We began our work collecting oral histories as the Voices Out Loud Project (VOL Project) in 2016 following state and federal crackdowns on LGBTQ+ rights. In 2018 we began collecting physical and digital artifacts in addition the amazing stories told by our oral history narrators and thus Knoxville Queer History (KQH) was born.

To date, we have conducted 53 oral histories and collected hundreds of artifacts and thousands of documents that tell the story of queer people in Knoxville and Appalachia.