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 

History of gay entrepreneurship

I've been meaning to note -- Pride Week finally gets me around to it -- a lively review in the May Literary Review of Canada by Elspeth Brown of Andrea Benoit's history of the Toronto-founded cosmetics company MAC: Viva M.A.C: AIDS, Fashion, and the Philanthropic Practices of M.A.C Cosmetics. Brown, and Benoit, consider the place of "gay capitalism" in a community generally seen as oriented to social justice and against capitalist exploitation

Now a ubiquitous fixture in high-end shopping malls and consumer-­friendly airport terminals around the world, M.A.C Cosmetics emerged from Toronto’s queer entrepreneurial past. In the 1970s, young gay people created a parallel ­lavender economy where they could both be out and pay the bills. By founding bookstores, restaurants, and bathhouses, business owners did their best to make money while making good and supporting the “community.” These newly out entrepreneurs joined an older queer tradition of gay men, in particular, working in the velvet underground of the aesthetic industries — fashion, hair salons, interior decorating — where being gay was tolerated, so long as no one spoke about it publicly.

Nice cover design, UTP.

History of Pride

In Toronto, it's Pride Week.  A couple of related historical posts.

• From the Champlain Society website, "A Gay Kiss-in and the Quest for Equality, 1976" by Don McLeod.
• From the Notches blog, Justin Bengry's "Case of the Sultry Mountie"

Image: Canadian Gay Lesbian Archives, via The Champlain Society