Browse Exhibits (43 total)

The Cabbagetown Group Softball League (CGSL) was founded in 1977 by a group of baseball enthusiasts who had gathered informally to play at public diamonds around Toronto since 1975. Many of the CGSL's founding members were activists in Toronto's gay liberation movement. The league's mandate was to provide an opportunity for members of the LGBTQ community and their supporters to play organized sports in a positive atmosphere. The league motto was "Gay Pride Through Sports". While the primary goal of the CGSL was to promote gay fellowship, it was also hoped that the league would serve as a means of bridge-building across ideological divides.

Toronto’s Desh Pardesh festival (1988–2001) was a multidisciplinary arts festival that showcased underrepresented and marginalized voices within the South Asian diaspora. The South Asian Visual Arts Centre created these oral history interviews with artists and organizers involved in the festival in 2016.

Credits: Created by students Amal Khurram and Alisha Krishna for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. The Collaboratory is directed by Dr. Elspeth Brown and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Nancy Nicol is a documentary filmmaker who has dedicated her career to tracing the history of the LGBTQ movements in Canada and around the world. She has worked as a professor in visual studies since 1989 at York University. Her career as a filmmaker started in the 1970s with experimental films, but by the 1980s, Nicol’s work focused on documentary films addressing political issues, including pro-choice struggles for access to abortion, unions, and the working struggles of women and migrants. By the 2000s, her films changed focus to lesbian and gay rights from the 1970s to the 2010s.

The exhibit showcases shorts and excerpts from the award-winning documentary series From Criminality to Equality which includes Stand Together (2002), The Queer Nineties(2009), Politics of the Heart(2005) and, The End of Second Class (2006).

Oral histories have been a popular way to preserve the lives and testimonies of marginalized subjects who have often been denied access to the historical record. This exhibit showcases a small selection of oral histories and audiovisual materials relating to LGBTQ2+ lives in Canada from The ArQuives' collection.

Some of the cassette tapes have been digitized by the LGBTQ+ Oral History Digital Collaboratory in order to preserve them and make them available online. Several of the other oral history interviews have been conducted by The ArQuives as outreach projects and in order to continue collecting important histories from our community.

T-shirts are an important medium of expression for the LGBTQ2+ community; allowing subcultures to demonstrate what they stood for and expand their membership, and giving organizations the chance to raise awareness for issues like AIDS and homophobia. T-shirts and dresses also provided a simple but effective way for LGBTQ2+ to showcase their pride in themselves and their nonconformity.