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The Public Historian, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 96–109 (November XXXXXXXXXXISSN: XXXXXXXXXX,
electronic ISSN XXXXXXXXXX.
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eprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10/1525/tph XXXXXXXXXX.
96
Thanks to Sarah Chinn, Amanda French, Jonathan Katz, Peter Wosh, and the three anonymous
eviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Report from the Field
OutHistory.org:
An Experiment in LGBTQ
Community History-Making
Lauren Jae Gutterman
AA
sstt
aacctt: This article describes OutHistory.org, the public Web site on lesbian, gay, bi-
sexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) history hosted by the Center for Lesbian and
Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. OutHistory
.org uses MediaWiki software to compile community-created histories of LGBTQ life in
the U.S. and make the insights of LGBTQ history
oadly accessible. Project Coordinato
Lauren Gutterman explains how the public history project employs digital history to col-
lect, advance, and project LGBTQ history, and how it serves as a model for other inter -
active history Web sites.
KKeeyy wwoo
ddss:: digital history, public history, LGBTQ history, homosexuality, MediaWiki
In their 1994 study of the way we understand and make use of the past,
Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen found that gay Americans have an in-
creasing desire to learn about their history. These Americans see history as
capable of teaching them not only about themselves, but also about the po-
tential for political transformation. Studying the struggle for gay liberation can,
as one of Rosenzweig and Thelen’s survey respondents explained, demonstrate
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1. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in
American Life (New York: Columbia University, 1998), 120.
2. Mike Wallace discusses the problems museums face in securing funding for exhibits on
homosexuality among other “taboo” topics in “Museums and Controversy” in his book, Mickey
Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1996), 116–29.
3. This basic biographical information is available in the biographical note in the finding aid
of the Jonathan Ned Katz Papers at the New York Public Li
ary. Katz’s unpublished plays on
OUTHISTORY.ORG � 97
“the power of change and progressive thinking.”1 At a time when the gay past
is typically ignored in public schools and neglected in major museums, the
Internet can serve as a crucial public source of this history.2 OutHistory.org,
a freely accessible Web site concerning lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and
queer (LGBTQ) U.S. history, is attempting to do just that.
Using MediaWiki software, OutHistory.org is a combination online ency-
clopedia, museum, and archive to which any user can contribute. The site fea-
tures both collaboratively created, continually evolving articles—like those on
Wikipedia—and completed exhibits created by scholars, students, activists,
archivists, and others. The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the
City University of New York, Graduate Center, the nation’s first university-
ased research center devoted to LGBTQ Studies, hosts the site. In this ar-
ticle I describe how this Web site
ings together the fields of LGBTQ history,
digital history, and public history and how it compares to similar projects. Out-
History.org can serve as a model for other interactive history Web sites, what-
ever their focus, and in the second part of this article I chart OutHistory.org’s
development so that other public historians can learn from its challenges and
successes.
At the Intersection: LGBTQ History, Digital History,
and Public History
Independent scholar and pioneering gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz
founded OutHistory.org in 2003. Katz was one of the first researchers to in-
sist that homosexuality had a history, and he did so without the accreditation
and institutional support afforded to scholars within academia. In the early
1970s, Katz was working as a textile designer in New York City while writing
ooks and plays on African American history—an interest his father, a noted
jazz expert, had helped inspire. While coming to terms with his sexual orien-
tation and getting involved in the gay liberation movement, Katz became in-
terested in the history of homosexuality. Sti
ed by historian Martin Duber-
man’s documentary play In White America, Katz wrote Coming Out! an
agitprop theatre piece composed of historical documents, which the Gay Ac-
tivists Alliance first staged in 1972. The attention the play garnered helped
Katz secure a contract for Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in
the U.S.A., published in 1976.3
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African American history include Inquest at Christiana and The Dispute over the Ownership of
Anthony Burns. For his books on African American history, see Bernard and Jonathan Katz,Black
Woman: A Fictionalized Biography of Lucy Te
y Prince (New York: Pantheon, 1973); and
Jonathan Katz, Resistance at Christiana: The Fugitive Slave Rebellion, Christiana, Pennsylvania,
1851 (New York: Crowell, 1974); and Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.
(New York: Crowell, 1976).
4. Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York: Harper &
Row, c. 1983); Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995);
Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, XXXXXXXXXXFor a these and other early LGBTQ community history efforts, see Lisa
Duggan, “History’s Gay Ghetto: The Contradictions of Growth in Lesbian and Gay History,” in
Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig, The Presence of the Past: Essays on
History and the Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 281–90.
5. The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History, http:
www.clgbthis-
tory.org (accessed January 19, 2010); Society of American Archivists Lesbian and Gay Round-
table, Lavender Legacies Guide, http:
www.archivists.org/saagroups/ laga
guide/index.html (ac-
cessed January 19, 2010).
