Harry Sutherland has been making documentaries for the queer community for quite some time. Over his years of conducting research he has stumbled across amazing, uplifting, and terrifying things on queer history, stretching back as far as 2,800 years. The result is Out of History, an ambitious film project which hopes to inform and inspire everyone who sees it. Arranged like a Wikipedia of film bytes from history, viewers will be able to travel different threads – political, social, you name it – to discover their own history.

We discussed the project with its creator to find out more.

GC: How did the project come about? What is your personal attachment to it?

HS: I was sort of like most people in North America, I think, in that I assumed the Stonewall Riots [in 1969] were sort of the beginning of the political process in some way, and I met a guy who was doing some research in Amsterdam on an incident that occurred in 1730. He was doing his PhD on the criminal process in Amsterdam in the 1700s, and he came across one day where thirty people were executed for sodomy. So it sort of stuck out, and he explained to me that the whole socialization of homosexuals in Europe began in the early 1700s. Basically what happened is they started building canals in Europe, so it was really the first time that working class men actually travelled anywhere – otherwise you were born somewhere, you lived there, you worked there, and you died there, unless you went to war. So it began this whole network. It was the beginning of gay people coming together as groups of people to meet, to have coffee, to eat, to have sex. Basically it was the beginning, along with industrialization and urbanization, of a huge social movement. And, as I looked into it, more and more I realized how big and diverse it was.

GC: Will Out of History have an international focus?

HS: My focus was European but as I started going along, of course, information came out on China, on Japan. Certainly the whole story in Africa is a huge political story, and it involves colonialism. I mean, the laws that they are using right now to attack gays and lesbians in places like Uganda were written by people in Europe. This isn’t really just European, but what I focused on for the moment is the European story, because that’s the one I researched. I’m not the one doing the Japanese or Chinese story; I think filmmakers from those cultures should be the ones doing those stories.

GC: Why did you choose dana.io for your crowdsourcing? What makes it better than the other ways of raising money for a project like this?

HS: I like their commitment to community and the filmmaker. The money in dana.io goes directly to the filmmakers. Like in Indiegogo or Kickstarter they collect the money for you, then two or three weeks after your campaign they give you back that money, but less a percentage. But with dana.io all the money goes directly to the person organizing the campaign.

GC: Why did you choose this way of documenting queer history?

HS: Since there is so much information and so many points of view, I think that what feature films do really well is help to galvanize people and bring attention to certain stories. The reason I picked the first film I’m doing, from 1869 to 1969, is that is the modern gay and lesbian history – 1869 is when the word homosexuality was created. It is also the beginning of photography and film. So when you are making a film like that, you’re mirroring the development of society in terms of technology and politics. If I were to start from Ancient Greece there would be nobody around to interview; no photographs, no film. And a lot of it is academic conjecture. But if we’re talking about the Second World War, we are still talking about the people who were there, or who have talked to people who were there, and I think that’s an interesting film.

GC: What were some things you discovered on the road to making the film that really amazed or shocked you?

HS: Gay men who had actually gone to the concentration camps [in World War II] and survived, and their stories. There was a Jewish scholar who wrote a book about life in the concentration camps, and one of the things he couldn’t understand was that on the one hand you have people wearing pink triangles, who were ostracized by everyone, and were regularly beaten to death, and who died in larger numbers than any other group. He couldn’t figure out, though, why these people were so despised and brutalized while at the same time there was homosexual activity going on in the camp between prisoners and guards. There was the odd contradiction between someone who was labelled a homosexual, and someone who claimed not to be but participated in homosexual activity. As long as homosexual culture has stayed in the closet, society has given us room to organize and participate in our activities. As soon as it becomes a conveniently political issue they round us up. There is something there that is buried in the western culture’s psyche that we have to be very careful about, and not underestimate.