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, […]
Did you know that October is Canada's official LGBTQ2S+ History Month? To mark the occasion, we invite you to join us on Monday, October 2, 2023 for a moderated roundtable discussion about current trends, challenges, and interventions in the research and study of trans histories in both Canada and Germany, featuring visiting historical scholars from Freie Universität Berlin and graduate students in history at the University of Toronto.
An upcoming multi-media exhibition at the The ArQuives — Canada’s LGBTQ2+ archives — brings a new lens into the queer history of 20th century Canadian nightlife. Titled “ONSTAGE/OFFSTAGE,” the exhibition explores “the ways stage performance in nightclubs, cabarets, and drag venues offered opportunities for self-actualization for gender fluid, trans, and gender non-binary individuals in the second half of the 20th Century.” The curator, Jordan King, is a multi-disciplinary artist, performer, and writer who is currently […]
Having a good sense of the LGBTQ+ archives and resources available in North America has been crucial in my scholarship. My doctoral project on the history of gay periodicals led me to a number of these repositories, which included both physical and online spaces. Yet the increasing number of queer archives and the occasional changes...
The Mexican trans community recently launched a digital archive that will play an important role in reconstructing, documenting, and preserving the memory of this community. Named Archivo Memoria Trans México (Trans Memory Archive Mexico), this digital platform and its related social media will also play a significant role in bringing the community together, engaging trans Mexican folks in the process of writing their history in their own terms. In this regard, Archivo Memoria Trans México […]