6. Foucault was the first to identify such a shift. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexu-
ality, vol. I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
98 � THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN
Like other social historians and proponents of public history in the 1970s
and 1980s, Katz aimed to expand history’s scope to include the lives of op-
pressed people, to democratize the practice of history, and to use the past as
a tool in mobilizing change. Katz was not the only activist concerned with pre-
serving and publicizing gay and lesbian history. Joan Nestle, Deborah Edel,
and others founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1975; in 1979 Allan
Bérubé began traveling to local gay community spaces across the country and
presenting a slideshow on women who lived as men in nineteenth-century
San Francisco. In many ways, OutHistory.org is a continuation of the project
Katz and other LGBTQ public historians began decades ago. The site en-
courages people to consider how understandings of sexuality are historically
specific,
ings sources about LGBTQ history to light, and empowers people
eyond the academic world to preserve and write history themselves.4
Since Katz published Gay American History, LGBTQ U.S. history has be-
come an accepted field of academic study. In 1982 the American Historical
Association recognized the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans-
gender History (CLGBTH) as an official affiliate. The University of Chicago
Press began publishing the Journal of the History of Sexuality in 1990, and
three years later the Journal of American History created new subject cate-
gories to highlight recent articles and dissertations on sexuality and gay and
lesbian history. Several university presses established publication series focused
on the study of sexuality, including LGBTQ history. The CLGBTH’s Web site
lists more than one hundred dissertations on the history of sexuality since 1978,
and The Society for American Archivists’ Gay and Lesbian Archives Round-
table has identified LGBTQ archives and collections in most U.S. states.5
Several key debates and themes have emerged over the past few decades
in the field of LGBTQ history. Much of the scholarship in the field has sought
to elucidate why and how modern gay and lesbian identities coalesced at the
turn of the twentieth century.6 While some historians have pointed to
oad
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7. For examples of these competing explanations, see George Chauncey, Gay New York:
Gender, U
an Culture and The Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940 (New York: Basic,
1994); John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexu-
ality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1983), 100–13; Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian
Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
8. For discussions of mid-twentieth-century gay activism, and the forces behind it, see Allan
Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New
York: The Free Press, 1990); John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making
of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians
in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Marcia Gallo, Different
Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement
(New York: Ca
oll & Graf Publishers, 2006).
9. For examples of u
an histories of LGBTQ life, see Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town:
A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);
Chauncey, GayNew York; Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L. A.: A History of Sexual
Outlaws, Power Politics, And Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Elizabeth
Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a
Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); Marc Stein, City of Brotherly and Sisterly
Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945—1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
OUTHISTORY.ORG � 99
social shifts such as industrialization and u
anization, others have highlighted
the actions of specific social actors, from elite sexologists to ordinary work-
ing-class men and women.7 Scholars have also examined the history of
LGBTQ political resistance. Although popular knowledge holds that the gay
ights movement began with the 1969 Stonewall riots, this struggle, in fact,
has a much longer history. Historians have shown that the homophile move-
ment of the 1950s and 1960s laid critical groundwork for 1970s gay libera-
tion, and even before mid-century, gender and sexual “deviants” developed
community networks, claimed public space, asserted their rights, and con-
tested ideas that they were abnormal or “sick.”8 Some of the earliest works in
this field took on a national scope, but many historians have since focused on
LGBTQ community-formation and resistance in particular U.S. cities, such
as New York, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.9
OutHistory.org is contributing to these and other important discussions in
LGBTQ history. The site includes documents from Katz’s out-of-print Gay
American History and Gay/Lesbian Almanac testifying to the existence of sex
etween men before the invention of homosexuality in the colonial period,
and women who passed as men before the contemporary conception of trans-
gender identity. Many Americans believe that homosexuals were invisible be-
fore the 1970s. Collector Marshall Weeks’ early-twentieth century postcards
featuring masculine women and feminine men, however, suggest otherwise.
The site provides abundant evidence of LGBTQ political organizing through
anthropologist C. Todd White’s exhibit about homophile groups in the 1950s
and 1960s, photographer Ron Schlittler’s exhibit on openly gay and lesbian
politicians, scanned copies of the Gay Liberation Front’s Come Out! maga-
zine, the Lesbian Herstory Archive’s collection of lesbian political buttons,
and an undergraduate-created exhibit on queer youth activism since World
War II. Although much of LGBTQ history centers around the lives of white,
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10. The Center for History and New Media, http:
chnm.gmu.edu/ (accessed January 19, 2010).
11. The National Council on Public History, http:
ncph.org/cms/?page_id=4 (accessed Jan-
uary 19, 2010).
100 � THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN
gay men and women, OutHistory.org’s content extends well beyond this pop-
ulation. For example, the site features New York Gender Rights Advocacy
chair Pauline Park’s article about the recent campaign for a transgender rights
law in New York City, as well as primary materials describing gender trans-
gression, same-sex sexual expression, and gay rights activism among Native
Americans.
As LGBTQ history gained legitimacy in the 1990s, so did the field of dig-
ital history