Co-creating a “usable past” for LGBTQ+ people in the present.
Completed Projects
Since 2014, the Collaboratory has collected, digitized, and created over 250 individual oral histories about LGBTQ2+ life in Canada and the United States. Some of these oral history projects include two 1980s community-based projects (Lesbians Making History and Foolscap Gay Oral History Project, c.130 interviews). In addition to these discrete projects, the Collaboratory has also digitized many interviews held in The ArQuives’ collections, including interviews conducted by David Churchill, among others.
Follow the links in each description to engage more closely with each project’s public outcomes.
GUIDES & ORAL HISTORIES
Prepared by the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory with The ArQuives. The 70-page Trans Collections Guide is designed to assist researchers and community members interested in exploring trans histories at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives.
It provides a general overview of relevant materials in The ArQuives’ holdings, including the collections of Canadian artists, activists, and intellectuals like Mirha-Soleil Ross, Rupert Raj, and Anton Wagner. It also includes detailed information about how to request and access these materials. This guide also identifies common challenges that researchers face when exploring trans histories both at The ArQuives and more generally in collections predominately focused on gay and lesbian histories.
On December 3, 2020, we celebrated the launch of the Trans Collections Guide with a roundtable discussion about the trans holdings at The ArQuives and the histories and futures of trans archival practices. Moderator: Elspeth Brown; Speakers: Morgan M. Page, Monica Forrester, Syrus Marcus Ware, and Susan Stryker.
PROJECT TEAM
FOR THE COLLABORATORY
Nick Matte, Elspeth Brown, Haley O’Shaughnessy, Al Stanton-Hagan, K.J. Rawson, and Eli Holliday
FOR THE ARQUIVES
Raegan Swanson, Rebecka Sheffield, Alan Miller, Harold Averill, and Lucie Handley-Girard
The Queer Peel Oral History Project was a student-driven initiative that emerged from a 3rd year history course at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, in early 2020. Seeking to create primary sources about queer and trans life in the suburbs, the Queer Peel Oral History Project features 25 oral history interviews with LGBTQ2+ activists, students, alums, and residents of the Peel region with relevant news articles and other contextualizing visuals.
The Lesbians Making History (LMH) collective came together in the mid-1980s and was inspired by oral history projects of gay lives coming out of Buffalo, Boston and San Francisco. The collective interviewed 9 women about their experiences as ‘out’ lesbians in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. In 2014, the original audio tapes were given to the The ArQuives via the LGBTQ Digital Oral History Collaboratory. Embedded at The ArQuives, Collaboratory members digitized LMH materials and created new verbatim transcriptions. Original LHM collective members assisted with editing transcripts, identifying key words and writing abstracts for each oral history interview.
Project Lead: Dr. Cait McKinney
Hon Lu with his cousin, Shanobi Lam, at their cousin’s wedding, photo booth, 2009
The Family Camera Network was a collaborative, community-based project at the intersection of photography and oral history, wherein our network of cultural institutions, researchers, digital librarians and archivists developed the first multi-partner scholarly study of family photography as a critical building block for understanding self, family, community, and nation in Canada.
Collecting 42 oral histories, 60 albums, 37 home videos, and over 17,000 accompanying family photographs, The Family Camera Network established a public archive of family photographs and their stories, focused on migration in the near or distant past, and to and within Canada. Housed at the Royal Ontario Museum and The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, the Family Camera Network also spurred the Queering Family Photography exhibition.
Project Lead: Elspeth Brown
“Bridegroom,” photograph by Sarah Davidmann, 201x.
This project explores the experience of partners of trans* men, focusing on partners who were with their partner before and during at least six months of the transition, however defined (the couple does not have to be together now). 50 interviews have been completed in Canada and the U.S. so far.
Project Lead: Elspeth Brown
“Trans Rights are Human Rights,” photograph by Vanessa Nunes.
This oral history project focuses on the 1998 delisting and 2008 re-listing of sex reassignment surgeries in Ontario (as medical procedures funded by the province). This project brought together the voices, memories and experiences of people who were either effected by the policy changes, or who worked to fight for access to quality health care and equality for trans people in Ontario and beyond.
Project Lead: Nick Matte
DIGITAL COLLECTIONS LAB
This project was a partnership with the Jackman Humanities Institute’s Scholars-in-Residence program. For May 2016, we ran an intensive digital collections lab with five undergraduate students, out of The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives (formerly the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives), to create three digital collections:
PROJECT TEAM
PROJECT LEADS
Elspeth Brown, Cait McKinney, Juan Carlos Mezo Gonzalez, Sajdeep Soomal, Sid Cunningham
UNDERGRADUATES
Alisha Krishna, Amal Khurram, Caleigh Inman, Mac Stewart, Zohar Freeman
Toronto’s Desh Pardesh festival (1988–2001) was a multidisciplinary arts festival that showcased underrepresented and marginalized voices within the South Asian diaspora. In collaboration with SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre), we will produce a digital collection that streams these already complete, born-digital interviews with artists and activist of colour, and brings additional context to the interviews through digitized visual materials that document the festival.
Project Lead: Saj Soomal, SAVAC
Mirha-Soleil Ross (b. 1969, Montréal) is a transsexual media artist, activist, and sex-worker, who lived in Toronto from the early 1990s until 2008, the period covered by her fonds at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives (formerly the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives). The Collaboratory has partnered with the The ArQuives and Ms. Ross to processes these unparalleled records of trans art and activist histories in the city. The first batch of processing was completed in April 2016 and the collection is now open to researchers.
In May 2017, we developed digital collections based on these materials as part of our Scholars-in-Residence Digital Collections Lab. Sid Cunningham, Caleigh Inman, and MacKenzie Stewart, students from the 2017 Scholars-in-Residence Program, created the gendertrash zine digital exhibition for The ArQuives.
Project Leads: Cait McKinney and Sid Cunningham
Collaborators: Nora Butler Burke, Aaron Cain, Trish Salah
Between 2016 and 2019, the Collaboratory collected and digitized 176 audio cassettes and over 30 transcripts featuring over 125 oral history interviews of gay men in Toronto discussing their experiences of pre- and post-Stonewall community life (specifically, the 1950s, 60s, and 70s). These interviews comprised the Foolscap Gay Oral History Project, which the late John Grube started in 1980.
Grube and Lionel Collier, an undergraduate student at the time, both collected a great number of interviews with local gay men in Toronto. These interviews were intended to document the formation of gay social spaces in the city, in addition to the personal histories of the gay men interviewed. Most of these interviews were conducted within the 1980s, although an interview with Lionel Collier conducted in 1997 is included in the fonds.
We are currently working on a Finding Aid for the collection; interested researchers are welcome to contact Elspeth Brown (elspeth.brown@utoronto.ca).
A special note of thanks to former undergrad Zohar Freeman, who was the project lead for many years.
For a sense of the materials, consult this digital exhibition on Foolscap that Prof. Brown’s students completed in 2017.