OutHistory

OutHistory.org is a website in development about gender and sexual history, a site that aspires to encourage us to think deeply and critically about historical evidence and what it means to understand LGBT and heterosexual life in the perspective of society and time. OutHistory is designed to help us ask and begin to answer questions about the gendered and sexual actions and feelings of people within social structures over time. OutHistory includes elements of an almanac, archive, article, bibliography, book, encyclopedia, library, and museum, but it is not identical to any one of these. It's a history website -- on it, time is of the essence.

OutHistory.org is produced by The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), located at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The site was founded by Jonathan Ned Katz, who remains a director along with the OutHistory Project Director for CLAGS, Lauren Gutterman. The site was designed and developed by Cidamon, A New York based web design and development company, using Open-source MediaWiki software. The content of OutHistory.org is provided by volunteers. While the site went live in 2004, the official launch of the current OutHistory.org took place October 21, 2008.

Site Producer
OutHistory is produced by The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), under the guidance of its director, Sarah E. Chinn. CLAGS is an institute at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The site's Director and initiator is Jonathan Ned Katz. The site's Coordinator is Lauren Gutterman.

Content
This first prototype of OutHistory.org focuses on a number of featured Exhibits on LGBTQ history in the United States, and includes a variety of other content. But the future possibilities of this site are as wide as the world, and as open as all of us can collectively imagine. For example, Jonathan Ned Katz dreams that this site will eventually contain the largest, freely accessible, annotated bibliography on the subject of LGBTQ and heterosexual history. A user's ability to survey such a bibliography according to specific time frames and particular key words would give that person an overview of a history that will take many, many more years to document, detail, and publish.

Contributors
The content of this site is volunteered by and solicited from authors, curators, editors, researchers, independent and institutionally-based scholars, and collectors named on their entries. Inspired by Wikipedia, OutHistory.org also encourages all its users to discuss the site and each article.

Also inspired by Wikipedia, and as an experiment in history by the people, we encourage users to provide the site with documents, data and citations, articles, photos, administrative aid, and any kind of assistance they can. Users of OutHistory can help OutHistory make history. With the participation of users this site will grow, develop, and be institutionally supported over the long-run.

Collaborations
OutHistory is interested in collaborating with other LGBTQH history sites, archives, newspapers, magazines, museum projects, and art galleries, as well as interested researchers. As of August 29, 2008, OutHistory is collaborating with The Windy City Times (Chicago) and ChicagoGayHistory.org, and historian John D'Emilio is publishing original essays on Chicago gay history in this newspaper and on both websites.

OutHistory has also partnered with Arcus Foundation to award recipients of the LGBTQ Local Histories Contest for excellent contributions to OutHistory on local history topics.

OutHistory content on WikiQueer
Content from OutHistory can be transcluded to appear within WikiQueer articles via this template. This content is made available to WikiQueer through a partnership between the two projects.

Staff
OutHistory has a group of staff, mostly volunteer, overseeing fiscal and support operations.


 * Coordinator: Lauren Gutterman
 * Founder, Co-Director: Jonathan Ned Katz, Independent Scholar and Author
 * Co-Director: Daniel Hurewitz, Assistant Professor, Hunter College, NYC
 * Co-Director: Karen Miller, Associate Professor of Urban Studies and History, LaGuardia Community College

Board of Advisors At Large
The Advisory Board's primary responsibilities are advising on the site's content, contributing, as time permits, to that content, editing content, and suggesting and encouraging contributors. The board makes macro policy decisions (for example, about what kinds of materials the site should solicit and publish, and about the overall structure of the site). Like editorial boards and boards of directors, the Advisory Board does not make executive decisions about site production, budgeting, staffing, or the day-to-day running of the site.

