Queer Pasts

Queer Pasts is a collection of primary source exhibits for students and scholars of queer history and culture. The database uses “queer” in its broadest and most inclusive sense, to embrace topics that are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender and to include work on sexual and gender formations that are queer but not necessarily LGBT. Each of the document collections in the database will include a critical introductory essay that helps explain the significance of the primary sources in historical terms and in relationship to previous scholarship. This database seeks to broaden the field of queer history, including projects that focus on the experiences and perspectives of under-represented historical groups, including people of color, trans people, and people with disabilities.

Exhibits in this database include:
"A Revealment Most Sensational": Eleven Stories of Trans Lives in the United States, 1878-1914
AIDS Knows No Borders: Protesting the US Ban on HIV-Positive Migrants, 1990-1993
Are There Really Only Two Asian Lesbians in Chicago?: Queer Asian Visibility and Community Formation in Chicago, 1980s-1990s
Power, Politics, and Race in the 1968 Philadelphia Study of Prison Sexual Violence
Reclamation Projects: An Archive of Queer Latinidad, 1850-1921
Sodomites and Gender Transgressors in 1840s New York
The City Nightclub: A Community of Queer Youth in Portland, Oregon, 1977-1997