Browse Items (3176 total)

Toronto-based gay liberation activist George Hislop, interviewed by historian David Churchill in 1991. Interview is focused on mid-century gay life in Toronto.

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…

This series of two interviews with Dorothy Knight accounts for one linear life story, but split into two parts because of a recording error during the first interview. The second interview done on May 24, 2000, attempts to replace a part of Knight’s…

Cheryl Freeman was born in 1949, adopted by a working class Baptist family. She grew up in Toronto. Her biological mother was Jewish but she was not informed until she was in her 30s. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother was very controlling but…

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…

Anthony Mohamed is an activist in Toronto, and was an integral part of groups such as Zami, Lesbian and Gay Youth of Toronto and Khush. As an Indo-Caribbean LGBTQ leader, Mohamed describes the search for community when coming of age in the…

Verjee talks about her experience interacting with the Desh Pardesh festival in the late 1990s. She was not involved directly at an organizational level, but comes from a background in community organization because of her involvement in groups such…

Selvadurai, a writer and cartoonist, discusses his involvement with the Desh Pardesh festival and analyzes the deep identity politics that permeated every conversation held at the festival. He is a Sri Lankan born gay man in a festival where Sri…

Shelly Bahl was one of the founders of the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC). In this interview she discusses her role in several small collectives prior to her full involvement in SAVAC, and how these collectives worked hand in hand with the…

Sheila and Rachel, in this oral history interview, speak about their roles in Desh Pardesh, as a contributor and a programming coordinator, respectively. They explain the internal mechanisms of Desh, as well as its public perception at the time. They…