This essay, which reflects on teaching gay and lesbian history at San Francisco State University and Santa Clara University, was first published in The Journal of American History 93, no. 4 (March 2007): 1192-1199. Copyright Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This exhibit is a collection of stories contributed by OutHistory users. To be included in the exhibit, send your story to marcs@sfsu.edu.

During Black History Month in 2016, OutHistory presented original research discoveries about parties organized by cross-dressed African American men in Washington, D.C., in the 1880s and 1890s.

This exhibit provides a glimpse of events and documents that helped to change New York City laws as they relate to the LGBT communities. The documents and photographs shown here are housed at the La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College. Published originally on OutHistory in 2010. You can explore the holdings of the La Guardia and Wagner Archives here: http://www.laguardiawagnerarchive.lagcc.cuny.edu

OutHistory presents the proceedings of the November 25, 1973 Gay Academic Union Conference, with a new introduction by John D'Emilio, who was also a GAU founder. "The Universities and the Gay Experience," this 105-page document, includes keynote addresses by Barbara Gittings and Martin Duberman. Published on OutHistory in April 2016. 

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League did everything it could to keep lesbians off the diamond. Seventy-five years later, its gay stars finally opened up. Published originally on OutHistory in April 2020.

This is a short history of the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Democratic Club, published originally on OutHistory in 2013. This history explains how the club got started in San Francisco, California as the first registered LGBT Democratic Club in the nation. The history recounts the decades-long struggle of the LGBT community to influence public policy at the local, state and national level by making inroads within the Democratic Party in one of the nation's most important Democratic strongholds. Unless otherwise noted, all source material for this history came from the Alice Reports newsletter, interviews with longtime Alice members, and the Gay Vote Newsletters of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club. The 1971 section on Jim Foster establishing Alice is sourced from Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America by Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney.

A discussion of the LGBTQ+ digital humanities site “The Queer Archives Project” at Lafayette College (Easton, PA), with links to oral history interviews and examples of archival artifacts. © Mary A. Armstrong. All rights reserved. Published originally by OutHistory in 2023.

A searchable edition of Barbara Grier's 1981 bibliography The Lesbian in Literature. Republished on OutHistory in 2008 with the permission of Barbara Grier.

This exhibit focuses on the Lesbian Switchboard of New York City, a grassroots informational referral and peer counseling hotline staffed by lesbian volunteers from 1972 to 1997. The exhibit highlights the role of the Switchboard in local women’s movement organizing, lesbian consciousness-raising, and anti-violence activism. Published originally on OutHistory in February 2026.