Couldn’t make it to the Trans Collection Guide Launch on December 3rd 2020? The session is now up on the UofT Digital Humanities Network’s Youtube! This roundtable discusses the trans holdings of The ArQuives and the histories and futures of trans archival practices. Click here to watch!
A potential benefit of digitizing zines is increasing their accessibility. While a physical copy of Mirha-Soleil Ross’ gendertrash from hell might be hard to come by for many people in 2017, putting a high quality scan of the zine online makes it accessible to anyone with an internet connection, right? Not really. Depending on the context, “access” can take on very different meanings. I think we should think critically about what it means to make […]
TW: Description of a film that deals with child abuse Some Thoughts on Child-Play: a self indulgent rant by an over-eager cinema student We’ve been struggling to make our digital exhibition on SAVAC’s Not a Place on the Map Desh Pardesh oral history project more visual. The oral history interviews are riveting, but as an audience, it’d be hard to stay interested in around 36 hours of raw tapes. I was surprised and excited to […]
Archival objects can be powerful and moving. When they are centred around LGBTQ people, they can bring hope and joy. Some objects found in the Mirha-Soleil Ross fonds demonstrates this hopefulness to me. In her collection Mirha-Soleil Ross donated some pictures that were professionally taken of her and her partner at the time, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay. When Ms. Ross donated the photos to the CLGA, she attached a note requesting that we digitize them soon, showing […]
For the past few weeks I have been reading transcripts of the interviews that John Grube conducted in the 1980s with Canadian gay men born in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the most interesting topics in the interviews is the experiences that these men had with the gay bar culture in Toronto during the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Going to bars or “beverage rooms” was instrumental in their coming out experience, […]
Listening to the Foolscap interviews, it seems impossible to have been in Toronto in the 1960s without realizing that the St Charles Tavern was a hotbed of gay activity. However, researching press coverage of the bar, it’s clear that this watering hole’s queerness was fairly hidden from most of the public in the 1960s. A brief review of Globe and Mail articles between the 1940s and 1960s rarely link homosexuality to the St. Charles Tavern. It’s […]