Same-Sex Attraction

In the above link, you can find my project: Same-Sex Attraction. This body of work was explicitly designed to show how a  biological fact—that attraction between people of the same sex occurs naturally in human populations—has been interpreted, celebrated, but never absent in human cultures around the world. With material ranging from 5th century BCE to 1920, and geography from Australia to Africa, the broad scope of the project is something that can only be made possible in the digital format.

Rather than an exhaustive look at all the examples of same-sex love, sexuality and attraction in history, which would be impossible in the scope of this course, I instead focused on a variety of examples from disparate cultures showing how different people viewed the same human instinct across different cultures and times.

This project is very similar to the ethos of history pin—that is, proving that every place has a history, and attempting to bring those histories together in short, sporadic, often almost random ways.

My intention starting out on this project was to build something huge, something near exhaustive, and something digitally and visually complex. The hardest issue I faced was relying on a friend to do the coding for the project, which fell through when he found he didn’t have the time to help me. I was scrambling, trying to figure out how I could create something interesting and intellectually similar with a lot less resources.

What I settled on, in fact, was a little odd. It may not be instantly obvious to you, but that website I made is actually a video game. I used an open-source video game designer called Twine, and repurposed it into something that wasn’t a video game at all. It was, instead, a website with some odd functionality built into it, like undo and redo buttons instead of separate pages.

The most important takeaway I have from this attempt of mine to build a digital project is that sometimes, using the resources you have is better than trying to fit your work into a technology that is more expensive, and sometimes, it’s okay to let your project go when there’s still a great deal more things that could be on it.

Even now, as I’m sitting here, things like the trial of Oscar Wilde or more famous examples of Japanese nanshoku art, or the Cut Sleeve story in Pu Songling’s 17th century work Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, haunt me—there’s far more history than I added in!

That, however, appears to me to be the end result of digital projects in general: there’s always something more that can be done. The most important thing isn’t that the project is truly and fully complete—especially a project like this—or that it looks anything like the original vision you had for the project. Certainly, the clickable historic map I was intending is nothing at all like what I’ve created instead.

The most important thing is that your project fulfills the aims it set out to do in a way that’s potentially meaningful to the audience you intend, in my case, queer youth of color.

I believe my project, in its relevance to youth and its ease of finding and navigating, does this adequately.

My timeline for the remaining work to be done on this project is a desire to do three continents a week from now until April 25th, which will allow me to have a fleshed-out website by that date. Since the intention of this project is not to be exhaustive, but only point out a variety of historical precedents to modern LGBTQ+ communities, I find this idea quite doable.

We’ve talked a lot about how history is converted into digital media, and I think one of the greatest uses for history is in public education on how the status quo on any particular social issue came to be. In light of that, for my digital project, I’m creating a website divided up by continents, and using that to show how same-sex love and other forms of attraction and sexuality, what we call in modernity LGBTQ+, was conceptualized across different places and times.

There is a paucity of round-the-world LGBTQ+ stories from a historical perspective. In fact, the usual treatment of this kind of material has been slipshod in scholarship and even, in those areas that do have it, encompassing straight up lies: mistranslated objects, etc., just generally very bad history.

My goal is to make something that was accurate but also inclusive, so we could show in quick snapshots how what we would today call LGBTQ+ people existed, persisted, and sometimes resisted as communities.

The website itself is just simple clickable links to relevant stories, sources, objects, and information about queer history on that continent. of North America, for example, which has information and pictures of First Nation two spirit people.

The virtue of having this a digital project is immediate: it’s inviting people interacting with the project to think on a more broad scale as to how a biological fact—attraction and sexuality between people of the same gender occurs naturally in the human population—has been viewed and understood across different time periods and in different cultures.

This is quintessentially made possible by a digital project—a paper requires one to get in detail about one particular period and place, whereas this is history on a broader but shallower scale, to see how one biological inclination was viewed in umpteen different cultures around the world. As a paper, this would be broad to the point of uselessness. As a digital project, however, it’s actually useful and natural as a topic. Digital projects work well in more survey courses style of historiography, after all.

For my terms and information about historical predecessors to what we now call the LGBTQ+ umbrella, I’ll be turning mainly to queer theory as well as historians with a focus on same-sex attractions in history.

It is my intention through this work to create a repository of examples of same-sex attraction and transgender persons and communities in history, and to wrestle with how a biological fact—that attraction towards those of the same sex occurs naturally in the human population—has been viewed, wrestled with, celebrated, but never non-existent in human cultures. In doing so, I’m dividing the world into geographic features and showing examples from all ends of them.

