Tell us a little bit about yourself.
At Oberlin, I was a history major, ate at Fairchild coop, helped organize one of the college's first transgender awareness weeks, edited the queer student magazine "undisclosed recipients", and played violin in student ensembles such as the Oberlin Orchestra. Since graduating, I have worked at a number of nonprofits and publications, including The Nation, the Earth First! Journal, SCOPE, and Creating Common Ground.  I recently created an online interactive archive of Oberlin's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history.

What were the major challenges for you and the other LGBT students at Oberlin College in the late 1990's?
For the most part, Oberlin felt like an incredibly fertile place to
learn, cultivate critical thinking skills, and develop authentic identities -- including queer identities. The challenge (for me and others) was to connect with people from different backgrounds to transform our individual work into collective work, and to do this in a thoughtful, respectful way, while also not losing sight of the world
outside of Oberlin. Definitely a learning experience!

You just finished a major project examining the history of the LGBT community at Oberlin College .  Could you tell us a bit about the project and how you became interested in it?
I started the project as a senior year private reading, after a summer internship at San Francisco 's GLBT Historical Society. The final product was originally a long essay exploring gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered life at Oberlin College from the 1920s to the early 1970s.

About a year ago, I began developing a website, which seemed like the obvious medium to not only present this material in an accessible way, but also to allow the Oberlin community to enrich the historical record by adding their own stories and submitting photos, articles, and other documents.

What do you hope to accomplish with the site?
I'd like the site to become a repository for all things queer and Oberlin. I hope it will continue to expand as alumni and students submit first-person essays, photos, historical narratives, interviews, artwork, audio and video clips, and related materials. Given their under representation on the site right now, I think it's especially important that women, people of color, and transgendered people submit materials and post stories. If successful, the site could also serve as a model for other community history projects and the beginning of a history of LGBT life at U.S. college campuses (a book on this subject has not yet been written).

Are you still looking for funds to keep the site going?
Yes! Funds will be used for hosting fees, website design, and other related expenses. It's possible that funds might also be used to support student research at some later date. Donations are
tax-deductible, and information can be found on the website.