The Interview
Queer Pasts, published by Alexander Street, is a digital history platform founded in 2020. Coedited by Lisa Arellano and Marc Stein, the project describes itself as “a collection of primary source exhibits for students and scholars of queer history and culture.” According to its publisher, “The database uses ‘queer’ in its broadest and most inclusive sense, embracing LGBT topics as well as other sexual and gender formations that are queer. It prioritizes under-represented histories and encourages critical reflections on the archives used and materials presented.” So far, Queer Pasts has published 18 projects, all of which have been peer-reviewed by scholars in the field. According to the publisher, “Each project includes 10-40 primary source documents; whenever possible, they are available in both transcribed (searchable) and original form. Every exhibit also includes a critical introductory essay that helps explain the significance of the primary sources in historical terms and in relationship to previous scholarship…. We are also especially interested in archives themselves and the ways in which they are constructed, constrained, and contested. In naming the project, we intend to invoke the idea that the past itself is queer—simultaneously comprehensible and inscrutable.”
This OutHistory exhibit features archivist and novelist Isaac Fellman’s 2025 interview with Arellano and Stein, along with a set of project abstracts from the first volume (2020-2025). Most people access Queer Pasts via library subscriptions; trial subscriptions also are available.
Isaac: Although Queer Pasts (QP) was inspired by the Women and Social Movements (WASM) database project, its scholarly form is pretty unique. It’s a little bit journal article, a little bit online exhibit, a little bit lecture with slides. Most of it all, it reminds me of a format whose heyday should have been longer: the informative CD-ROMs of the 1990s, back when “interactive” was the buzzword. How would you describe the genre of Queer Pasts? What are its antecedents?
Marc: I’m happy to hop on the nostalgia train for the 1990s, my first fully queer decade! I see the QP genre as a variant of older forms of historical presentation. The idea of sharing interpretive work by historians alongside associated primary sources isn’t super-new. Lots of college and university history textbooks have long offered that, though in those cases the balance typically favors the interpretive work by historians (picture an insert featuring the Gettysburg Address in the Civil War chapter of a U.S. history textbook). There also are book series with individual volumes that feature an introductory essay by a historian and an associated set of primary sources. One of the best known is the Bedford Series in History & Culture. I’ve often taught with those, which help college and university teachers work with students on the craft of history, though I’ve complained that the Bedford Series has almost no LGBTQ+ content. And there are books like my Stonewall Riots reader, which features a short introduction followed by 200 primary sources. Those types of works are often used by teachers to encourage students to develop their own interpretations of primary sources without requiring them to find the sources themselves. Teaching wise, it’s a developmental step before a fully independent historical research project.
As you say, Women and Social Movements (WASM) was the most direct inspiration for Queer Pasts, and I should note that WASM itself has published several LGBTQ+ history projects. In 2020, the publisher of WASM approached us about gestating a queer sibling; more specifically, an Alexander Street content manager who had worked for Scribners when I edited the 2003 Encyclopedia of LGBT History in America (and someone who thus knew about my skills in herding cats) asked if I was interested in editing a new LGBTQ project. In its original form, WASM featured curated digital history exhibits with introductory essays by historians and associated primary sources. Now WASM does other things as well, but so far QP concentrates on what are sometimes called documents projects.
A typical historical book or journal article features an argument by a historian with short quotations from primary sources that help the author prove the argument. If a reader wants to see the primary sources for themselves, they have to go to the archive or otherwise find the primary sources, which almost no reader will ever do. The WASM/QP genre gives readers the primary sources, or at least many of them. This can be challenging for a scholar; it’s the equivalent of “discovery” in a trial where a lawyer has to give the opposing side all of their evidence in advance, facilitating critical cross-examination and opening up possibilities for impugning the evidence.
Another distinct feature of the genre: we tell our contributors that their introductory essays need not present fully-developed arguments. We’re equally happy to feature introductory essays that offer guides and tips for readers of the primary sources without reaching definitive conclusions. I should say as well, since this is appearing on OutHistory, that Jonathan Ned Katz, OutHistory’s founder, was another inspiration; his books Gay American History and Gay/Lesbian Almanac were compilations of primary source excerpts with Jonathan’s introductions.
