OutHistory includes Philadelphia LGBT Interviews

OutHistory, the public history website founded by Jonathan Ned Katz, has posted another seven of Marc Stein's oral history transcripts from his Philadelphia LGBT history project: https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/philadelphia-lgbt-interviews. This brings the total number of transcripts to 31; approximately 10 more will be posted in the future. In honor of Black History Month, please note that two of the seven new transcripts focus on African American lesbians Sharon Owens and Elizabeth Terry. These join the transcripts of two other African American oral history narrators: Anita Cornwell (author of Black Lesbian in White America) and "Jay Herman" (longtime professor of history at Swarthmore College). The other five new transcripts feature Becky Davidson (member of Philadelphia Radicalesbians in the 1970s); Jeffrey Escoffier (leader of Philadelphia's Gay Activists Alliance in the 1970s); Carole Friedman (leader of Philadelphia's chapter of the Daughter of Bilitis and the Homophile Action League in the 1960s and 1970s); Norman Oshtry (lawyer of Clark Polak, one of Philadelphia's leading gay activists in the 1970s); and Mark Segal (leader of the Gay Raiders in the 1970s and longtime publisher of Philadelphia Gay News). Topics covered include coming out to family and friends; bars, neighborhoods, and relationships; legal and political struggles; and movement activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Marc Stein is the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History at San Francisco State University; he previously worked as a professor of history and founder of the Sexuality Studies Program at York University in Toronto (1998-2014) and the editor of Gay Community News in Boston (1987-89). His major publications include City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 2000); Encyclopedia of LGBT History in America (Scribners, 2003) Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (Routledge, 2012); U.S. Homophile Internationalism, a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality (2017); and The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History (NYU Press, 2019). He has chaired the Committee on LGBT History, an affiliated society of the American Historical Association (2000-2003), and the Organization of American Historians Committee on the Status of LGBTQ Historians and Histories (2013-16); he also has served as a member of the LGBTQ Historians Task Force of the American Historical Association (2009-15) and a member of the board of directors of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco (2016-19).