LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory

Collect, archive, and publish.  These are the three phases of an oral history project. You can break it down into smaller processes and objectives, but those smaller categories can be collapsed into these three categories. Record your interviews, archive them, and publish an article that makes use of the collected material. The most community-engaged (and generously funded) projects, especially in the digital age, have broadened the idea of what it means to publish public history […]

Can I say this? Is it a betrayal? I’ve found myself asking these questions a few times since fellow oral historian, Alisha Stranges, and I wrapped up the interviewing phase of the Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP). Interviewing queer and trans elders, especially those that were part of such a radical chapter of Toronto’s LGBTQ+ history, was one of the most amazing experiences afforded me as both a scholar and a young queer person. […]

I had been on testosterone for one month when I did my first Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP) interview. I remember Alisha Stranges, the co-oral historian, hitting record on the Zoom interview and thinking to myself, “that’s it. This version of you, one that will eventually be unrecognizable to you, is going to be archived.” At the beginning of every interview, I would think a different version of that thought; this went on for […]

Reposted from April 16, 2021. Did you know that the 2000 Pussy Palace had an instant photo room? On the fourth floor of the Palace, a sign reading “porn/photo room” directed patrons in two equally playful directions: towards a room for screening pornography and/or towards a room for having Polaroids taken to document one’s night at the bathhouse (Blair 163; Vogels paras. 10-13). In our most recent oral history interview, Carlyle Jansen, one of the founding members of the Toronto Women’s […]

In The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, Alessandro Portelli opens with, well, the death of Luigi Trastulli, a young steelworker who was allegedly killed by police during a public protest in Terni, Italy. As Portelli guides the reader through the inconsistencies riddled throughout oral histories that recount Trastulli’s death, he argues that oral histories “are not always fully reliable in point of fact. Rather than being a […]