Lisa: I want to emphasize something Marc is noting about the curatorial essays. We really do encourage our contributors to ask questions of the documents, and we encourage speculation. This means we can highlight work in history as well as historical thinking in its in-process and developing stage. I think this is especially exciting for, and useful to, student users.
Issac: A related question: some of the pieces (like Lucas Hillebrand’s on gay bars and Emily Skidmore’s on transmen) could be viewed as adaptations of the authors’ books. A good adaptation does things with the story that only the new format can do. What are the things that only this format can do?
Marc: Yes, quite a few of our exhibits are adaptations of books, but also articles, websites, and other historical projects. Eric Gonzaba’s project on t-shirts is an adaptation of his Wearing Gay History website. Tom Hooper’s on the Toronto bathhouse raids grew out of his public history work. Wendy Rouse’s book on queering the women’s suffrage movement was the basis of her exhibit. Darius Bost’s new project on black gay culture in the 1980s is an outgrowth of his book The Evidence of Being. Other QP projects anticipate books that are forthcoming. And some, like my QP project on Philadelphia prison sexual violence, take a topic briefly discussed in an earlier work and develop it much more substantially. One thing that the QP format allows for is the reprinting of primary sources that all historians are expected to find but few have opportunities to share. The format also encourages our contributors to think about how to teach, as opposed to how to present, history.
Lisa: We are also aware of the multiple and competing claims on our contributors’ time. We want our contributors to feel that their work on this project is supported by, and in turn supports, their other work. A Queer Pasts project can reanimate interest in a scholars’ other articles or books or, conversely, act an as early announcement of a forthcoming project.
And let’s be honest...a lot of us have packrat tendencies! We have big piles of documents sitting around our offices already, either leftover from or in anticipation of a project. Queer Pasts is a great way to make use of those piles.
Isaac: Although Queer Pasts exists entirely online, its mission often focuses on a queer sense of place. We are offered a detailed look at what queer life was like in rural Arkansas at the end of the 19th century, or Portland in the eighties. I found myself thinking about whether online archives are uniquely suited to give us a sense of place, precisely because they don’t exist in space themselves. Do you think this is true? Why?
Lisa: Marc and I have been interested from the beginning in space or location as an aspect of queer diversity—the geographical diversity you’re pointing to is an effect of that editorial intention. We went about achieving this through recruitment and by encouraging contributors to emphasize this sense of place in their work. I think one effect of this is that many of the projects are deeply personal. The project I wrote about the all-ages gay nightclub in Portland, Oregon, The City Nightclub: A Community of Queer Youth in Portland, Oregon, 1977-1997, is a love letter to a place that nurtured my teenage self. Laura Fugikawa’s project about Chicago, Are There Really Only Two Asian Lesbians in Chicago?: Queer Asian Visibility and Community Formation in Chicago, 1980s-1990s, is flushed out by an archive that they helped build. Rachel Trusty’s project about rural Arkansas, Chesser and Holly: A Case of Queer, Interracial Marriage in the Turn-of-the-Century Frontier, is animated by her own lived understanding of that region. The resulting projects are both very personal and specific to these geographies. The digitized documents enable users to enter these spatial and temporal worlds in direct and accessible ways. So yes, I do think online archives--or at least this one--are particularly well-suited to creating this kind of experience.
But queer digital worlds also have a complicated relationship to queer space, right? I hope that our work in part serves to teach folks about the complexity of queer geographies such that they are tempted to step away from their computers.
