All posts filed under: Oral History

Remembering the Delisting Years, Twenty Years Later

October 5, 2018
by Elspeth Brown
Oral History / Trans History

Twenty years after the delisting of gender confirmation surgeries in Ontario, the recent return of the Conservatives to power forces us to remember the ten year struggle for relisting that resulted from this decision. On October 1st, 1998, the newly-installed Conservative provincial government removed coverage for gender confirmation surgeries under the Ontario health care plan (OHIP). The delisting of these procedures, formerly referred to as sex reassignment surgery (SRS), was part of a broader plan […]

Queering Family Photography: A Short Film

June 19, 2018
by Elspeth Brown
Oral History / Photography / Public Humanities

In May 2016, The Family Camera Network launched a public archive project to collect and preserve family photographs and their stories, providing a resource for teachers, historians, and scholars to write new histories of photography, family, and Canada…The project has conducted over 30 interviews in total, including 16 oral history interviews with 13 queer and/or trans narrators about their family photographs. The photographs and video interviews are being preserved at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay […]

Queering Family Photography

June 15, 2018
by Elspeth Brown
Oral History / Photography / Public Humanities

On April 21st, 2018, the Queering Family Photography exhibition opened at Stephen Bulger Gallery, in conjunction with artist Sunil Gupta’s exhibition, Friends and Lovers – Coming out in Montreal in the 70s. Queering Family Photography explored the critical work that queer, trans, and two-spirited family photos do in documenting and creating queer modes of belonging, and how our emotional attachments to queer family photographs have also sustained LGBTQ2+ lives. The show traced how queer, trans, […]

Foolscap Oral Histories and Gay Bar Culture in Toronto and Mexico City

May 25, 2017
by Elspeth Brown
Foolscap Project / Gay History / Oral History

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, […]

Digitizing Oral Histories on VHS

February 1, 2017
by mckinneycait
Digitization / Oral History

Over the last several months we have been working toward expanding the formats we are able to digitize in order to preserve and improve access to oral histories recorded on video tape. Our VHS digitization station is now up and running at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. University of Manitoba Historian David Churchill‘s oral history interviews, conducted with gay men in Toronto in 1991, are the first batch of tapes we are working on. Churchill […]

Trans Elders’ Life Histories

November 24, 2016
by Elspeth Brown
Oral History / Trans History

It started innocently enough at a plenary panel the last morning of the Moving Trans* History Forward symposium at the University of Victoria in the spring of 2014. Presenters recounted their experiences in activism, writing and engagement with and within the transgender community. Immediately following the panel, I approached my colleague and friend, Aaron Devor, symposium organizer and now Chair in Transgender Studies at UVic, expressing both enthusiasm and concern. On one hand, I was […]