I am co-director of Lesbian & Gay Liberation in Canada.
Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada (LGLC) is building an interactive digital resource for the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) history in Canada from 1964 to 1981. The project takes two books, Don McLeod’s chronologies Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Volumes 1 and 2 (ECW Press, 1996; Homewood Books, 2014), and converts them into a database that will allow users to explore the people, places, events, and publications that defined Canadian lesbian and gay liberation history.
The LGLC Prosopography
The focus of my research is in building a prosopography, or collective biography, of every person mentioned in the database. The goal of the prosopography is to increase the amount of existing and publicly accessible historical information around the lesbian and gay liberation movement in Canada, and to capture for posterity the contributions that many individuals in Canada made to this movement. These individuals worked to push through major changes to the political and social landscape in Canada, however because of their status as members of marginalized and persecuted groups, their efforts and identities have gone unrecorded. By making our database available online, we hope to increase public engagement with LGBT history in Canada.
Lesbian & Gay Liberation in Canada is a pilot project for the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory and an affiliate project with Ryerson University’s Centre for Digital Humanities and the Ryerson Library Collaboratory.
Lesbian & Gay Liberation in Canada is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant.