This is not intended as traditional scholarship—if I’m making an argument, it’s only in what I choose to select. Nor is it necessarily my aim to create something new of the traditional interpretations of these images and texts. Rather, my desire is to consolidate knowledge in one easily-traversed place.

My main audience is queer youth, and particularly queer youth of color, who have too often been denied knowledge of their place in history. The goal of this website is primarily education.

CLICK HERE FOR MY PROJECT

We’ve talked a lot about how history is converted into digital media, and I think one of the greatest uses for history is in public education on how the status quo on any particular social issue came to be. In light of that, for my digital project, I’d like to create an interactive world map divided up by continents, and use that to show how same-sex love and other forms of attraction and sexuality, what we call in modernity LGBTQ+, was conceptualized across different places and times.

There is a paucity of round-the-world LGBTQ+ stories from a historical perspective. In fact, the usual treatment of this kind of material has been slipshod in scholarship and even, in those areas that do have it, encompassing straight up lies: mistranslated objects, etc., just generally very bad history.

My goal would be to make something that was accurate but also inclusive, so we could show in quick snapshots how what we would today call LGBTQ+ people existed, persisted, and sometimes resisted as communities.

The map itself will just be a simple clickable continents map, which when clicked will bring up relevant stories, sources, objects, and information about queer history on that continent. Asia, for example, might have lists of info about the terms cut-sleeve boy or wakashudo, and examples of works of art or literature of same-sex love: for example, Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio or the ukiyo-e prints of Japan.

The virtue of having this a digital project is immediate: it’s inviting people interacting with the project to think on a more broad scale as to how a biological fact—attraction and sexuality between people of the same gender occurs naturally in the human population—has been viewed and understood across different time periods and in different cultures.

This is quintessentially made possible by a digital project—a paper requires one to get in detail about one particular period and place, whereas this is history on a broader scale, to see how one biological inclination was viewed in umpteen different cultures around the world. As a paper, this would be broad to the point of uselessness. As a digital project, however, it’s actually useful and natural as a topic. Digital projects work well in more survey courses style of historiography, after all.

For my terms and information about historical predecessors to what we now call the LGBTQ+ umbrella, I’ll be turning mainly to queer theory as well as historians with a focus on same-sex attractions in history.

 

The relationship between oppressed communities and traditional historians and historiography has long been a fraught one. In our modern age, where the civil rights and protections for LGBTQ+ people are under constant discussion and threat, religious ideology and political will make representations of the past for historians both clearer and more difficult.

If we were to speak regarding the official history of the country, only in the last few years has the history of LGBTQ+ people been brought to life at all for the modern American public—and then, as in much oppression-based literature, unevenly relegated to one part of the country, let alone the world.

This geographical basis for knowledge and teaching is not an unusual difficulty faced by the LGBTQ+ community nor confined only to us. In school, we teach children about the Civil Rights movement and the Civil War in entirely different and disparate ways, based on the level of education of their teacher and where he or she was born.  In Montgomery County, the heartland of the Civil Rights movement, there was no monument to any Civil Rights or other black leaders in the city until 2013. There remain, however, over sixty confederate monuments, including, right across the street from the Rosa Parks library, a much grander Jefferson Davis theater towering over it.

This tension is played out across the field of history, especially outside the cleanness of the academy. If we argue as historians that history serves purposes to our society and the world, as was discussed in the History Manifesto (flawed as I found that piece), we also have to be thoughtful about what we show the public, since that by its nature reflects choices, and preferences some stories over others.

My project will restrict itself to mostly museum ventures, in an attempt to capture and meditate on that push and pull, between traditional understandings of history and the histories not written about and forgotten. Smithsonian museums, the Holocaust Memorial, and the literature around the new creation of the placard for Stonewall under President Obama are examples of public history I’ll use to discuss how historians have created easily-found—or not so easily found—rebuttals to the age-old trope of LGBTQ+ communities being without a past. I will focus with most clarity on the language used and how quickly this information is to find—is it buried in the back of a Smithsonian website? Is it shown anywhere at all? Is there any information, for example, about two-spirit people in the American Indian museum? If so, how easy is it to find? These and other attempts to pry apart the making of traditional history from the real blood and life of the people who lived it will be the bulk of my paper.

My guiding question and guiding light is simply this: what are we portraying as digital historians about the history of marginalized groups of people?

This week’s focus is on generating software—essentially, the tools to build your own website so you can more easily share your knowledge of history. The knowledge of how to cheaply and easily make a website for a project is invaluable to modern historians no matter what work they’re doing, and that is what these two services offer.

