This narrative history of LGBTQIA+ life at Princeton is incomplete and continuously evolving. We hope to expand this history to reflect a variety of lived experiences through the years. If there is something you would like to add to this history, or if you have an alternate viewpoint on any of the events highlighted, please let us know by filling out this form. We can’t wait to hear your story! Finally, it is important to note that this website and the accompanying archives are representative of the contributors' voices and experiences and as such, they do not represent the views of all Princetonians or the University at large.

Princeton LGBTQIA+ Oral History Project

About Us

Exploring the Oral History Project Web Exhibit

This website is designed to be easily navigable for both researchers and non-academics who want to gain more insight into Princeton’s queer past. To this end, we wanted our exhibit space to allow for different levels of engagement. Our landing page highlights section will take you on an immersive, multimedia trip through Princeton’s queer past from the early 1970s onward. For more in-depth research, we embedded full interviews from our archive in branching web pages with more detailed historical context for the events they discuss.

To listen to the voices the project has captured, you can feel free to peruse the decade tabs at your leisure, or jump straight to a desired interview or subject area through our index and search function. We aimed to make the interviews accessible for users with targeted interests by implementing a project-specific controlled vocabulary of identity and Princeton-oriented search terms. These terms, and associated content warnings, are displayed individually on each embedded interview and in the website’s index.

As curators, we paid close attention to the language our contributors used to describe themselves, their identities, and Princeton. The LGBTQIA+ community has a storied history with the language it has used to describe itself. If an interviewee did not self-identify as a certain identity, we did not tag an interview as such. Instead, in the interest of making associated identities easily searchable, we chose to “nest” some search terms together. For example, if you search for “lesbians,” results for “gay women'' will also appear

We understand that some interviewees do not identify themselves as queer, or have complicated relationships with the term. We use the terms “queer” and “LGBTQIA+” interchangeably on this site. This was a deliberate decision made in the interest of making our language as inclusive, consistent, and concise as possible.

Similarly, we wanted to respect the integrity of people’s memories of Princeton as a place. If you went to Princeton when the “School of Public and International Affairs” was known as the “Woodrow Wilson School,” or the “Carl A. Fields Center (CAF)” was known as the “Third World Center,” you’ll find that either of these searches will also bring up entries of the other.

We are very aware that the queer history of Princeton began long before the 1950s – queerness has existed in this space for as long as people have lived on this land. To that end, it is important to acknowledge that Princeton is located on the stolen ancestral land of the Lenni Lenape people, whose history this project is looking to collect in the future.

Likewise, Princeton’s queer history did not end in the early 2010s when our record becomes more sparse. Princeton’s institutional memory is short. Our project is committed to centering and amplifying untold stories, and we actively seek out underrepresented voices for our archive. Princeton is in no way exempt from the systemic forces that work to silence these voices in the first place. We plan to continue our efforts to diversify and expand our collection of oral histories in coming years – if your life isn’t represented in our archive, we want to hear from you.

The timeline section on our landing page showcases a snapshot of how Princeton as a space has been shaped by the queer people who have inhabited it, and those people have been shaped by it in turn. It was important to us that this section be sensorially immersive and interactive. It includes audio snippets from project interviews and scans of queer historical ephemera (largely sourced from Mudd archive). We elected to include audio snippets that helped us illustrate the story we wanted to tell about Princeton’s queer alum, staff, and faculty, and which corroborated our account of historical events on campus. The same is true of the ephemera we chose to display. 

We acknowledge that Princeton’s queer history is a living document. As with any historical record, our project contains holes and voices who challenge each other’s accounts. If you spot information on our website that does not match your memory, or you have questions or concerns about our curation process, please feel free to reach out to us through our feedback form, or to write to us directly through our email: grsc@princeton.edu.

Lastly, as highlighted on other areas of this website we want to reiterate that this website and the accompanying archives are representative of the contributors' voices and experiences and as such, they do not and should not be assumed to represent the position of Princeton University.

Metahistory Narrative: History of the Princeton LGBTQIA Oral History Project

Judy Jarvis, former Princeton LGBT Center Director and current Executive Director of the Princeton Office of Campus Engagement
‍June 2024

The Princeton LGBTQIA+ Oral History Project was an idea that Judy Jarvis, former Princeton LGBT Center Director, brought with her from Vassar University. Jarvis founded the Vassar LGBTQ Oral History Project with Hiram Perez, inspired by Darnell Moore's work on the Queer Newark Oral History Project. As part of her early conversations with students and colleagues on campus, Jarvis shared the idea of founding an LGBTQ oral history project at Princeton, and she found much enthusiasm for the idea in the Princeton community. That led her to found the Princeton LGBTQIA+ Oral History Project in the summer of 2017. The goal of the project was to interview LGBTQIA+ alumni and current and former LGBTQIA staff and faculty to learn about their lives, particularly their experiences being LGBTQIA+ (out and not out) at Princeton, and their perceptions of the climate for LGBTQIA+ people at Princeton across time.

