Project
Queer Digital History Project

Project Director
Avery Dame-Griff, Gonzaga University

Project URL
http://queerdigital.com

Project Reviewer
Kat Brewster, University of Michigan

Project Overview

Avery Dame-Griff

The Queer Digital History Project (QDHP) is an independent community history project documenting pre-2010 LGBTQ digital spaces online. The QDHP maintains a variety of resources, including a catalog of early LGBTQ online communities (90 as of 2024) and collections of archival documents related to these spaces, an archive of transgender-related Usenet newsgroups, and resources for researching and teaching about the early internet. In some cases, content the QDHP preserves is mirrored from other locations, such as the internet Archive. In these cases, the work focuses on not only recontextualizing these documents as specifically LGBTQ-related but also making them more accessible to a variety of audiences. 

Other collections, in contrast, come from materials donated by community members. While some of these are publicly accessible, others are available by request only. This extra step has been added as an acknowledgement of posters’ expectations regarding privacy and anonymity at the time of posting — which may be very different from contemporary standards. More recently, the project has also begun to expand into active preservation, such as the project to preserve LGBTQ-related Yahoo Groups prior to the service’s closure in 2019, as well as collecting oral histories from LGBTQ individuals active in early digital spaces.

The QDHP was founded by and is maintained by Avery Dame-Griff, whose work focuses on the early web and LGBTQ individuals. His most recent book, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (2023), draws on the information and documents collected in the QDHP. The Project is built in Omeka, using item types with custom metadata to index related information such as baud rate or network participation (for BBSes) or Intended Audience (for proprietary fora).

Given the limited documentation of both early digital spaces, the QDHP’s primary goals are twofold: first, to actively document and preserve information about these platforms and second, to raise public awareness of these spaces’ history and longer impact. As such, the QDHP’s audience includes academic researchers, public historians, and community members. To date, the QDHP has largely been self-funded by Dame-Griff, as well as through a grant from Humanities Washington, which supported the development of a suite of educational resources: digital exhibits on key LGBTQ figures and communities in the history of the internet, teaching guides, and a glossary of related terminology. The project has been written about in JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and First Monday, where it was noted as an exemplary example of “how digital archives and digital humanities methods are allowing scholars to do digital histories differently using digital sources, methods, and tools.” Content in the QDHP’s AIDS INFO BBS collection was the basis for a OneZero article on AIDS INFO BBS sysop Ben Gardiner, as well as a recent article in Feminist Media Histories exploring how AIDS caregivers used technology to maintain networks of care.

Project Review

Kat Brewster

Despite memes and popular opinion that might suggest otherwise, the internet is not forever. Websites, Twitter profiles, apps, and YouTube videos of cats are all volatile media that rely on very specific conditions to remain functional and accessible in situ. It is not uncommon for content online to be subject to rot, drift, mass user migration, and wholesale deletion. Initiatives such as the nonprofit Internet Archive (IA)’s Wayback Machine offer some alternatives for collecting the World Wide Web writ large, though the IA has its limitations. Starting in 1996, the IA’s broad aims and technical scope means that some more nuanced records and those from before 1996 might fall through the cracks. Records of LGBTQ+ life, for instance, were historically subject to homophobic stigma that has led to erasures, omissions, and purposefully opaque artifacts. These objects often require “reading between the lines,” or are only legible to those “in the know.” So it follows, recording digital LGBTQ+ life is a complex process for the dual challenges of both maintaining digital records and seeking out content that was, at one time, kept purposefully inaccessible. Tending to these particular hurdles — that of digital recordkeeping and underscoring the nuance of queer life — is what makes Avery Dame-Griff’s Queer Digital History Project (QDHP) such a vital resource.

The QDHP is an online repository that collects, organizes, and documents records of LGBTQ+ pre-2010 LGBTQ digital life, and makes them widely accessible to the public. As an online resource, the QDHP is an exemplar for its content, organizational practice, and scope. The QDHP focuses on pre-2010 digital media, featuring both primary documentation and co-locates a cluster of pre-2010 online LGBTQ+ communities with relevant complementary documentation. Want to read some early 1990s flame wars? You got it. Want to see where HIV/AIDS activists were congregating online to exchange vital, life-saving information? The QDHP has that too. Within these collections, the QDHP also hosts primary documentation from early computer networking efforts, such as bulletin board systems (BBSs) from the 1980s and early 1990s. On its own, this is a remarkable feat, as most BBS records were deleted to maintain the limited storage space on computers. That these records also reflect a precarious and ephemeral point of time for LGBTQ+ people makes them all the more critical.

The QDHP also offers a dynamic example of how to collect records from a historically marginalized population in a way that honors their unique life experiences. For instance, the QDHP draws from community-forward language in its descriptions and resists using anachronistic language to describe the diverse array of identities represented in its collections. Where we might today describe someone as trans, for example, the QDHP description guidelines acknowledges that that same person might have identified with language less commonly used today, such as “crossdresser.“

Beyond a catalogue of records to peruse, the QDHP smartly skirts the “archive” label to encompass an array of complementaryprojects such as teaching guides, oral histories, interactivemaps and curated exhibitions of important figures and moments in LGBTQ+ digital history. Taken together, the QDHP is a useful tool for historians, digital humanists, educators, and web archivists who are interested in LGBTQ+ history, the history of computer networking, and dynamic digital archiving or memory work projects.