LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory

Curated by Collaboratory Oral Historian, Elio Colavito, this blog series ran from March to December of 2022. Posts featured a mix of external and internal contributors. As the series evolved, Colavito transitioned from the traditional blog format to reflective forewords introducing short video interviews with fellow scholars and community narrators. Each entry emphasizes critical reflections on queer and trans* oral histories beyond the scope of their focus in time, shifting analysis to the multiple meanings […]

Everyone listens to podcasts.   I don’t even listen to podcasts and I still listen to podcasts, you know what I mean?   Academics especially love podcasts, and for good reason; they’re a common-sense way to publicize what academics already do. Lectures, panel conversations, and research outcomes can be easily (or at least we try to imagine it as easily) adapted into a podcast. The popular media format meets oral history in the perfect place, with rich […]

Rupert Raj, a Eurasian-Canadian, pansexual, and trans activist since 1971, is mindful of his place in the historical record. Raj added a new dimension to his activism in 2013 when LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory Director, Professor Elspeth Brown, organized his personal papers and recorded four oral history interviews with him for The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives. In addition to founding two service organizations, three support groups and three counselling/consulting services for transsexuals, crossdressers and […]

Oral historians often work with physical space in mind. At the very least, we conduct our interviews in quiet spaces that are hospitable to reflection and capturing crisp interview audio. If the project permits, interviews might be conducted in spaces significant to the histories being told for the historical record. The most public history-minded researchers may even return the histories to significant physical spaces, inviting the communities they belong to and the publics that frequent […]

“Celia Cruz looked like a drag queen, didn’t she?” I laugh. “Totally” “I brought five trannies from Cleveland, Ohio with me,” Gina tells me as she swiftly changes the subject from the Queen of Salsa to the queens of the park. “We used to be terrors in high school. Always the center of attraction.” She names them quickly, but I only catch four. Sharon, Lisa, Brenda, Roxane. “They all died,” she says. One of them […]