Queer Archives and Representation: The Urban-Rural Disparity
Renée D. Bondy
In 2018, University of Windsor students in the Women’s and Gender Studies course “Queer Activism,” in collaboration with the Leddy Library, took on the challenge of researching aspects of LGBTQ2S+ history in Windsor-Essex, with the goal of initiating a queer archive. From the outset, these students knew that the historical documents and ephemera they were hoping to discover would not be found in tidy archival fonds and files, or in existing online databases. This was a grassroots project that would involve emails, trips on city transit, and conversations with LGBTQ2S+ elders and activists. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for – but I’ll know it when it see it,” declared one especially confident student.
By the end of the semester, the students had amassed a fascinating collection of posters, flyers, photographs, and newspaper articles documenting decades of queer activism, many of which are now digitized in the Queer Life in Windsor and Essex County: A Living History collection. As researchers and other users will note, much of its content focuses on the history of the queer community in the city of Windsor. In fact, only three of the twenty-five exhibit objects include Essex County content, despite the population of the county being nearly as large as the population of Windsor. This disparity in representation is not surprising. As Michael Riordon observes in Out Our Way: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Country, “When mainstream culture notices gay and lesbian folk, it tends to see us as urban.”[1] The predominance of urban content in the archive is understandable: the first Pride organizations and parades, the popular bars and bathhouses, the health and support agencies, and the landmark human rights cases were located in the city.
And yet, it is important to recognize that gathering evidence of the queer history of a city the size of Windsor involves an intentional refocusing of effort— a decentring of the centre. The preeminent queer archive in Canada, The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, acknowledges that its collection is “Canada-focused, but Toronto-dominated.”[2] The ongoing project of documenting LGBTQ2S+ history in Windsor-Essex—and expanding it to include more rural content— faces inherent challenges. As was the case across Canada, it is likely that queer residents in this region congregated in the city in search of community, and the social and political institutions they established preserve the tangible evidence of their histories.
Documenting experiences of LGBTQ2S+ people who made their homes in the towns, villages, and farmlands of Essex County will require special attention to sources such as oral histories – a worthy future project for a living, growing archive.
Renée Bondy is a writer, historian, and educator. She lectured in the Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University of Windsor for several years, and developed and facilitated the course 'Queer Activism.’
[1] Michael Riordon, Out Our Way: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Country (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1996), 1.
[2] Craig Jennex and Nisha Eswaran, Out North: An archive of queer activism and kinship in Canada (Vancouver: Figure.1 Publishing, 2020), 13.