Despite a growing number of digital LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer, intersex) history archives, and research-driven digital LGBTQI initiatives, queer perspectives have not been prominent in the digital humanities. Furthermore, investigations of LGBTQI in literary history is hampered by the fact that, to date, there are no broad scholarly inventories of such literature. Due to the absence of exhaustive bibliographies, scholars need to perform time-consuming, human reading of individual works and imprecise searches in order to locate LGBTQI motifs and themes. Research on subject indexing has also revealed that controlled vocabularies in use are too general to describe LGBTQI themes, motifs, and characters in a relevant manner. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how LGBTQI literature can be made more searchable, and more visible through the development of a quality-controlled subject specific database (QUEERLIT database) in which specialized subject indexing is applied. Methodological challenges pertaining to indexing of queer literary texts with implicit LGBTQI motifs are discussed, as well as theoretical considerations raised when assigning certain contemporary subjects to historical texts.