Foolscap Audiotapes. A selection of the original audio tapes from the Foolscap Oral History Project. Photographer unknown, 2017.
Project Overview
The Foolscap Oral History Project (also known as the Toronto Gay History Project), conducted by John Grube and Lionel Collier between 1981 and 1987, documented the lives of nearly 100 gay men in Toronto born in the first half of the twentieth century. The Collaboratory worked with students to digitize the collection, produce metadata and abstracts, and curate a digital exhibition hosted on The ArQuives’ website, making these rich historical materials more accessible to researchers and the public.
Historical & Community Context
The Foolscap interviews capture Toronto gay life prior to the gay liberation movement, tracing the social, sexual, and cultural lives of men from the 1940s to the 1970s. Respondents shared memories of public cruising spaces, bars, and social networks, as well as experiences with policing, psychiatry, activism, and intergenerational tensions within gay communities. These recollections provide rare insight into pre-Stonewall gay communities in Canada and their strategies for creating social space under societal constraints.
Project Goals & Methodology
The project aimed to preserve, contextualize, and share the Foolscap oral histories. Collaboratory researchers digitized over 50 tapes, created written abstracts and metadata, and developed an interactive digital exhibition that maps the sites and social spaces described in the interviews. The project paired archival processing with digital curation to foreground narrators’ own voices and experiences while situating them within Toronto’s historical urban geography.
Research Scope
The collection comprises more than 100 life histories recorded between 1981 and 1987, totaling over 300 audio recordings from approximately 125 interviews. The digital activation focuses on interviews with 42 narrators, including politicians, activists, and artists such as George Hislop and Del Newbigging, and maps the public and semi-public spaces where gay men socialized, cruised, and built community in mid-twentieth-century Toronto.
Project Outputs
- Digitization of 52 tapes (42 interviews) from the original Foolscap collection
- Written abstracts, metadata, and archival descriptions
- Digital exhibition Mapping Foolscap: Gay Oral Histories 1981–1987, including an interactive map of Toronto gay spaces
- One interview conducted by the Collaboratory with original interviewer Lionel Collier discussing his involvement and photographs
Impact & Significance
Mapping Foolscap makes pre-Stonewall Toronto gay histories publicly accessible and preserves a unique record of community formation, social networks, and urban spaces central to LGBTQ+ life. The project demonstrates the potential of archival digitization combined with digital storytelling to engage contemporary audiences with historically marginalized voices, providing both research infrastructure and a public-facing intervention into the history of Canadian gay communities.
