The ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives, formerly known as the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, is a Canadian non-profit organization, founded in 1973 as the Canadian Gay Liberation Movement Archives. The ArQuives acquires, preserves, and provides public access to material and information by and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit communities primarily in Canada.[1][2]
The ArQuives was established in 1973 by The Body Politic's editorial collective (also known as the Pink Triangle Press). Established as the Canadian Gay Liberation Movement Archives, the organization changed its name to the Canadian Gay Archives in 1975. The Canadian Gay Archives incorporated in 1980 and received charitable status in 1981. The CGA formed a Board of Directors in 1992; and adopted the name Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in 1993.[3]
Beginning as a one-cupboard reference collection co-housed with Pink Triangle Press, the ArQuives relocated to an independent location on Temperance Street in downtown Toronto in 1992.
In November 2005, the ArQuives moved to a temporary location at 65 Wellesley Street in the city's Church and Wellesleygay village, launched a fundraising campaign, and began the search for a permanent home in the same area. The historic Jared Sessions house was built in 1860 and was located at 34 Isabella Street.[4] The building was sold to the ArQuives for $1 by the Children's Aid Society of Toronto (CAS) after CAS began construction on a newer, larger building next door. The sale of the Jared Sessions house was facilitated by Toronto City Councillor Kyle Rae.[5] After major renovations to the building, The ArQuives re-opened in September 2009. In December 2016, the Archives received a $50,000 grant from Toronto City Council to improve the building's accessibility for people with disabilities.[1]
Today the ArQuives has a reading room and rare book library, vertical file room, offices, AV room, and gallery space for exhibitions. Additional holdings remain at 65 Wellesley and in deep storage.[6]
At its AGM in May 2018, after a year-long consultation process, the organization changed its name to the ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives.[7]
Collections
The ArQuives was established in order to "preserve, organize, and give public access to information and materials in any medium, by and about LGBTQ2+ people, primarily produced in or concerning Canada".[8] The ArQuives' collections are not limited to traditional printed material, but instead contain many diverse collections.
Artifacts
In addition to traditional printed material (over 3000 books, diaries, booklets, leaflets, programmes, zines, press clippings, etc.), the ArQuives collects artifacts that would normally be considered museum objects to capture specific moments in the history of the lesbian and gay community.[9] Such artifacts include:
The ArQuives has acquired over 500 original works of art from within the LGBT community. These are primarily paper or canvas works, and the emphasis is historical.[10] Examples include:
Costumes, drawings and photographs by Ronald McRae
Containing more than 2000 hours of sound on tapes and over 1300 discs, the ArQuives houses LPs, gramophone records, cassettes, and CDs. Much of this material is vocal or instrumental recordings of lesbian and gay performers, but there is also a significant library of taped interviews and radio programs.[11] The ArQuives also has over 150 oral histories in its collections, including the Foolscap Gay Oral History Project (over 125 interviews with gay men, conducted in the 1980s, about gay life in Toronto before Stonewall);[12] the Lesbians Making History project (approximately eight interviews with lesbians, conducted in the 1980s, about lesbian life in Toronto in the decades before 1985);[13] and the Trans Health Care Activism in Ontario oral history project (eight interviews about activism from the late 1990s through 2008).[14]
Moving images
The collection's moving images collection includes more than 2200 items, in 8 mm film and 16 mm film, Betamax, VHS, and DVD formats. While there are feature films, documentaries, and erotica housed in the Archives, there are also videos shot at lesbian and gay community events.[15] Because of its extensive video and film collection, the Archives are often used to provide source material for Canadian film projects, such as Forbidden Love.[16]
National Portrait Collection
Established in 1998, the National Portrait Collection honours individuals who have contributed to the growth and development of the LGBT community in Canada. Currently, the collection holds 75 portraits in various mediums, including photography, watercolour, and oil.[17]
The ArQuives contains the largest collection of LGBT periodicals at an independent archives in the world, with over 9500 individual titles.[18][19] The ArQuives also houses a general collection of periodicals not specifically produced for the LGBT community, but concerning feminism, the arts, and alternative culture that include LGBT issues and an indication of changing attitudes in mainstream media.[20]
Personal and organizational records
Trans material display
The Archives holds records of Canadian LGBTQ2+ organizations, as well as the personal records of prominent Canadians active in, or significant to, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and two-spirit communities.[21] This includes the following fonds:
Beginning as the photo files for The Body Politic, the Archives grew around the photograph collection, and while many of the items are not yet cataloged due to the high number of entries, the Archives houses over 7000 individual items in various mediums, including prints, negatives, and halftone reproductions.
