Browse Items (3176 total)

Mary-Woo Sims has worked to further lesbian and gay and same-sex spousal rights for many years. She was co-chair of the Campaign for Equal Families, and took great joy in witnessing the determination and cohesion of the lesbian and gay community…

Writer, editor, political activist and mother of two wonderful daughters, Jamaican born Makeda Silvera is a visionary who has revolutionized Canadian literature. In 1985, she and partner Stephanie Martin co-founded Sister Vision Press, the first and…

Shyam Selvadurai is the author of the brilliant, ground-breaking and internationally acclaimed novel Funny Boy, a story of growing up gay in Sri Lanka amidst the long-standing conflict between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities. "It is difficult to…

Pat Murphy was born in 1941 to an Irish-Catholic working-class family in Toronto, Canada. Murphy trained as a nurse and worked initially at Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital in 1964, where she had her first lesbian relationship with a co-worker. The…

Born in 1920, Lois Stewart is a political activist and retired schoolteacher who grew up in Victoria, British Columbia. After teaching in Victoria during World War 2, Lois moved to Southern Ontario, where she taught in a number of cities and towns…

This interview begins as a conversation between Lois, a retired schoolteacher and activist in Southern Ontario, and Jeanne, a retired secretarial worker and activist. Partway through the interview, Jackie enters and dominates much of the discussion.…

Jeanne is an activist and retired bookkeeper and secretary. She was born in 1924, the youngest and only girl of five siblings and grew up and lived for a major part of her life in Toronto. At the time of the interview she was back living with her…

Eve Zaremba was born in Poland in 1930. The Second World War displaced her family to Scotland and England, where she was sent to a boarding school in Reading until the age of 15. Zaremba leaves school in 1945 and moves with her family to Southern…

Betty was born on a farm just outside in Sydney, Australia and Shirley was born in Sudbury in 1924. The two meet in Toronto in the 1960s, where they were apart of the lesbian bar scene that gravitated around The Continental. At the time of the…

A native of Hamilton, Kyle Scanlon was a member of the queer students’ organization at McMaster University. A move to Toronto led Kyle into the Lesbian Gay Bi Youth Line, where he became the first openly transsexual man to be the Executive Director…