QueerHistoryProject.com: exploring and reimagining queer history

Queer history is often marginalized, unrecorded, forgotten or lost. Many of us come out and join queer communities without ever having had a chance to learn about the queers who came before us—their lives, their struggles, their parties, their heroes, their secrets…

The folks behind QueerHistoryProject.com hope to change all that.

They have developed this interactive website as a place where the queer community can create, explore and share our history. This is an opportunity to showcase what was funny, brave, caring, painful, motivating, subversive, routine, ignored, gorgeous and arousing. What happened and what was it like? We invite the community to define its ongoing history.

The website is currently a pilot project. If they are successful in acquiring funding, their long term vision is to create a permanent online, digital collection. They hope to build our community’s capacity to document history, with workshops on how to digitize and upload content to the site, partnerships with other organizations and continued outreach to our communities to encourage participation in this project. We intend the site to be a resource that strengthens and empowers our community.

This website is maintained by a group of volunteers under the umbrella of Out On Screen, a non-profit organization that presents the annual Vancouver Queer Film Festival and the province-wide Out in Schools educational program. This website is the online component of the Queer History Project, a film commissioning project comprised of film works that depict Vancouver’s queer histories.