On January 25, 1892, on a riverfront railroad track, in Memphis, Tennessee, Alice Mitchell slit the throat of Freda Ward. Mitchell explained: "I killed Freda because I loved her, and she refused to marry me." The murder and subsequent trial brought new, national attention to intense, passionate, romantic and sometimes sexual (and soured) intimacies between women. This feature includes reprints of two major scholarly analyses of Mitchell and Ward's intimacy, the murder, and its aftermath. It also reprints reports about an African American woman, Emma Williams, murdering another African American woman, Eleanor Richardson, in Mobile, Alabama. The papers compared this to Alice Mitchell's murder of Freda Ward.
Containing unique items from the personal collection of Rich Wilson, this exhibit focuses on 19th-century queer experience in the United States. Published originally on OutHistory in 2012.
Barbara Gittings interviewed by Jonathan Ned Katz in 1974 about her development as a Lesbian, and about the founding and early history of the New York Daughters of Bilitis.
This was originally published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which upheld the deportation of Clive Michael Boutilier, a Canadian citizen and U.S. permanent resident classified by the INS as “afflicted with psychopathic personality” based on his homosexuality. First published by OutHistory on May 22, 2017.