Marc: I would just add that it would be interesting, moving forward, if we could also feature images of the archives in which our materials are located. I’m thinking, for example, about the space of the American Antiquarian Society, where I spent a day looking at sensational press coverage of New York City’s sodomites. Or the many LGBTQ archives where some of our materials are housed currently. I love Isaac’s evocation of the GLBT Historical Society’s basement archives in Dead Collections. My next exhibit, which draws on National Archives legal case files that I obtained at a distance during the early Covid-19 era, is quite different in this regard: writing about places where I’ve never been feels strange and disconnected. The same, by the way, is true of my OutHistory exhibit on Bucks County Community College, where a very helpful college librarian provided me with student newspaper scans when I could not visit because of Covid. And then there are “the ones that got away.” For my Philadelphia prison exhibit, I obtained an amazing 1968 60 Minutes interview that features Mike Wallace talking to Arlen Specter (then a District Attorney, later a U.S. Senator) about prison sexual violence; the two men are positioned inside and outside a jail cell, providing a powerful and strange sense of place while they talk about such a difficult subject. But alas, we couldn’t afford the licensing fee CBS wanted to charge.
Isaac: Archivists and historians have a complex relationship with paywalled databases. They fund major scanning projects and open up collections to a new audience, while also drawing a veil over them that libraries must pay to raise. How did you make ethical decisions around database work?
Marc: Yes, Lisa and I have thought a great deal about this. In a sense this OutHistory feature (offering an open-access window to a paywalled database) grows out of our thinking about the issue. In a perfect world, we would want everything to be free, public, and accessible. But free, public, and accessible projects like OutHistory historically have depended on unpaid voluntary contributors, who generally are not compensated, or compensated fairly, for the work they do. That’s not a great model either. For many years, there were similar issues with LGBTQ periodicals. When I edited Gay Community News in Boston in the 1980s, we had two paid staff writers but relied heavily on unpaid reporters and feature writers from around the country and world. I remember being yelled at by a gay contributor, a member of the National Writers Union, for not paying our volunteer writers. Mind you, we were constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, and the staff salary, earned by all ten of us, was $10,000/year. And GCN was forced to close a few years after I left.
With Queer Pasts, we are proud to have negotiated with the publisher so that we pay each contributor $1000 when they complete their project. As editors, we receive modest stipends as well. The publisher, via its paid staff, handles all of the work involved with maintaining, developing, and marketing the database. As the Luddite director of OutHistory, I am well aware of how valuable and costly that work is. The publisher also pays for the expensive process of converting the scanned primary sources into searchable texts (which, for example, OutHistory cannot afford to do, reducing our accessibility and searchability). In addition, the publisher has a small budget for the archives that supply us with the materials we publish, and they deserve that compensation for the work they do and the costs they incur. We’ve also done a little co-publishing with open-access sites. My LGBT Direct Action Bibliography, Chronology, and Inventory, co-published by OutHistory and Queer Pasts, has been done that way, reaching two very different audiences. I wish we did more of that. And there are 30-day free trial subscriptions for Queer Pasts, which we encourage people to utilize. Critics of pay walling also should keep in mind that it’s not as though books and journals are free. And when the criticisms come from tenured professors at well-endowed and expensive universities, my eyes might roll just a little.
Finally, and this is meant for the philanthropic LGBTQ+ gazillionaire or foundation director who is reading this: if LGBTQ+ archives and LGBTQ+ websites like OutHistory had sufficient financial support, we would be less dependent on funding models that require paid subscriptions.
Lisa: I’ve thought about this a lot over the past few years, as I’ve moved from a tenured position at a well-resourced institution, to adjunct work, to a more administrative position. Marc's right that books and journals are often behind paywalls and that better-resourced scholars enjoy better access. But all of academic life is unevenly resourced, including our capacity to attend conferences, do research, and be available for uncompensated forms of work, like peer-review. If we’re going to talk about paywalls I want to be sure we’re talking about the larger realities of resource distribution inside the academy.
I also think it’s incredibly important to recognize and acknowledge who is best able, at this moment, to support work in queer studies, gender studies, and critical ethnic studies. Our editor at Alexander Street, Nathalie Duval, is unrelenting in her support of Queer Pasts (as Marc mentioned earlier, the project is really her brainchild). Unrelenting structural support for queer history is hard to come by these days.