History of OutHistory.org
In the 1980s, while working as secretary to the contract director of a major educational publisher, Jonathan Ned Katz first learned to use a computer, and fantasized that this huge, multi-floor office was actually a "gay history factory," and that the hundreds of people working busily in cubicles were actually researchers, paid to dig up forgotten bits of the LGBTQ past. The present LGBTQ history website is the realization of Katz's history factory dream.

In 2003, a friend of Katz's, Barbara Todd Kerr, who worked as a producer at Mediapolis, a website development company, introduced him to Mediapolis founder and director Carl Pritzkat. Katz asked Pritizkat if his company would create, pro bono, a website on LGBTQ history. Prtizkat suggested the name OutHistory.org and began developing the site, to which Katz began to add content.

In 2004, while Katz was teaching at Yale University, the first version of OutHistory.org went on line, featuring a detailed, original biography of a Yale major donor, the lawyer John William Sterling and his live-in companion of 40 years, James Bloss. (That biography now appears on the present OutHistory.org.)

In 2005, a grant of $5,000 from the Zebra Fund via the Funding Exchange, facilitated by program officer Marcia Gallo through the generosity of the late Joan R. Heller and her partner, Dr. L. Diane Bernard, encouraged Katz to investigate the various commercial and non-commercial ways to go about funding a much more complex site and supporting it over the long run.

The grant also encouraged Katz to formulate an agenda to discuss the development of the site and to call a meeting of interested people. About a dozen people, mostly archivists, met at his house on February 4, 2006. Richard Wandell, founder and director of the National Museum and Archive of Lesbian and Gay History, in New York City, ended a long and useful discussion by suggesting that Katz needed to draft a complete vision statement for the website.

Katz wrote a vision statement and submitted it to the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, then directed by Paisely Currah. The CLAGS board voted to support the project for two years if funding for it could be secured. Before the CLAGS board voted, Katz met with Urvashi Vaid, director of the Arcus Foundation, discussed the website proposal, and received an encouraging response. Katz drafted a proposal to Arcus and Sara Ganter, then the development director of CLAGS redrafted it and submitted it to Arcus. At the end of 2006, that foundation approved a grant of $50,000 a year for two years (2007-2008) to develop the site.

CLAGS hired a first Project CoordinatorIn for the site, James Arnette, and in June 2007 an OutHistory advisors meeting was attended by about twenty women and men. Other advisors agreed to join an email advisory committee. After investigating various website development companies CLAGS hired Cidamon.com to do that work, and the present prototype is the result. After Arnett, Lynley Wheaton was hired as Project Coordinator and in June 2008 Lauren Gutterman took over the position.

OutHistory.org officially went on line on October 21, 2008, and was celebrated at a party at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center in New York City. A second OutHistory Advisors' Meeting was held on February 4, 2009, during the annual conference of the American Historical Association, in New York City.

Awards and Recognition
OutHistory was awarded the 2010 Allan Berube Prize in Public History by the Committee on LGBT History of the American Historical Association.

Support / Funding
OutHistory accepts donations - which are tax deductible - online and via mail.


 * Donation information

Past Support
In 2005, a grant of $5,000 from the Zebra Fund via the Funding Exchange, through the generosity of the late Joan R. Heller and her partner, Dr. L. Diane Bernard, encouraged Jonathan Ned Katz to investigate how to go about funding and establishing a complex LGBTQ history site and supporting it over the long run.

The development of OutHistory.org by CLAGS was funded by a two-year grant (2007-2008: $50,000 a year) from the Arcus Foundation. The Arcus Foundation agreed to support OutHistory's "Since Stonewall Local Histories Contest" from March 1, 2009 through December 31, 2010, with a grant of $55,000 for those 22 months.

The 2007 OutHistory Advisors' Meeting was catered thanks to a donation by Florent Morellet of Restaurant Florent.

The Mulberry Group, Inc., contributed $1,500 in 2008.

A number of individuals contributed in 2008 and 2009.

Future Support
CLAGS is seeking other sources of financial support to make sure that OutHistory.org continues into the future. If you can help, please go to the Donate section of the site.