History of Queer Activism Video Project

I am fundraising for startup costs to produce a free queer history video series online combining my interest in filmmaking, performing, and my longtime love of history to create free videos to educate any queer person who finds them on our history in a way that is both deeply researched and entertainment focused.

With widespread backlash to the queer community all over the news and 434 bills and counting targeting our community, it’s easy to feel afraid in the face of the future. As a trans woman living in the deep South I find myself bracing for the days ahead.My full time job was working as a tour guide teaching the history of queer New Orleans. Until a few weeks ago, I did it in drag.

For a lot of complicated reasons, I decided to put away the wigs and makeup and step out from behind the gimmick that had given me the platform I now have. I would be lying if I said one of those reasons wasn’t fear. I could see the handwriting on the wall, when I walked out there all I could think of was my home state of Tennessee passing a law against drag in public, remembering being a frightened queer kid afraid of everyone around me. I could see my walking tour on Fox News accusing me of god knows what, and it didn’t seem worth it all. So I quit doing the drag. It seemed easier that way.

In many ways I have been moving away from this tour and towards a career where I can share all of the research on a broader scale. I’ve been researching queer history extensively for the past three years trying to take all of the knowledge I have been reading and combine it all into something accessible and exciting for a new generation of queer people having to step into the roles of activists and organizers to defend themselves because I know from my own life of organizing how important queer history can be to rebuilding our imagination of what is possible in the face of adversity.

Our ancestors built communities in every era of history out in public often in open violation of the police, they poured kegs of beer into the street in protest, shut down whole streets demanding their right to live, built an army of men with whistles to push back the men who would assault them.They built secret languages and learned to sneak through urban landscapes, coming from every class. They built networks of support in everything from brothels to convents, served as key figures in nearly every movement for liberation in the history of the United States. They found each other, they fought back.

And occasionally, they won. In the face of the rising backlash, I know that history has a key role to play and I feel the call do whatever was in my power to stand up for my community. History is what I do.

I’ve been working on this project obsessively, I’ve been reading nearly nonstop every day trying to pull together a history of not only queer activism but everything that I can about our history. I want to take the energy that I put into the tours and put all of it into this project, covering everything from the rise of homophobia in Europe to the passage of Marriage Equality in the US. Tracing it all together in a way that is honestly more ambitious than is probably healthy, but I know it’s what we need right now. It’s what I am good at, it’s the small thing I can do, to fight.

I want to rebuild our history from the ground up, reconnect queer people from the present with the entirety of our history, from the rise of anti-queer violence in Europe all the way up to our current struggle against backlash. This isn’t just a story of queer activism in the US anymore, though that was the original intention, it’s a collective story of who we are, where we come from with no pearl clutching and no sugarcoating.

That remembers our heroes and our villains and hopefully illuminates the roots of our struggles and begins to tug them out while also remembering every act of resistance we can find from lesbian nuns to leather daddies.

And hopefully by the end of it all, we can build a playbook for our current world. Throughout our past, even when things were at their worst, we built secret worlds, we fought back in our own ways, we found each other, we helped each other survive, because we have always known each other on sight and felt comforted to know we aren’t alone.

One of my older gay mentors told me, “We used to be warriors, Quinn. The queers today, they aren’t warriors”

I believe we could be together again.

If only we were brave enough to remember how we did in the first place, remember all of the pain, the joy, the drama. With no pearl clutching and no sugarcoating. To truly know where we came from, and at the end of it all stare down the barrel of a future we’re afraid of and fight for the one we deserve with all of our queer ancestors behind us.

And I believe we will.

But only If we are brave enough to remember who we are.

Only If we were brave enough to be that alive again.

If only we were brave enough to donate to this gofundme so that I can afford all expensive ass books and a decent camera. I would like to make this project something exceptional so I have been putting all of my energy and finances behind it, but I know even if I worked nonstop I wouldn’t be able to afford to produce what I want.

My vision is essentially to provide a definitive course on queer history with all the rigor of an academic mixed with the drama and glamor of a drag show. I want costumes, amazing sets, powerful interviews, travel and on site video from the historical spaces I am discussing.

My vision is essentially a walking tour through queer history with plenty of time spent explaining some of the more complex aspects of our history in a way that is accessible, hilarious, sexy, and, as one of my first tour reviews ever said, “surprisingly educational”.

My original vision of this project was a 24 part series covering queer activism in the US, I now see that this project must cover more than that to accomplish what I want, which is a full career shift to creating online history content, building an online community to connect queer people who want to fight back, and putting all of my artistic weight behind it.

But there is now way I can do this without the help of my community, both online and off, so I am asking for the money I need to get a good start on this project in terms of research materials, equipment, and also to essentially buy myself the time I need in order to produce it.

How I’ll spend the Money

$2000 for high quality sound and video equipment as well as a budget for assistance with editing as needed

$3000 Budget to use as needed for: books, articles, travel, compensation for queer elders, costumes, set pieces, licensing for music, pay a graphic designer, and anything else that comes up

$2000 Compensating myself for the time and labor producing the series will take, as well as provide me with some financial cushion

Any funds over the fundraising goal will be invested into making the project better and more sustainable for the long term.

I’ll be running a main channel on Youtube @queerhistorywithquinn, and will also be keeping a blog/ running a discussion group on my patreon. I won’t be using any of my personal social medias for this project, though I will be keeping up with emails sent to [email redacted]

Topics I plan to cover in these videos (growing list)

Introducing the Series video

Turn of the Century Queer politics

Gay Enclaves in the 1920s

World War II

The Lavender Scare

Gayborhoods and the Mafia

Physique pictorials and the first major Supreme Court victory

Gay New Orleans History

The Sexual Revolution

The Stonewall Riots + Pride

STAR + Early Trans Activism: The True Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major, and Marsha P Johnson

Gay Boycotts

Harvey Milk’s Castro

Anita Bryant and the backlash movement

Lesbians and the Second Wave

Queer Separatist Communes

HIV AIDS and ACT- UP

ACT-UP (a second part)

90s Queer Activism

Resisting murder and violence: Rise of the movement against Violence

Marriage Equality Movement and the fight for domestic partner benefits

Rise of Modern Online queer activism

History of the Modern Backlash

The Church and Gay Activism

Where are we now?