Taking pride in preserving Toronto’s queer culture
Collection began 40 years ago with the files of the activist Body Politic newspaper
“The archives seduced me early on,” says Rebecka Sheffield. “It was like a cabinet of curiosity of queer culture.”
Sheffield is an archivist and the new executive director of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, having volunteered there for eight years previously. Toronto is a city of archives: from well-known ones such as the City of Toronto Archives, on Spadina Rd. by Casa Loma, to smaller ones such as the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, although the latter collection is still quite deep.
“It’s the largest independent LGBTQ archives in the world,” says Sheffield. “It has matchbook covers to meeting minutes, anything that is evidence of queer and transsexual lives.”
Matchbooks, flyers, pamphlets and even T-shirts are part of the archive’s vast collection of ephemera: objects that mark where places were and events that happened, which might otherwise be lost to history. Archive contents are the non-fiction ingredients to an untold number of stories waiting to be pieced together.
The CLGA archives have more than 40 years of history and started out of the working files of The Body Politic, a Toronto gay liberation newspaper that published from 1971 to 1987.
Those files were initially moved between the houses of people associated with the paper. Finally, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives acquired the circa-1860 heritage house at 34 Isabella St. There’s a storage location at Church and Wellesley Sts., where archived letters can be seen on the second-floor windows.
When the archives were moved into the house six years ago, a commitment was made to maintaining a gallery space on the second floor that would bring more people into the building. The current show, Queering Space, invited 14 contemporary queer Canadian artists to respond to the archives’ images and objects. It runs until Sept. 15.
“I wanted to look at queer culture through a different lens,” says James Fowler, co-curator of the exhibition. “We looked at the history of queer culture and how LGBTQ people used spaces and place. How the streets have been a place of celebration, but also of protest. We looked at the many places LGBTQ people have used buildings.”
One of the biggest challenges the archives face is growth, along with existing only on donations and some grants. Space to store new acquisitions is limited. Yet, the archives continue to broaden the scope.
“Our community outreach co-ordinator identified areas that we are missing, like the Asian community, so we’ve developed relations with them to let them know their stories are important,” says Dennis Findlay, president of the archives’ board. Although national in scope, international queer experiences find a home on Isabella St., too.
It’s a long way from what Sheffield calls the “rescue historian mentality,” when archivists would go to dumps or curbsides after the families of deceased LGBT people tossed out their files.
Often people who have items of archival value have no idea of their value, or that they can be catalogued and preserved.
The CLGA is slowly digitizing its collection to make it more accessible to people who don’t live in Toronto, and is open to the public during service hours.
Archives are human memory in physical form, civic grey matter, but are also social places that draw people in for different reasons, and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives runs on the steam of many kinds of volunteers.
“If somebody brought me a carpenter, I would kiss them,” says Sheffield, referring to the upkeep needed on a 150year-old house. They also need an architect to draw up an accessibility ramp, as well as gardeners.
But the archive shelves aren’t dusty, they’re quite alive. Pay them a visit. Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.