Welcoming Megan Ingram, our inaugural “Creative Scholar in Virtual Residence.” Part scholarship and part cultural production, Megan is developing a new documentary project, using oral history interviews conducted with community activists working at the intersections of disability, queerness, healthcare access, housing, and poverty.
For this edition of “The Gays Did What Now?” we’re hyping up the crowd for Jamey Jesperson’s March 5, 2024, guest lecture Trans Misogyny in the Colonial Archive: A Sex Worker’s Counter-History at the University of Toronto. This talk promises to transport you (yes, YOU) through three choice stories of intrigue, passion and protest from colonial Mexico City and fur traders in Oregon County to the salacious media campaign against Black brothel worker Mary Jones in antebellum New York.
The Library is Open! (Let’s Keep It That Way) Was your non-committal New Year's Resolution to “read more”? Did you join a queer book club and silently sob at the price of the newest gay paperbacks? Are your internal organs begging you to take up a hobby with a somewhat lower stroke risk? The Toronto Public Library’s dedicated Pride Collection at the Yorkville branch is full of luxuriously queer books, DVDs, CDs, audio books, movies, ebooks, magazines, comics, maps, classes, groups, kids’ rooms, study spaces, conference rooms and anything else your little gay heart desires.
The Pussy Palace is back! Sort of. In November 2022, the club that hosted the Pussy Palace relaunched the pre-pandemic women and trans bathhouse night called, uh...Sapphic Aquatica? Held in the same historic bathhouse as the Pussy Palace, the pansexual swinger’s club, Oasis Aqualounge, ran another monthly women and trans bathhouse event from 2012-2019. Thought to be yet another permanent pandemic casualty, the party is back, back, back again in yet another form with the same fishy name.
It’s Gay Christmas, y’all! For decades, Toronto’s Gay Village has transformed into a massive, costumed block party for Halloween. But why? Learn about the legendary Halloween Drag Balls in the city, the clock tower that we’ve all forgotten, and the deeply Trans history of the one night a year you can dress as your true self, and no one can ding you for it.
Trans histories by trans historians are important. But with only a handful of trans history books and not a single academic journal dedicated to trans pasts, there are vast temporal, thematic, and geographical gaps in our histories. As two trans feminine graduate students in history at the University of Victoria, we set out to change that. In the summer of 2021, we took up editorship of our department’s peer-reviewed, graduate-student journal, The Graduate History Review, […]