Homosaurus

Homosaurus is a thesaurus or controlled vocabulary dedicated to LGBTQ+ terms.^[1][2] It aims to replace and complement outdated and disparaging definitions in broader vocabularies such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings,^[1][3][4][5] and has been used by the Library of Congress since 2016.^[6]

The Homosaurus logo

The project was started in 1982, where it was made as a standalone vocabulary to describe the collection for the IHLIA LGBT Heritage in Dutch. It was significantly expanded in 1987, and was merged with a queer-focused vocabulary from Anna Blaman Huis. In 1997, it was translated into English as A Queer Thesaurus,^[4][5] which was available in both Dutch and English.^[7]: 159 In 2013, it was renamed to the Homosaurus^[5] and expanded with a focus on reducing its bias towards white cisgender gay men.^[4] In 2016, it was decided to reduce the scope of the vocabulary to LGBTQ+ terms only.^[4][8] Since then, it has been used to support any use for collating LGBTQ+ works.^[4][9]

The thesaurus has been translated into Swedish and French.^[9][10] An effort to translate the project into Spanish was started in 2023 in collaboration with the San Francisco Public Library, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, and the Arizona Queer Archives^[9] when the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities granted 350,000 dollars to do so. It is slated to finish in late 2026.^[6]