TQHP’s work began in traditional oral history interviews. To date we have collected twelve long-form interviews conducted in interviewees’ homes and usually ranging in length from 1.5 to 2 hours. The goal of the interviews is to learn more about the LGBTQ past and present in Tidewater, Virginia. We are interested in what it has been like to be an LGBTQ person living in Southeastern Virginia — the good, the bad, the mundane. In 2016 TQHP interviewed six attendees at Hampton Roads PrideFest. We expected to spend five minutes talking to people at Pride, but participants were so eager to tell their stories, and those stories were so genuinely interesting, that most interviews lasted for nearly half an hour.
TQHP’s plan is to archive the interviews so that they are publicly accessible to the community. There are several possibilities for archiving, but the interviews will likely be stored online by a local library.