So I definitely have ethical thoughts about academic resources but they aren’t limited to paywalled databases.
Isaac: Databases fundamentally reorganize the archive. Instead of a relatively linear progression through organized folders whose contents can be analyzed only by the human eye, the archive becomes full-text searchable from above, leading to totally different ways of thinking about history. How do guided journeys through the archive like Queer Pasts fit into this new kind of archival work?
Lisa: Yes, the “knowable” becomes so much broader in this context and some kinds of work are only possible with access to so many documents and, even more so, with searchability. A lot of archival digitization is premised on this vastness—more access to more documents for more users. Marc and I have benefitted from these projects ourselves and value the document delivery aspect of Queer Pasts. We encourage our contributors to include as many “new” sources in their exhibits as they can (we are especially excited to facilitate user access to original oral history work). Our digitized document sets are bringing more documents to more users in these specific ways.
But we are also very committed to the curatorial essays that accompany the source sets. The inquisitive, interpretive, and analytic curatorial work done by our editors means that Queer Pasts relies very centrally on the human work of historians. No amount of digitization can change that part of the process. In that sense, while we are dealing in digital forms, we are still curious people metaphorically digging through folders to make sense of the world.
Marc: The searchability of primary source databases and hybrid platforms like ours is definitely transformative, affecting research efficiency and source discoverability. I’m just finishing a book on the U.S. bicentennial and, because it took me thirty years to complete, I’ve done old-school research with archival folders and microfilm reels and new-wave research with massive media databases. We’re pleased that the primary source scans presented on Queer Pasts are converted into searchable texts. At the same time, the conversions of written materials and oral recordings are not perfect, and it’s very labor-intensive to review and correct the conversions. We’ve worked with our publisher to improve the conversions, and we recently had complicated conversations about how to manage this for non-English-language sources, where theoretically we could have original language scans and conversions and English-language scans and conversions. And then there’s the issue of what is not digitized. I addressed that issue in a 2014 Radical History Review essay that critiqued some of the best LGBTQ digital history databases for practicing sexual censorship. We need to continue reminding researchers that not everything is available online and not everything has been digitized.
Isaac: As archival projects go, Queer Pasts is unusually frank about the fact that it’s making arguments. Archivists talk a lot about how we can’t be neutral, but sometimes struggle to get out of that mindset; it is a major concern in the field. Have your experiences researching in archives informed your stance on the non-neutrality of curation?
Marc: Yes, absolutely. I think that historians might be a little less committed to the performance of neutrality than archivists are. And Lisa, who is more interdisciplinary than I am, would probably say that neutrality is not an operating assumption in fields like women’s studies, gender studies, and queer studies.
Yes, there are historians and readers of history who insist that our aspiration should be for truth-telling: neutrally and objectively “telling it like it was.” But I think most of us recognize, even if some in the discipline of history won’t admit it, that naïve scientific empiricism just doesn’t work in history, the arts, and the humanities. When students ask me about this in my constitutional law classes, I tell them, tongue in cheek, that I have to admit that I am biased—I’m biased against genocide and slavery. And when colleagues tell me that scholarly impulses are at odds with activist ones, I point out that without queer activism, queer studies would not exist.
In archives in general, and queer archives in particular, the researcher selects what to examine, decides what to prioritize, and then makes endless choices about how to interpret the sources and how to present their work. In my Queer Pasts project about the New York sodomites of the 1840s, I chose to build my essay around the question of what these sources tell us about the “invention” of homosexuality in the 1800s. In looking at the sensational urban newspapers of that era, I innovated by looking at trans representations alongside representations of sodomites. I can defend everything I wrote, but at the same time I know that a different historian looking at the same materials might pursue very different questions and come to very different conclusions. In my Queer Pasts project on Corona Rivera, “the world’s most arrested lesbian,” I used as a title a media claim that I knew was hyperbolic and then talked about that. Guided by the preponderance of archival materials, I could have done a project about the Gay Activists Alliance of New York and emphasized white gay men’s activism; I chose to shine a light on an Italian American and Puerto Rican lesbian. In my Philadelphia prison sexual violence story, I chose to conclude with the bravery of a trans woman who testified in court against a guard who had sexually assaulted her.
