Avery Dame-Griff is a Lecturer in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Gonzaga University. He founded and serves as primary curator of the Queer Digital History Project, an independent community history project cataloging and archiving pre-2010 LGBTQ spaces online. He also maintains the Archival Internet Video Index, which indexes video footage of pre-Internet and early Internet communication platforms.

His book, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023) tracks how the Internet transformed transgender political organizing from the 1980s to the contemporary moment. In 2022, he was selected to be a Public Humanities Fellow for Humanities Washington, developing a series of interactive online exhibits, teaching guides, and workshops about the history of LBGTQ+ communities in online spaces. For 2024-2025, he will be a member of Humanities Washington’s Speakers’ Bureau.

Recent and Upcoming Talks, Interviews, and Publications

Recent and Upcoming Talks

• “Defining Who We Are Not: Transgender Usenet and the Rise of Cisgender,” Thu, Sept 21, 2023, 5:00 to 7:00 pm. Berkeley Film and Media Seminar series, University of California, Berkeley.
• “The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet Book Talk (Hybrid event),” Thu, Nov 2, 2023 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM EDT. Hosted by The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, + Tech Series @ McGill University.
• “The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet,” Michigan Interactive and Social Computing Research Group, University of Michigan. November 13, 2023.
• Ethical Digital Archiving of Sexual Minority Narratives Colloquium, B’AI Global Forum, University of Tokyo, February 2024.
• “When It Was Ours: A Queer and Trans Counterhistory of the Internet,” Keynote Speaker for 43rd Annual Gender Studies Symposium, Lewis & Clark College. March 6, 2024.

Interviews

• “The Two Revolutions,” The New Books Network.
• “How the early internet defined what it meant to be ‘transgender’,” Soundside, KUOW (Seattle Public Radio)
• “Many Revolutions: Archiving the trans internet with Avery Dame-Griff,” The Baffler.
• “Tech Talks: Avery.” Center for Antiracist Research, Boston University.

Publications

• “Did You Yahoo?: Exploring the Ethical Challenges of Preserving Dormant Platforms.” Full Stack Feminism. September 2023.
• “Digital Queers: How Computers Transformed LGBTQ Life in the United States.” Process. Blog of the Organization of American Historians (OAH).
• “Love, Acceptance, and Screeching Modems.” Spark Magazine.