In 1965 Drum magazine called it “the first sit-in of its kind in the history of the United States.” To honor the fiftieth anniversary of this major act of LGBT resistance, Marc Stein presented reports of the sit-in at Dewey’s restaurant in Center…
Larry Kramer's The American People, Volume I, Search for My Heart, A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) is a fictional meditation on history, especially on gay and lesbian history. Kramer and other activists founded the AIDS Coalition to…
An introduction to the 1937 case history of “Mary Jones,” who scholars have identified as African American actress Edna Thomas. First published on OutHistory in 2015.
A collection John Ibson's images of African American men with other men that appear in his 2002 book, Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography. First published on OutHistory in 2015.
An introduction to Gertrude "Ma" Rainey's resistance anthem. First published by OutHistory in 2014.
An exhibit about the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's surveillance of African American writer and activist James Baldwin in the 1960s and 1970s. First published on OutHistory in 2014.
An interview with a documentary filmmaker who received a National Endowement for the Humanities grant in support of the first full-length documentary feature on Lorraine Hansberry. The interview was conducted by a consulting humanities scholar on the…
The Las Vegas OutHistory project. This exhibit was a winner of OutHistory's 2010 Since Stonewall community history contest!
An exploration of the brief but significant life of African American educator Juliette Derricotte.
An exhibit on the often overlooked queer history of Newark, New Jersey, a history that is "tragic at times, but also bold, defiant, and resistant." First published on OutHistory in 2014.
A collection of biographies to celebrate Black History Month, first published on OutHistory on January 23, 2014.
Profiles of ten LGBT social justice activists by Rich Wilson. First published December 10, 2013. Last edited: May 28, 2017.
An exhibit on the queer intersectionality of African American writer Lorraine Hansberry, focusing on a 2013-2014 museum exhibit, an overview of Hansberry's life and work, and copies of Hansberry's correspondence with The Ladder.
Ruth Peter Worth, originally Ruth Wertheimer, was a Jewish Holocaust survivor, a U.S. immigrant, a lesbian, and a long-time home owner in Cherry Grove, Fire Island, New York. Published originally on OutHistory in 2011.
This proud moment in civil rights activism is also a moment to reflect on how LGBT civil rights strategies have overlapped with, drawn strength from, and patterned themselves on a century and a half of anti-racist struggle in the United States.
A collection of biographies written by the students in Catherine Jacquet's Fall 2012 class at the University of Illinois, Chicago. The class was titled "Gender Non-Conformity in Historical Perspective."
A project produced by thirty-three students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of their requirements for the advanced undergraduate seminar U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Histories. The project was…
FIERCE is a membership-based organization building the leadership and power of LGBTQ youth of color in New York City. Text by FIERCE, compiled by Andre Banks, Thomas J. Lax and Ellen Vaz. Photographs courtesy of FIERCE © 2010. All Rights Reserved.
A short story set in 1950s Greenwich Village about the love between two women--one white, one black--as observed by the white woman's daughter. Reprinted with the permission of Faith S. Holsaert. Copyright (c) 2003 by Faith S. Holsaert.
"Lesbians in the Twentieth Century" was created by Professor Esther Newton and the graduate and undergraduate students in the seminar on "Lesbian History" that she taught in fall of 2006 at the University of Michigan. Newton and…