Oral History | LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory

All posts filed under: Oral History

Transcripts – Tretter Transgender Oral History Project

October 13, 2020

What would a World without transphobia look like? Is life getting better for trans people as a result of visibility? How do the qualms of other social categories intersect with trans identity? What would it take for Black trans people to live out liberation, to live joyfully? These are the types of questions that Myrl Beam, Assistant Professor at University of Minnesota and Virginia Commonwealth University, and Andrea Jenkins, the Vice President of the […]

Queer Peel Oral History Project!

May 10, 2020

by Elspeth Brown

Collaboratory News / Oral History / Public Humanities / Queer Peel Project / Trans History

What’s it like to be LGBTQ2+ in Canadian suburbs and edge cities? We’ve next to no primary sources about queer and trans life in Canada’s ‘burbs and edge cities, so my students and I decided to create some. This spring, students in my 3rd year history course at the University of Toronto, Mississauga conducted 25 oral histories with LGBTQ2+ activists, students, alums, and residents of the Peel region in the Greater Toronto Area. Our goal […]

Trans Oral History Post-Doc! (6 months)

January 26, 2019

by Elspeth Brown

Collaboratory News / Oral History / Trans History

Post-doctoral Fellowship in Trans Oral History The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (University of Toronto, ON), in collaboration with The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC) will award one six-month Postdoctoral Fellowship. The fellowship is to be taken up, and concluded, between 1 June 2019 and 30 March 2020 (exact starting and ending dates to be negotiated within this time frame). The Fellow will be expected to coordinate and conduct oral histories […]

Finding the Body in Foolscap

October 30, 2018

by Elspeth Brown

Foolscap Project / Gay History / Oral History

The Foolscap Project consists of a series of oral history interviewees, mostly conducted between 1981 and 1989 by John Grube and Lionel Collier conducted a series of oral history interviews with gay men born in the first half of the 20th century. The project produced over 100 autobiographical interviews. These interviews were invariably informed by conditions contemporaneous to the project: the Stonewall riots, Operation Soap, the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic within the community and […]

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 […]