Early partners of the project were the Princeton University Archives, the BTGALA/FRR alumni group (presently Queer Princeton Alumni), and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. The partnership with the University Archives was essential, and it was especially helpful to work with Valencia Johnson and others on the Special Collections team to create systems and processes to easily transfer the audio and transcript materials the LGBT Center would collect. The Special Collections librarians also consulted on the consent forms. The BTGALA/FRR alumni group was also an important partner, helping send out missives via their listservs to alumni, encouraging them to sign up for the project. A number of BTGALA/FRR board members also served on the Oral History Project Advisory Board, and were greatly helpful in developing outreach and other strategies (a list of the founding advisory board members can be found below). The Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies helped with outreach and Professor Justin Perez even used the archive for an assignment in his “Queer Ethnographies'' course.

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Founding Princeton LGBTQIA+ Oral History Project Advisory Board Members:

Suman Chakraborty ‘97 (Board Co-Chair) 

Christina Chica ‘15

Gill Frank (Visiting Fellow at P’s Center for the Study of Religion)

Howard Gertler ‘96

Lelabari Giwa-Ojuri ‘14

Robert Gleason ‘87

Judy Jarvis (former LGBT Center Director, Board Co-Chair)

Karen Krahulik ‘91

Tobias Rodriguez ‘11

Ruby Nell Sales *75

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Jarvis designed the initiative so that all interviews would be conducted in person by undergraduate and graduate students with the goal of collecting the stories of LGBTQIA alumni and former/current staff and faculty as well as creating connection between the interviewer and the narrator. The students were trained in oral history methods by former Princeton Visiting Fellow Gill Frank, and interviews took place in the summertime, when students could work full-time on the project. Through funding from the LGBT Center, the Princeton Histories Fund and donations from alumni, OHP student workers were able to travel throughout the country to conduct interviews; as of this writing, over 150 oral histories have been collected, accessible in the Princeton University library (via this link) and on this website.

Jarvis oversaw three years of the initiative, with students conducting interviews in the summer of 2017, 2018 and 2019. Along with Judy, LGBT Center program coordinator Andy Cofino served as the project manager in the summer of 2017 until he departed Princeton. When Jarvis departed the LGBT Center to found the Princeton University Office of Campus Engagement in September of 2019, former Associate Director Eric Anglero stepped in to manage the project from late 2019 through Anglero’s departure in early 2024. Interviews were paused during the summers of 2020 and 2021 due to COVID, but picked up again in 2022 and 2023. In the summer of 2024, a group of student contributors to the project, including Rodolfo Pineda ‘26 and Mirabella Smith ‘24, worked with web designer Alex Beige and professional staff members April Callis (Director of the Gender + Sexuality Resource Center – or GSRC) and Alex Rosado-Torres (Associate Director of the GSRC) to curate the digital exhibit space you are now exploring. 

Many of the individuals who have worked on the Oral History Project have consulted a document, Princeton LGBTQIA+ History Narrative, 1938-2013, as a jumping off point for the work. This narrative history was compiled by the Princeton LGBT Center as a multiyear project from 2004-2013. Although input was sought from multiple people, this written narrative should be most credited to Elizabeth Swanson ’12, Thomas Lipp ’08, and Debbie Bazarsky h’13 and former LGBT Center Director. Swanson ’12 and Lipp ‘08 were hired by the LGBT Center at different times to help construct a history of LGBT life at Princeton. They accessed the archives at Mudd Library; conducted personal interviews with active Princeton University alumni, former student leaders, and current and former staff and faculty; examined additional archival print media including The Daily Princetonian, Town Topics, and other Princeton publications; read through histories written by previous coordinators and Pride Alliance officers; examined available University reports; and searched through the recorded history of LGBT Student Services and the LGBT Center from 2001 through 2012.

This History Narrative continues to be vital to the work of the Oral History Project. In fact, much of the language on the website comes directly from this document, and we are grateful to the original authors for their work on this.

Since the founding of the Princeton LGBTQIA Oral History Project, student workers have been an essential part of its success, sharing the staff’s passion and excitement for gathering LGBTQIA stories.

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Founded in 2017, the Princeton LGBTQIA+ Oral History Project has worked to capture the life stories of LGBTQIA+ Princeton alumni, staff, and faculty. This digital exhibit has been curated to amplify the voices in our archive – to allow Princeton’s queer history and the lives of the people who wrote it to be heard. It is important to note that this website and the accompanying archives are representative of the contributors' voices and experiences and as such, they do not represent the views of all Princetonians or the University at large.

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