StoryCorps Takes On Its First LGBT Project

StoryCorps Takes On Its First LGBT Project
Frontiers LA
By Frank Bua
06/03/2014

For today’s LBGTQ youth, it may be difficult to imagine a time where the Gay Rights movement wasn’t traveling with EZ-Pass. But just under 50 years ago, gays faced a long struggle just to rise above the discrimination and needless suffering of the pre-Stonewall era. Now the stories of those early heroes on the frontlines of history will be told. StoryCorps, an independent nonprofit oral history project, is set to unveil OutLoud, a three-year initiative dedicated to recording LGBTQ voices across America.

Since its modest rollout with one recording StoryBooth in Grand Central Station in October 2003, StoryCorps has evolved into a preservation juggernaut, compiling more than 50,000 interviews that are catalogued and maintained in the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center. Each interview is facilitated by a coordinator but conducted by people who know each other intimately (father and son, husband and wife, grandmother and granddaughter). These unscripted back-and-forth conversations are often as revealing to the people participating in them as they are to any stranger. If you’ve found yourself crying the middle of NPR’s Morning Edition, you are probably listening to a StoryCorps interview.

StoryCorps has long been committed to recording and sustaining silent voices in American history. While David Isay, founder and President of StoryCorps, may be straight, personal and generational imperatives lead him to believe that now is the ideal moment for OutLoud. His father was Dr. Richard Isay, a psychiatrist and gay rights advocate who famously fought the notion of homosexuality as an illness...

...Once this project is complete, OutLoud will become more than merely a rich collection of LGBTQ stories. StoryCorps is preserving the historic narrative while reminding us all that the foundation of the LGBTQ movement was built with blood, sweat, setbacks and tears—not Facebook and Twitter posts....
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