History of Pride without the Parade

But ArQuives goes on

In Toronto at the end of June, you don't have to be gay to be part of Pride -- it's just around. Except this year, without the big parade and the other events the media usually cover, it just ain't, not to anything like its usual.

So here's a moment to salute ArQuives (formerly the Canadian Lesbian Gay Archives) in Toronto. Its website is a testimony to all it has collected and compiled since 1973, and this article reports on on what it is doing these days, and particularly how it has grown beyond its male white gay roots, transphobia, and racial bias.

Just as with similar LGBTQ archives elsewhere in Canada and in the U.S, the stories of white, cisgender gay men and lesbians were overwhelmingly dominant, with trans and queer Black, Indigenous and people of colour histories barely accounted for. [....]

Many of these archives were founded by white gay activists in the early ’70s and, as much as the reckoning was already underway, there is a new-found urgency to current efforts to continue to acknowledge their contributions, while also directly grappling with the problematic challenges posed by their legacies.

Elsewhere in the archival community, the current issue of Archivaria features historian Elspeth Brown's analysis of the evolution of LGBTQ2+ archival work. Plus an essay on  "the archives as community classroom," focussed on Montreal's Negro Community Centre collection and how it became a centre for Montreal's black community from 1927 to 1992. And more

Image: from ArQuives