This week’s two resources are WordPress and Omeka.

WordPress

I’ve used WordPress many times, and found it both easy and powerful as a tool. I have more familiarity with WordPress.org, however, which allows you to buy server space from any web hosting site you desire and upload a copy of wordpress onto it. WordPress is so popular for amateur websites that many hosting companies offer one-click installs of a wordpress site.

The second method of using wordpress, which is a little more controlled, is by using a WordPress.com account. That is what we’ll be starting with.

So we’ve registered a site. The first order of business is choosing a theme. Themes are a site’s skin. There’s a bunch of free ones, but I would strongly urge anyone looking for a theme to only use themes found on the wordpress.org site—downloading random themes opens you up to malignant code and hacking galore. Plugins, which we’ll discuss later, run by the same idea.

So now we have a WordPress.com site with a theme! Time to add a blog post.

Here we see a new blog post with a title. Time to customize it.

The really neat thing about WordPress is how damn easy it is to make something that looks great. Not every website building software has that functionality, trust me on that. Most require heavy customization and knowledge of css and html to get looking anything like professional—Wordpress in all its forms has that functionality right out the box.

There are two editors for WordPress: Visual and HTML/Text. HTML/Text lets you edit the html of the post inline. Here I’ve put simple header 1 tags and italics around the words. If you know HTML that functionality can become extremely useful, and cool. Youtube embed codes are a good example of how to use HTML/Text responsibly.

And here’s the result of my html edits!

One of WordPresses neatest features is Categories. These are good because you use them to group posts, and you can on paid wordpress and wordpress.org installations turn that into easy menus for your blog or website.

Here’s how you add a category. I added one called Junk.

You can also add tags, to make tag clouds and to help your audience find other posts or pages easily. They’re very easy to add, just type them in and press enter.

You can set a featured image, which will appear as the thumbnail of the post, including in Google.

Now we’ve added a featured image!

Here’s some of the formats you can make your post. These formats are also customizable if you have a paid wordpress.com account or a wordpress.org build.

Here’s some more options to customize!

Now to add some text and a picture. I used good old Lorem Ipsum for text. One of the neat functionalities of WordPress is the ease with which it lets you find beautiful photos to use, and how customizable adding those photos is.

Here’s how it looks to search public photos from the free photo library.

By default, the image will stick itself in not floating and off to the left. This can be changed to centered:

Or floating/text-wrapped to the right or left.

Now it’s publishable by clicking the big blue button!

Another part of WordPress that pushes it head and shoulders above its competitors is how SEO-friendly it is, making your site really easy to find on Google.

Even the free plan has tons of customizable tidbits under settings.

The other wonderful thing about WordPress are its plugins. Plugins increase functionality a hundred percent. Virtually anything is possible with them. There’s tens of thousands and if you want it, someone has probably made a plugin for it.

The Result

Take a look at the blog I just created here! That’s an example of some of the functionality and use of WordPress.

Omeka

For historians, a version of website automation has been created called Omeka.net. For a historian’s needs, Omeka meets them nicely, with a sleek interface and a lot of ability to make a useful online exhibit. That said, Omeka does not have the flexibility of WordPress, and I personally will continue using WordPress, even for my history sites.

Most of Omeka’s functions are locked behind a pay wall, but I did start a free trial to see what it’s all about.

Just like on WordPress, I built us an Omeka domain. There were a few limited plugins, but none that really jumped out at me as being worth playing around with.

Adding objects to create an exhibit is extremely fluid and easy.

First I added a collection.

Then I added an object to the collection. The process was easy and took only a minute’s time in total.

This wordpress isn’t allowing me to add more screenshots, so I’ll have to allow you guys to follow my verbal instructions! Filling in the info to add an item is easy enough, with most of the possibiliites clearly labeled and described. There was a slight functionality problem in that the tabs at the top to get to different parts of the exhibit item addition did not grab my eye, and I ended up publishing the item before putting the item in, since that was in a separate tab.

Omeka has a lot less sleekness and global use than WordPress. It does not have much out-of-the-box flexibility, whereas WordPress has loads.

Here, however, is the end product.

The Result

Take a look at the exhibit I just created here!

Concluding Thoughts

• Which of the two tools do you find easiest and most user-friendly?
• How do you feel about your wordpress blogging career so far?
• Do you see merits to Omeka and what it can do for a historian that are unique to us, or do you agree with me that WordPress functionality could more easily be moulded into that space?