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"The Tidewater Queer History Project is a community-based organization dedicated to collecting, preserving, and documenting LGBTQ history from in and around Virginia’s Tidewater region.” The project was founded and is run by ODU’s Cathleen Rhodes, a senior lecturer in the Women and Gender Studies department. TQHP is a community grown, grassroots organization, being supported by local individuals and educators who believe in its mission.
The TQHP has done a lot in its time, including the creation of the Norfolk Queer Walking Tour, which brings participants face to face with local queer history and locations. The project also worked alongside ODU’s Perry Library to digitize the local paper Our Own Community Press, which was one of the longest running gay and lesbian newspapers in the country.
-Internship Overview-
There were three different intern positions available with the project in the Spring 2025 semester, including a social media intern, and a communications intern who helped produce the project podcast.. I secured the position for an archiving intern, a position focusing on conducting research and identifying, describing, cataloging, and maintaining the physical and digital archives of the TQHP. Later, in Fall 2025, I was one of 4 different interns. I was one of two archiving interns, while there was also another soical media intern, and an art intern.
Most of my time with the TQHP was spent working on my own assigned projects which are discussed under their specific semester in the sidebar. Along with this I also gave assistance to other interns with their projects, such as producing/writing episodes of the TQHP podcast and making social media posts. I did research work, specifically helping with verifying information and where certain quotes came from, and also gave ideas on sentence structure and the more technical sides of writing. Below is an example of research work I did: a write-up about the Our Own Community Press newspaper during the earliest years of its run.
Going into this internship, I was expected to have a foundation of organizational and writing skills, TQHP was looking more for interns who could work on projects pretty independently, without constant oversight. We were also largely allowed to make our own decisions about our workload and methods of doing things, allowing for a very manageable and unique experience.
When dealing with a project like TQHP, whose subject matter is so valuable and sensitive, there is a sense of responsibility that comes with your everyday work, an inherent duty to do your work well, as to honor the stories that you are preserving and taking care of. I believe this was my most important but mainly unspoken duty to the project.
To secure this internship, I communicated with the internship supervisor, Professor Cathleen Rhodes over email, sending her my resume and a cover letter explaining my purpose for applying and what I wanted out of a possible position. I was lucky enough to be selected for an interview and was quickly accepted into the fold. Paid internships are hard to come by in the humanities, so I was lucky enough to secure funding for my work through the Mellon Foundation, which “makes grants to support communities through the power of the arts and humanities.”
I want to thank my internship supervisor, Professor Rhodes, the Mellon foundation, Professor Zanoni of the ODU history department, and my fellow interns for giving me such a wonderful experience. In an increasingly dark world for knowledge, history, and academia, this internship has been a point of hope and brightness for me and I hope others too.
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