Mind you, we cannot and should not “make things up.” We have to be prepared to defend our arguments. But arguments they are: “truthful” arguments in the sense of being full of truths without being the only possible interpretations.
Lisa: Marc’s right! I do tend to be suspicious of neutrality claims. Many years ago, in a different academic life, I wrote about vigilantism in the west and learned a lot about how early archivists amassed documents that served the interests of vigilance committees. Given what I perceive as the non-neutrality of archival processes, I’m just grateful folks like you and K.J. Rawson at the Digital Transgender Archive are on the inside!
I obsessively quote Hayden White, who said, “Events happen, whereas facts are constituted by linguistic description.” I do believe there’s an irreducible part of the past that exists prior to our collection and narration—what White calls the event. But much of what circulates as historical work is in the realm of linguistic constitution, and that includes folder and box labels.
Isaac: Queer Pasts doesn’t quite have a house style, but I noticed that most contributors wrote accessibly, as if writing a popular book. This suggests that you played some role as literary editors. Is that true, and if so, what was it?
Lisa: I think what you’re picking up on is our commitment to teachability. We encourage contributors to keep student users in mind when they write their essays. We really like the idea that an exhibit could be easily dropped into a syllabus as a freestanding class or that a cluster of exhibits with overlapping topics could support a unit on a particular topic. It would be interesting, for example, to teach my project on Mills College, "Are They Really?" Queer Life at Mills College, 1900-1980, alongside Tim Retzloff’s project, "Striking Out Against the Conspiracy of Silence": 1970s LGBTQ Campus Organizing In the Michigan Student Press. We do want these projects to be valuable to folks doing research in queer history, but students and teachers are always central to our thinking.
Marc: Accessibility is so complicated and so important to consider. Yes, we encourage our curators to aim for an undergraduate reader and avoid overly-specialized language. But of course it’s all relative: defenders of “accessibility” in queer studies often ignore the fact that what they take to be “accessible” might not be readable or comprehensible to many people. And I’ve long argued that no one expects a non-specialist to understand an advanced physics research paper; why do we demand that in some fields and not in others? For this particular platform, we aim for a broad readership. That means, for example, encouraging our readers to explain their usage of key LGBTQ+ terms, without requiring that everyone adhere to a single standard. More generally, we aim in our editorial practice to support our contributors and improve their work, not police their choices or require stylistic conformity.
Isaac: The queer archive is full of material that’s homophobic and transphobic – either explicitly, through verbal cruelty, or passively, through the erasure of queer possibilities. I’m thinking particularly about Marc’s piece about “sodomites” and their brutal depiction in the 1840s flash press. How did you, as experienced archival researchers involved in translating archives for students, learn to work with archives about people who would have hated you?
Marc: It’s such a good question, Isaac, and over my thirty-six years teaching at the college and university level, I’ve seen extraordinary changes in how we have to deal with this issue in our classrooms. I’ve written previously about a project I’ve done in three classes on the queer history of San Francisco State, where I’ve taught for the last eleven years. When I guide students through the process of searching digital databases for media stories in the past, I have to make them comfortable (and also uncomfortable) with the notion of searching for words like dyke, faggot, pervert, tranny, and more. And then instruct them on “reading against the grain” because many of the sources will be full of gender and sexual indifference and hate. Many QP projects offer object lessons in how to do this.
Yes, my sodomites project is a good example. In that case, all of the articles are written from hostile points of view, and so it requires willful acts of imagination to consider the perspectives of the people who were attacked and demeaned. My prison sexual violence project is different in that many of the primary sources are hostile about LGBTQ+ people, but some include the embedded voices of LGBTQ people, and I also included LGBTQ+ media sources, so that there are contrary perspectives from the historical period, not just from the historian. A further complication in that case is that the main primary source—a lengthy study of prison sexual violence in the 1960s—was profoundly racist as well. My essay critiques that racism, but there’s always the worry that students and other readers of this work will end up with the “wrong” takeaways (reinforcing hate and hostility rather than exposing it).
