Queer Newark Oral History Project

The Queer Newark Oral History Project (QNOHP) was founded in the summer of 2011 by Darnell Moore, an activist and writer and the first chair of the City of Newark’s Advisory Commission on LGBTQ Concerns, Beryl Satter, a history professor at Rutgers University-Newark, and Christina Strasburger, the administrator of the Departments of History and African American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Bringing together Newark’s LGBTQ activists, high school students, artists, church leaders, professors, administrators and university staff, Moore and Satter convened a series of focused discussions with the goal of developing an initiative to collect and preserve the history of LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming communities in Newark. The term “queer” was chosen for the name of the project to showcase the resilience of an often-invisible population of Newarkers whose lives reflected sexual and gender diversity, whether or not they adopted LGBTQ identities.