SC LGBTQ+ Collection: Web Resources

These are oral histories with LGBTQ Charleston-area residents about their lives and experiences. These oral histories are hosted by the Lowcountry Digital Library.

Through their own voices and images, the Passing It Forward project links the personal stories of LGBTQ+ elders of color --those around 50 years old and above-- to the political and social movements they are connected to. The collection consists of 150 interviews with LGBTQ+ elders of color, conducted by interviewers of around college age. These intergenerational conversations allow this growing and important population to reflect on their life and wisdom. By doing so, this project provides a venue to allow these individuals to educate and inspire. Available online through Spelman College and the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library.

A CofC project documenting Charleston Pride and the 90s-era Charleston gay nightclub, Treehouse. The site includes videos, photos, and interviews.

Writer Jack Hitt goes on a search for a mysterious neighbor from his childhood in Charleston, South Carolina, and stumbles onto an epic story of the Old South, the New South, gender confusion, Chihuahuas, and changing values in American journalism.

Out TV Atlanta, a half-hour weekly news and entertainment show focused on LGBTQ life, ran from 1999-2000. This digital collection contains about 240 digitized tapes of raw footage created in the process of making the show.

This link takes you to digitized copies of the Charlotte LGBTQ newspaper Q-notes from 1983-2016. The newspaper is still printing as qnotes, and they describe themselves as the largest and most trusted source of news, politics, opinion, entertainment, art, lifestyle, community events and more for LGBT North Carolinians and South Carolinians.

Six recordings from Rainbow Radio, an LGBTQ radio program that aired in Columbia, South Carolina.

This podcast (with transcription and pictures) describes the context of an 1868 Charleston ordinance that made it illegal for a person to appear in public dressed in a manner “not becoming his or her sex.”

The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world.

The Lesbian Herstory Archives exists to gather and preserve records of Lesbian lives and activities so that future generations will have ready access to materials relevant to their lives. Check out their digital collections.

This study is a publication of the National Park Foundation and the National Park Service and was funded by the Gill Foundation. Experts in LGBTQ Studies wrote and peer-edited each chapter. It is a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind project to explore how the legacy of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals can be recognized, preserved and interpreted for future generations.

A great collection of scanned LGBTQ publications, mostly from Houston, Texas, but includes several from around the country. Publications, including magazines, newspapers, and directories, date from 1965-2016.

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives is the oldest active LGBTQ organization in the United States and the largest repository of LGBTQ materials in the world. Founded in 1952, ONE Archives currently houses over two million archival items including periodicals, books, film, video and audio recordings, photographs, artworks, organizational records and personal papers. A small subset of this material has been digitized and is available online.

The Queer Digital History Project is an ongoing effort to document pre-2010 LGBTQ digital spaces online. Current projects include a catalog of early LGBTQ online communities, an archive of transgender-related Usenet newsgroups, and interactive maps of TGNet, one of the first international transgender-specific BBS networks.

From January 2000 until March 2015 "Queer Music Heritage" was both a radio show and a website, and the goal of both was to preserve and share the music of queer culture. It has become the resource on the net for the history of LGBT music. Each month's page gives the playlist and additional pages of info, and you can stream or download every show; there's over 580 hours of programming available. This is a deep site, covering over 2000 pages.

"People with a History" includes hundreds of original texts, discussions, and images, and addresses LGBT history in all periods, and in all regions of the world.

LGBT materials in the New York Public Library (NYPL) is one of the most significant LGBT archives in the United States. Part of the library’s digital collections, the items available are the result of an ongoing project to document LGBT history with a concentration on LGBT life and activist organizations founded in New York. In 1988, NYPL received a significant collection of archives collected by the International Gay Information Center that dated back to the beginnings of the movement in the 1950s. The searchable materials include photos of notable members of the arts community, archives from the AIDS activist art collective Gran Fury, audiovisual materials from the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and a selection of activist photography, dating from the early Gay Rights marches from the 1960s, as well as finding aids.