Queers in Quarantine: Love Stories
- Alexandra Lenihan
- School of Social Policy and Practice
Queers in Quarantine: Love Stories will be a website featuring queer love stories that blossomed, began, ended, or went through change while in quarantine in the US: offering both a public message board, for anonymous contributions, as well as five featured stories. Alexandra Lenihan will choose five stories from the public message board to feature and will create a different presentation for each of those stories, following approval from the writers. In making their selection, Alexndra will take into consideration diversity in race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability status, as well as geographic location. After the selection, Alexandra will conduct in-depth interviews with each participant, before developing interpretations of their stories as either a short documentary, an article-type interview, a comic strip, a podcast, and an animated film. The final collection will feature one of each. This project stems from a deep scholarly investment in the question: what can be learned from queer love? In a more immediate sense, Alexandra also wants to address the massive collective trauma that we are currently experiencing, which necessitates documentation. As Alexandra noted in her application, “I want to be one small voice helping to make sure queer people’s experiences are being documented during this time. Every form of archiving that can be done during the pandemic will be important, and I want to include queer stories in the larger narrative.”