As my examples suggest, I think we have to navigate these issues differently depending on the period we’re studying. The truth is that most of our pre-World War Two primary sources about LGBTQ+ life are hostile and hateful. If we avoid those sources, we’re going to end up skewing LGBTQ+ history even more than it already is to the recent past (by which I mean the post-1950 era). As someone who works primarily on the 1940s through the 1980s, I really stretched to work on the sodomites of the 1840s, but I’m glad I did, even though it meant focusing on anti-LGBTQ+ texts.
Isaac: Is there a place for camp in archival research? In creating these curated collections which recontextualize materials in ways that are valuable to queer people and their allies, are you creating a camp canon? Is camp’s semi-sincere, semi-ironic approach useful when we look at history?
Lisa: I think camp and other queer aesthetic styles are central in a number of the exhibits—I'm thinking of Eric Gonzaba’s work on t-shirts or Wendy Rouse’s reading of suffragette publicity images in The Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement. As I noted earlier, a number of these projects are deeply personal; I think that intimacy has aesthetic expression in the document curation and the introductory essays. So yes, I do think there’s a place for camp in archival collections, particularly those created by and for the queer community. I’m interested in thinking about this potential in the context of your last question—how might camp and other queer aesthetic styles enable us to approach and metabolize anti-queer representations in the archive?
Marc: Yes, picking up on Lisa’s comment, I think many of our projects encourage campy critiques of the primary sources. In academic contexts, it’s sometimes difficult to convey camp and irony in the written word. In my classes, I’ll often read texts aloud with my students, using voice inflection to highlight embedded meanings or the perspectives that I want to encourage. It can be more difficult to do that via the written word, where the raised eyebrow is not necessarily visible. Hopefully our introductory essays do some of that work, and hopefully teachers who assign Queer Pasts projects encourage those sensibilities.
Isaac: Finally, I noticed that several writers made similar decisions, influenced by the work of Jen Manion, to use a neutral “they” pronoun when discussing people whose gender identities didn’t map onto the categories of their time (and might or might not map onto the categories of ours). Did you approach decisions like this collectively? Was there a style guide for contributors on how to discuss historical gender identity?
Lisa: We’ve really empowered our contributors to make these choices themselves. Unsurprisingly, though, a number of peer reviewers have urged authors to clarify their use of terms, reconsider anachronistic language, and explain term choices. Often this results in a longer explanation of authorial choices in the essay. These passages alert our users to key conversations in the field and help them understand the stakes of various methodological choices.
Marc: I think it’s incredibly important to have conversations about terminology, think about the distinctive complications of this when doing history, and have the humility to recognize that today’s terms will be critiqued by future generations, just as our generations have critiqued past terms. Long after we’re gone, future scholars might use Queer Pasts projects to marvel about the strange words we used when talking about genders and sexualities (or whatever words will displace genders and sexualities in the future).
About the Contributors:
Lisa Arellano is a Bay Area-based social movement historian and digital editor, as well as the director of research at The Mills Institute at Northeastern University. She is the co-editor of Queer Pasts, volumes I and II.
Isaac Fellman is Assistant Director of the Digital Transgender Archive. He was previously Managing Reference Archivist at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. Isaac is the author of three novels (Notes From a Regicide, Dead Collections, and The Breath of the Sun) and a novella, The Two Doctors Górski.
Marc Stein is the coeditor of Queer Pasts, the director of OutHistory, and the president-elect of the Organization of American Historians. He is the author of five books, with a sixth forthcoming: City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (Routledge, 2012; 2023), The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History (NYU Press, 2019), Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism (University of California Press, 2022), and Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s (University of Chicago Press, 2026). He teaches at San Francisco State University, where he is the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of Constitutional Law and U.S. History.