How to Make the Most of Our Quistory

When I came out as a lesbian in 2000 at the age of fourteen, I didn’t know any other gay people. The stories I read about Sappho and Oscar Wilde and Harvey Milk were what I turned to for a sense of community. I read up on LGBTQ history from sources ranging from books in my school library to Wikipedia. These bygone figures provided me with two essential gifts.

The first was normalization of my feelings. When you read a love letter between two men from 200 years ago, it reads just like it was from this week—struggles with coming out, confusion over being different, and a passionate affection for each other. The sense of the heteronormative culture around them being unsafe is true today as well, even in the countries that no longer execute their citizens for committing sodomy, the threat of hate crimes, employment and housing discrimination, and family disapproval are still just as relevant.

This normalization was not like the conformist view that LGBTQ people “are just like straight people.” We are each unique individuals no matter our sexual identity. Some of us want to be married and monogamous with two children, others don’t. I could see the full spectrum of diversity within the queer community from our histories. Every country, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, economic class, type of body, and profession was represented in the hundreds of stories I devoured. Anyone can discover pieces of themselves in our past, even if marginalized stories are often harder to find.

The other gift I got from learning about queer history was feeling loved. When I read about the incredible sacrifices LGBTQ activists had made over the decades—putting their lives on the line and sometimes losing them—to make the world a little safer for all LGBTQ people, I knew that I was one of those LGBTQ people the activists from years ago were working to protect. I felt so touched thinking about icons as recent as Ellen DeGeneres, whose courage paved the way for modern advances. I still feel a strong connection to these ancestors who gave so much so that I could live in a fairer world today.

Bringing those two gifts to the next generation is why I created the Quist mobile app. Quist (short for “queer history”) displays these stories on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. The 800 Quist stories range from examples of LGBTQ individuals making significant contributions to society (Nobel prizes, firsts in their field, Olympic medals, publishing works of literature) to watershed legislation (countries criminalizing or decriminalizing sodomy, banning or passing same-sex marriage) to famous icons coming out. Nothing is held back: Executions and hate crimes against LGBTQ people are included along with the positive, and I made every effort to intentionally lift up stories from intersex, asexual, genderqueer, and other marginalized sexual and gender identities. I hired amateur researchers of different identities from different countries so that I was not the only gatekeeper of information.

As the way the masses consume information changes, we must change the way we distribute information. People are getting used to reading the news as quick headlines with short blurbs that deliver the facts in scannable text on a screen. Whether this is good or bad is debatable, but whether it is true is not. Quist delivers historical information in this format, with links to more information after the blurb for readers who want to take their learning deeper.

This medium proved to be extremely popular. In the first six months of availability on the Apple and Android app stores, 15,000 people downloaded Quist. Eighty Websites covered the launch, along with seven radio and television shows and unknown print news sources. Articles were not only written in English, but Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, and Hebrew as well. Eleven thousand of the 15,000 downloads came from the United States, and the other 4,000 were spread across twenty-two countries in the Americas, twenty-nine countries in Asia and Australia, seven countries in Africa, and thirty-six countries in Europe. These numbers were humanized...