In terms of scope, the photographs depict the LGBT community in a broad sense: photographs of demonstrations, conferences, social events, performances, and police harassment, as well the LGBT community's personal, domestic, and social lives.[53]
Posters
Posters in the ArQuives are predominantly Canadian, with some international, representing film, theatre, concerts, parties, bars, and avant-garde art, within the LGBT community.[54]
Vertical Files at the CLGA
Vertical files
The ArQuives currently holds over 30,000 vertical files on people, groups, and events affecting the LGBT community. Unlike most of the Archives, the vertical files provide information about an individual or organization, rather than information produced by the individual or organization. The vertical files contain approximately fifty percent Canadian content and fifty percent international content.[55]
Exhibitions
To exhibit work that honours LGBT community and encourages dialogue, the Archives has an exhibition programme. A sample of past exhibitions includes:
We Could Be Heroes (Just For One Day) – March to May 2016)
Queering Space – June to September 2015)
Marked: Tattoos & Queer Identity – April to May 2015
Code, Read: Hollywood's Hays Code and the Queer Stereotypes of the Silver Screen – February to March 2015
Butch: Not Like the Other Girls – November 2014 to January 2015
Rocking the Boat: Celebrating Queer Content in Canadian Concert Dance – November 2013 to April 2014
Colour Coded: queer abstraction meets fruity frosting – September to November 2013
Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archives, 1973–1983 and TAG TEAM: Gay Premises – June to September 2013
Public Sins / Private Desires: Tracing Lesbian Lives in the Archives, 1950–1980 – June to August 2012
CENSORED LIVES: Suppression, resistance and free speech – June to September 2010
National Portrait Collection – September 2009 to November 2010
Outreach
The ArQuives' outreach initiatives include tours and study opportunities for undergraduates.[56]
Michelle D. Douglas is a Canadian human rights activist who launched a landmark legal challenge in the Federal Court of Canada against the military's discriminatory policies against LGBTQ+ service members. Douglas herself served as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces from 1986 to 1989. She was honourably discharged from the military in 1989 under the military's discriminating "LGBT Purge".
The Body Politic was a Canadian monthly magazine, which was published from 1971 to 1987. It was one of Canada's first significant gay publications, and played a prominent role in the development of the LGBT community in Canada.
George Hislop was one of Canada's most influential gay activists. He was one of the earliest openly gay candidates for political office in Canada, and was a key figure in the early development of Toronto's gay community.
Supporting Our Youth (SOY) is an organization based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, which runs programs and events geared to supporting the special needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual and intersex youth. SOY gets support and involvement from local youth and adults that volunteer their time to help improve each other’s lives. SOY’s main focus points are helping the youth create healthy arts, recreational spaces, culture, supportive housing, and employment.
Douglas Wilson (1950–1992) was a Canadian gay activist, graduate student, publisher and writer born in Saskatchewan. In 1975, he gained prominence in a fight for gay rights with the University of Saskatchewan. The university's dean of the College of Education refused to allow Wilson into the school system to supervise practice teachers because of his public involvement with the gay liberation movement. Wilson was vice-president of the Gay Community Centre Saskatoon and had been trying to start a gay academic union at the university. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission failed to protect Wilson and his case was unsuccessful.
Richard Fung is a video artist, writer, public intellectual and theorist who currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. He was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and is openly gay.
The Lesbian Gay Bi Trans Youth Line , founded in 1994, is a peer support organization for LGBT youth across the province of Ontario. Although originally known for their phone support line, the organization also offers online chat, SMS and e-mail support services, as well as promoting and supporting other events and programs for 2SLGBTQ+ youth.
Robert Laliberté is a Canadian photographer, best known for his male nudes. Originally from Quebec City, Quebec, he has lived and worked in Montreal since 1975.
