Re-meet the CLGA.

Founded in 1973, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA) has grown to become the second-largest LGBT archive in the world. After years of operating in tiny, cramped offices, the CLGA finally moved into our beautiful new home at 34 Isabella St in the summer of 2009. Our house, which was originally built in the 1850s, has been renovated to allow for a lot more public engagement. Instead of having to squeeze visitors in around the stacks and the photocopier, we can now offer a large reading room, an art gallery and a huge meeting room that can be rented by other community groups.

We’re finding that having a home base has already made a big difference in the kinds of outreach work that we can do, and on any given day volunteers at the house might be leading a school tour, assisting researchers or preparing for a presentation elsewhere in the community. In late November we hosted the first lecture in our Visiting Speakers’ series, and we hope to continue to create events like this to engage the community well into 2011.

In the early days, the CLGA (then known as the Gay Archives) focused primarily on the gay male experience, and that emphasis is still noticeable within the collection. However, after the name was changed to officially include “lesbian” in 1993, it seems that a more concerted effort was made to seek and include lesbian-related materials. In recent years, contributions from bi and trans-identified folks have increased, and while I can’t truthfully claim that we now represent everyone in the LGBT communities equally, we’re definitely on our way.

We’ve got dozens of vertical files on lesbian organizations, events and individuals, as well as papers from such notable dykes as activist Christine Bearchell and documentarian Nancy Nicol. We’ve got tons of lesbian-themed periodicals, including a publication called The Ladder, which was created by the Daughters of Bilitis in the 1950s. We have the records from organizations like the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT) and the Lesbian Outdoor Group, and a range of lesbo-themed clippings from straight publications — including the infamous 1993 Vanity Fair cover featuring kd lang and Cindy Crawford.

My favourite items by far, however, are the pulp fiction novels from the 1950s and 1960s. These are kept in our rare book library, and when I first started volunteering in 2006, I was lucky enough to catalogue them (I probably spent more time reading them than cataloguing them, but I digress). Anyone who’s seen the awesome documentary Forbidden Love understands what these novels meant to dykes in the ’50s and ’60s, and it’s a real reminder of how far we’ve come to flip through their pages.

Given that the CLGA’s founders were also members of the collective that published The Body Politic, it should come as no surprise that our earliest holdings consisted of records from that influential queer liberation newspaper. As the ’70s progressed and word of the Archives’ existence spread across the country, donations started pouring in from organizations and private individuals. These days, the CLGA preserves a wide range of material, including personal papers, photographs, moving images, sound recordings, periodicals and clipping files. However, unlike many more traditional archives, we also collect artifacts like buttons, board games, T-shirts and banners. As if this weren’t enough to keep researchers busy, we also have a reference library and a rare book collection.

If you’re interested in donating material or time, please get in touch with the CLGA through our website. Financial help is also greatly appreciated — we’re a totally volunteer-run organization at the moment, and we operate on a very small budget. I would encourage anybody with an interest in queer history to consider becoming a member (only $25!) or to make a tax-deductible donation.

Please help us keep our stories alive!

Kate Zieman
CLGA volunteer