Revealing Invisible Histories

The queer presence in the South has been made invisible for too long. The time has come to recover this history, as Summersell students unearth the story of the queer student movement at the University of Alabama and across the state.

Delving deep into the manuscript collections at the University of Alabama and Birmingham Public Library, students reconstruct the struggle for rights, visibility, and sexual equality for queer students at universities across Alabama. Combining in-class readings with rarely-seen primary sources and taking oral histories of the early leaders of the queer civil rights movement, students shed new light on the birth and development of this fight for equality. Their findings have been presented at Queer Alabama, a website that documents the queer civil rights movement at The University of Alabama.