Browse Exhibits (2 total)
Mapping Foolscap: Gay Oral Histories, 1981-1987
Between 1981-1987, John Grube and Lionel Collier collected oral histories of earlier gay life in Toronto. Known as the “Foolscap Oral History Project,” or the “Toronto Gay History Project,” this enterprise produced nearly 100 interviews with Canadian gay men born in the first half of the twentieth century, who had spent most of their lives in Toronto.
Drawing on Collier and Grube’s interviews, the digital exhibit “Mapping Foolscap” provides insights into the Toronto gay scene prior to the gay liberation movement by locating the places where homosexual men gathered, cruised, and socialized between the 1940s and the late 1960s.
Credits
Digital Collection by Juan Carlos Mezo and Zohar Freeman. Created in collaboration with 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.
LGBTQ2+ Oral Histories
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.