Introduction

Queers in Your Ears Performance at Glad Day Bookshop in 2017

Centering queer stories and queer people has been the objective of Queers in Your Ears (QIYE) since they formed as a storytelling collective in the late 1990s. Though members, places, and stories have changed over time, QIYE has been steadily bringing queer and queered stories to Toronto almost every year from 1996 until today. 

When you listen to their stories, you are not only invited into a very personal snippet of that storyteller’s life, you may also get transported to queer Toronto at a different point in time.

Retracing QIYE is about discovering very different stories, but it is also finding a bit of Toronto queer history through the spaces that QIYE sought out and built communities in. 

“QIYE started performing in queer spaces that were often not the kinds of spaces that we traditionally associate with storytelling - gay and lesbian bars like Bar Babylon, Pope Joan and the Red Spot; Tallulah’s Cabaret at Buddies; This Ain’t the Rosedale Library - those spaces were important for us as queer tellers and for our listeners, gay and straight, because they celebrated aspects of LGBTQ community and identity in the same way that our stories did” — Queers in Your Ears

This exhibition invites you to find out about the trajectory of this storytelling collective, the spaces they deemed important for their community, and the stories they told.