Jonathan Ned Katz: Proposal to Develop a Web Site on LGBTQ History, December 13, 2004

This document was emailed to Marcia Gallo, then at the Funding Exchange, and it resulted in Katz receiving a first grant to develop OutHistory.org.

Proposal to Develop a Web Site on LGBTQ History

Independent scholar/historian Jonathan Ned Katz is seeking a $10,000 grant to further the development, maintenance and publicizing of a public web site on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer American history.

The grant will be used to pay Katz and one collaborator to work together to plan the detailed stages of this web sites development, and to produce a grant proposal to continue the actual development of the site through its next stage.

As envisioned, the proposed web site, tentatively titled OutHistory.org, will newly introduce a youthful audience of web users and others to the oppression and resistance history of the lgbtq group, and relate their cultural contributions to the U.S. and the world. It will tell their personal stories and narrate their collective struggles.

A first, primitive version of OutHistory.org is on line. Katz suggests that readers of this proposal take a look at the entry in the "Stories" section dated 1864, about John Sterling and James Bloss. It includes lots of wonderful photos along with the text.

This web site's form and content, Katz dreams, will make it entertaining and informative for the present, large, youthful audience of web users, and the general public, as well as useful to scholars.

The developed version of this web site, Katz imagines, will tell many tales about people, relationships, and events.

Katz’s dream site will offer biographies, stories, images, reviews, a timeline, annotated bibliographies, a terminology list, a recent history section, suggestions for future research, and it will be fully searchable.

It will include interactive features that encourage comments, additions, and the active participation of viewers.

For numbers of years now, Katz has dreamed of an ambitious, public, lgbtq history web site that will all tell the stories that have been forgotten and present all the data that has been suppressed. The proposed web site will begin to realize Katz’s long-held, fantasy: to collect all the known data of lgbtq American history on an ever-expanding, public web database.

Katz urges readers of this proposal to take a look at OutHistory.org and to dream with him.

Jonathan Ned Katz has played a pioneering role in the development of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer American history. He published Gay American History: Lesbian's and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (1976), the first scholarly book on the subject. His Gay/Lesbian Almanac (1983) was a second collection of documents and analyses. His book The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995), was the first to trace the history of the heterosexual idea and institution. Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (2001), presented and interpreted sexual and affectional relationships between men in the nineteenth century. He has also published two books on African American history and articles and reviews.

In 2002, Katz headed a faculty seminar on Sexual History at Princeton University. In 2003, Katz taught a class on gay and lesbian history at Yale University, and then curated an exhibit on the lesbian and gay history of Yale and Connecticut. A complete resume is available upon request.