, and those working within the LGBTQ

movement certainly took inspiration from other social movements regarding the power of

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 the past in building new political identities. By the 2010s, with the embracing of LGBT

history work within the larger public history profession via the National Park Service and

mainstream museums, the grassroots memory work cultivated by earlier activists had

comingled with the larger public history profession to integrate sexuality and LGBT

identity into the national narrative. Queer public history has provided the larger

movement with an important expression of precedence and perseverance, but it also

provides the larger public history profession with a model for engaged and accountable

politically-effective cultural work that seeks social justice and democratic cultural

representations.

Further Reading

Adair, Peter., Nancy. Adair, Andrew. Brown, Robert P. Epstein, Lucy Massie. Phenix,
Veronica. Selver, Mariposa Film Group, et al. 1992. Word Is Out. American independents;
American independents. New York, NY: New Yorker Video.

Bérubé, Alan, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World
War Two (New York: Free Press, 1992).

Bérubé, Alan, Lesbian Masquerade, slide show.

Boston Lesbian and Gay Archives, Our Boston Heritage, slide show.

Boyd, Nan Alamilla and Horacio Roque Ramirez, eds., Bodies of Evidence: The Practice
of Queer Oral History (New York: Oxford, 2012).

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 Circle of Lesbian Indexers. “The Lesbian Periodicals Index and Thesaurus of Subjects,”
3rd Edition, September, 1981, Circle of Lesbian Indexers Collection, 1, Lesbian Herstory
Archives (Brooklyn, NY); “Preserving our Words and Pictures," transcript of interview of
Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel by Beth Hodge, circa 1980. Topical Files, "Publicity"
Lesbian Herstory Archives (Brooklyn, NY).

Cowan, Liza, What the Well-dressed Dyke Will Wear--Dyke Fashion, slide show.

Ferentinos, Susan, Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites, (Roman
and Littlefield: Lanham, MD, 2015).

Freedman, Estelle and Liz Stevens, She Even Chewed Tobacco: Passing Women in
Nineteenth Century America, slide show.

Katz, Jonathan Ned. Coming Out! A Documentary Play

Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. New
York: Crowell, 1976.

Katz, Jonathan Ned, Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public
Library.

Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: A
History of a Lesbian Community. (New York; Routledge, 1993).

Morris, Charles E. III, “My Old Kentucky Homo: Lincoln and the Politics of Queer
Public Memory,” in Kendall R Phillips, ed. Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama, 2004).

Schiller, Greta., Robert Rosenberg, John. Scagliotti, Rita Mae. Brown, and Media
Network (U.S.). 1989. Before Stonewall : The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community.
MPI Home Video.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
(Boston, MA: Beacon, 1995).

1 Jonathan Ned Katz, “Why Gay History?” Body Politic 55 (August 1979), 19-20.
2 "Sappho of Lesbos," The Ladder, December 1, 1958, 12.

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 3 For more on the history of LGBT organizations generally, see, in this volume, Marcia

M. Gallo, “Organizations.”
4 For more on the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the history and subject of queer

archives, see, in this volume, Kate Eichhorn, “Queer Archives: From Collections to

Conceptual Framework.”
5 “Gay History Meeting at Jonathan Ned Katz’s apt. in Greenwich Village, January 28,

1978. Jonathan Ned Katz Papers, 41, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Humanities and

Social Sciences Library, New York Public Library (New York, NY).
6 Deb Edel, “Building Cultural Memories: The Work of the Lesbian Herstory Archives,"

Ginny Vida, ed., Our Right to Love: a Lesbian Resource Book (New York: Prentice Hall,

1978), 270.
7 “Considerations in the Organizations of Gay Archives,” Jim Monahan, Gay Insurgent 5,

(1978).
8 Ibid.
9 Maxine Wolfe, “The Lesbian Herstory Archives: A Passionate and Political Act,”

Maxine Wolfe Papers, 1: “1995,," Lesbian Herstory Archives (Brooklyn, NY).

Gay History Project Records, 1:10, GLBT Historical Society (San Francisco, CA).
11 Christopher Capozzola, “A Very American Epidemic: Memory Politics and Identity

Politics in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1985-1993,” Radical History Review 82 (2002) 95.

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