Lesbians Making History Banner at Toronto Pride March. Copyright, Rachel Epstein, 1993.
Project Overview
Lesbians Making History is a community-based oral history project initiated in the mid-1980s by a Toronto-based lesbian feminist collective. Collective members included: Rachel Epstein, Maureen FitzGerald, Amy Gottlieb, Didi Khayatt, Mary Louise Noble, and Lorie Rotenberg. Inspired by contemporaneous gay and lesbian oral history projects in Buffalo, Boston, and San Francisco, the collective recorded interviews with nine women about their experiences living as “out” lesbians in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
In 2014, the Collaboratory digitized the original audio recordings, produced new verbatim transcripts, and worked with original collective members to edit transcripts, identify keywords, and write interview abstracts. The project culminated in a digital exhibition hosted at The ArQuives, making these histories accessible to new audiences.
Historical & Community Context
The Lesbians Making History collective emerged within a vibrant but often divided lesbian feminist community in 1980s Toronto. Committed to feminist principles of collaboration, open communication, and consciousness-raising, the collective sought to create a space where women could narrate their lives on their own terms and situate personal experience within broader questions of gender, class, sexuality, and politics.
The project was shaped by the political tensions of its moment, including debates around pornography, s/m, butch/femme identities, and relationships between lesbians and gay men. These debates—documented in the collective’s planning meetings—reflect wider fractures within lesbian feminism during the period. The project was also part of a transnational women’s oral history movement, with direct connections to projects such as the Buffalo Women’s Oral History Project.
Project Goals & Methodology
The collective aimed to document lesbian lives that were largely absent from official archives, while remaining accountable to community rather than academic institutions. Interviews were designed to privilege first-person narrative and to allow participants to speak expansively about relationships, work, politics, sexuality, and community.
Planning was central to the methodology. The collective held extensive meetings to discuss interview design, participant selection, and ethical concerns, grounding the project in feminist collaborative practice. These planning discussions—later digitized and transcribed—now form part of the historical record themselves, offering insight into lesbian feminist oral history methods in the 1980s.
Research Scope
The project includes oral history interviews with nine women whose lives span the 1920s through the 1980s, with particular focus on experiences of lesbian life in Toronto and beyond during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Narrators recount coming out, relationships, bar and social scenes, political activism, work and class, encounters with policing and psychiatric institutions, and participation in feminist and homophile movements.
The digitized collection also includes recordings and transcripts of the collective’s 1986 planning meetings, providing rare documentation of the process behind a community-based feminist oral history project.
Emergent Themes
- Lesbian social worlds and spaces
- Negotiating visibility and risk
- Class, work, and economic precarity
- Gender expression and sexuality
- Politics and community activism
Project Outputs
- Digitized audio recordings of all interviews
- New verbatim transcripts created in collaboration with original collective members
- Interview abstracts and keywords
- Digitized planning meeting recordings and transcripts
- A publicly accessible digital exhibition hosted at The ArQuive
Impact & Significance
Lesbians Making History preserves rare first-person accounts of lesbian life in mid-twentieth-century Canada and documents the feminist labour behind community oral history work itself. The interviews have been widely used in scholarship, teaching, and documentary film, including Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives.
By digitizing and activating the collection in collaboration with original project members, the Collaboratory extended the life of a community-driven archive while honouring its feminist and anti-institutional origins. The project stands as a foundational example of how grassroots oral histories can be preserved, contextualized, and shared without severing them from the communities that created them.