Lynne Fernie is a Canadian filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. She spent fourteen years as the Canadian Spectrum programmer for the Hot Docs Festival from 2002 to 2016, and was described as having a passion as "deep as her knowledge," and it was said that her "championing of Canadian documentaries and the people who make them has never wavered."
James Egan was a Canadian LGBT rights activist known for his role in the landmark Supreme Court of Canada case Egan v. Canada. He is considered Canada's first prominent LGBT activist, due to his initial period of activism from 1949 to 1964.
Gens Douglas Hellquist was a Canadian activist and publisher, noted for his prominent role in founding and developing the organized LGBT community in the province of Saskatchewan.
John Alan Lee was a Canadian writer, academic and political activist, best known as an early advocate for LGBT rights in Canada, for his academic research into sociological and psychological aspects of love and sexuality, and for his later-life advocacy of assisted suicide and the right to die.
Khush: South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association was a queer collective activist organization in Canada geared towards South Asian men and women whose goal was to promote a better understanding of South Asian culture and values within the gay and lesbian community.
Tom Warner is an author, gay rights activist, and former Human Rights Commissioner. He was born in Saskatchewan and lives in Toronto, Ontario. He was one of the founding members of Gay Students' Alliance at the University of Saskatchewan, and of the Zodiac Friendship Society. In Toronto, he helped found the Gay Alliance Toward Equality and has been involved with the Right to Privacy Committee. From 1993 to 1996 he served as an Ontario Human Rights Commissioner.
Jearld Frederick Moldenhauer was born in Niagara Falls, New York on August 9, 1946. He has been a gay activist from his college years onward, and was the founder of the Cornell Student Homophile League, the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA), and The Body Politic gay liberation journal, Canada's most significant gay periodical. He was a founding member of Toronto Gay Action (TGA), and the Toronto Gay Alliance toward Equality (GATE). On February 13, 1972, he became the first gay liberation representative to address a political party conference in Canada when he addressed a convention of The Waffle, a left-wing faction of the New Democratic Party. In 1973 he began collecting the books, newspapers and ephemera that seeded and grew into the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives. He opened Glad Day Bookshop, the first gay and lesbian bookstore in Canada, in 1970 and operated it until 1991 when he sold the store to John Scythes. In 1979 he opened a second Glad Day Bookshop in Boston, Mass. Glad Day Bookshop Toronto is now considered the oldest gay/lesbian bookshop in the world. Glad Day Bookshop Boston closed its doors in the summer of 2000, when its lease expired and its building was sold.
Michael Lynch was an American-born Canadian professor, journalist, and activist, most noted as a pioneer of gay studies in Canadian academia and as an important builder of many significant LGBT rights and HIV/AIDS organizations in Toronto.
Marie Robertson is a Canadian LGBT rights activist. Robertson was a co-founder of multiple LGBT agencies and worked as a counsellor for the AIDS Committee of Toronto. Robertson's portrait was inducted into The ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives in 2002 and she was inducted into the Q Hall of Fame Canada in 2013.
Amy Gottlieb is a Canadian queer activist, artist and educator. She was one of the organizers of the first Pride Toronto in 1981. She was also an organizer of the Dykes on the Street March, organized by Lesbians Against the Right, which occurred in October of the same year.
Rebecka Sheffield is an archivist, scholar, and policy advisor. She is a Senior Policy Advisor of the Archives of Ontario and teaches information science in American and Canadian universities.
David Douglas Kelley was a Canadian LGBTQ rights activist and organizer, AIDS educator, and youth worker.
↑ Sheffield, R. (2015). The Emergence, Development and Survival of Four Lesbian and Gay Archives (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation). University of Toronto, Toronto
↑ "Photographs". Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. 2010. Retrieved 23 October 2011.
↑ "Posters". Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. 2010. Retrieved 23 October 2011.
↑ "Vertical files". Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. 2010. Retrieved 23 October 2011.
↑ Zieman, K. (2009). Youth outreach initiatives at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. Archivaria, 68, 311–317.
Further reading
Fraser, James; Averill, Harold (1983). Organizing an archives: The Canadian Gay Archives experience. Toronto: Canadian Gay Archives. ISBN978-0969098119.
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