Researching LGBTQIA+ Populations: Historical Research

AHL offers abstracts and citations for articles appearing in over 2,000 journals published worldwide in history, related humanities, and the social sciences. The database also includes citations to book reviews from approximately 140 major journals of American history and culture, and relevant dissertations from Dissertation Abstracts International.

This resource offers over 300 titles, with more than 250 in full-text, from an array of academic, radical, community and independent presses. Users may access more than 219,000 full articles on wide-ranging topics like sexuality, religion, societal roles, feminism, masculinity, eating disorders, healthcare, and the workplace.

Crucially, the complete backfile of The Advocate is made available digitally for the first time. The oldest surviving continuously published US title of its type (having launched in 1967), it is the periodical of record for information about the LGBT community; it has charted the key developments in LGBT history and culture for over 50 years. As one of the very few LGBT titles to pre-date the 1969 Stonewall riots, it spans the history of the gay rights movement. LGBT Magazine Archive also includes the principal UK titles, notably Gay News and its successor publication Gay Times.

This first-of-its-kind collection features award-winning documentaries, interviews, archival footage, and select feature films exploring LGBT history, gay culture and subcultures, civil rights, marriage equality, LGBT families, AIDS, transgender issues, religious perspectives on homosexuality, global comparative experiences, and other topics. LGBT Studies in Video provides students and researchers across disciplines a multi-content perspective on the LGBT political, cultural and social movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day. It also provides key resources of interest to students and researchers in sociology, anthropology, psychology, counseling, history, political science, gender studies, cultural studies, and religious studies.

The collection illuminates the lives of lesbians, gays, transgender, and bisexual individuals and the community with content including selections from The National Archives in Kew, materials collected by activist and publisher Tracy Baim from the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s, the Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin collections from the Kinsey Institute, periodicals such as En la Vida and BLACKlines, select rare works from notable LGBT publishers including Alyson Books and Cleis Press, as well as mainstream trade and university publishers.

A new collection of 200 videos from the nonprofit organization I’m From Driftwood provides first-person accounts from those in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.
LGBTQ+ Source also includes an LGBTQ+ thesaurus of more than 9,500 terms.

The database uses “queer” in its broadest and most inclusive sense, to embrace topics that are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender and to include work on sexual and gender formations that are queer but not necessarily LGBT. Each of the document collections in the database will include a critical introductory essay that helps explain the significance of the primary sources in historical terms and in relationship to previous scholarship. We ask our project editors to address the strengths, limitations, and characteristics of their archive and to explore the ways in which archives are constructed, constrained, and contested.
This database seeks to broaden the field of queer history, including projects that focus on the experiences and perspectives of under-represented historical groups, including people of color, trans people, and people with disabilities.
Edited by Lisa Arellano and Marc Stein.

Check out these books about the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people for LGBT History Month and all year-round