Ryan Conrad

After many COVID-induced delays, my forthcoming book on the Toronto Living With AIDS community cable television program that ran in the early nineties is finally going to press. A collaboration between Archive/Counter-Archive, Vtape, and PUBLIC Books, this anthology of essays, interviews, activist reflections, and video stills will finally be available. I’m launching the book at the Toronto Queer Film Festival‘s 2024 Symposium in mid-March with a roundtable featuring original series contributors Kaspar Saxena, Darien Taylor, and more to be announced!

I made a small contribution to the FAG QC* exhibition that opened at the Archives Gaies du Quebec on December 10th. The AGQ invited forty researchers to select forty objects from the archives to exhibit as part of the organization’s fortieth anniversary. I selected a jacket from Le Club, the largest and most popular gay bar that operated in Vieux Hull throughout the eighties and early nineties. The jacket comes from the Walter Campbell Fonds, the former manager of Le Club and my downstairs neighbour whose materials I rescued and donated to the AGQ last year after he passed away.

Yasmin Nair and I are working on a few things to mark Against Equality‘s 15th anniversary and the 10th anniversary of our anthology Against Equality: Queer Revolution Not Mere Inclusion in 2024. We’ll be writing, reflecting, pod casting, and doing a few interviews so that we can take stock of the contributions that the collective made in its heyday and what remains in the aftermath of queer inclusion in marriage, military, and hate crime law.

In the background I’m also working on numerous things including my manuscript on Lizzie Borden’s 1986 film Working Girls for the Queer Film Classic book series on McGill-Queen’s University Press. I’ve also been keeping busy teaching “Intro to LGBT Studies” and “Public Health & Human Rights” this fall at Carleton University. Lastly, I’m meticulously revising a SSHRC Insight Development Grant titled Sex Worker Self-Authoring in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive that I’m hoping to secure for the 2024-2026 academic years. Never a moment’s rest!

Over the last seven months I have been on the bargaining team for part-time contract faculty at Carleton University as a member of CUPE 4600. We were fighting for a fair deal for contract faculty like myself who are paid the third worst pay rate in the province of Ontario. After negotiations came to an impasse over intellectual property, TA:student ratios, and salary the union flexed its might and went on strike for a week and a half. Once back at the bargaining table we won full rights to our IP and received an additional bump to the salary offer. We’ll leave the fight on TA:student ratios to the full time faculty union who have much greater leverage than us. I’m very proud of my work with the bargaining team and took heart in being on a picket line with fellow precariously employed contract faculty who make up nearly half of the faculty at Carleton (not to mention all of our TAs/RAs!). The corporate university is a nasty beast and the fight continues, but I am happy to celebrate the small victories.

The SSA’s Annual Conference is quickly approaching!  From May 29-31 I’ll be presiding over the last conference that will take place under my tenure as the association’s Chair and a member of its executive. It’s our first in-person conference in three years and I am excited to meet with and learn from my colleagues before passing the torch to incoming Chair Ricky Varghese. The keynote from Andil Gosine and award plenary organized by Gary Kinsman will be a real treat!

My work collaborating with Vtape as part of Archive/Counter-Archive is is coming to a conclusion.  We are soon to release a classroom guide for teachers interested in utilizing material from the community cable television program Toronto Living With AIDS (1990-91). The creation of the guide was spearheaded by Axelle Demus and Chloë Brushwood Rose. This fall, Vtape will also publish a chapbook on Toronto Living With AIDS that will including my essay on the series from JumpCut, transcripts of all the interviews I conducted with surviving contributors to the series, and short reflections on each tape written by contemporary artists and activists thinking about the legacy of the community cable television series. Keep an eye out for this in the fall!

I’ll spend the Summer hiding out at an off grid cabin so that I can finish my manuscript on Lizzie Borden’s 1986 film Working Girls for the queer film classics book series edited by Tom Waugh and Matthew Hays. It has been a long time coming, but COVID chaos has delayed this manuscript by a year and a half. I am looking forward to some peace and quiet so I can finish this off and get it out into the world. Stay tuned!

I’m wrapping up my last semester as Chair of the Sexuality Studies Association where I’m busily working on co-organizing the last annual conference under my leadership.  The call for proposals is out and available, with a deadline of January 15, 2023.

This winter I will continue teaching on contract at Carleton where I’m scheduled to teach the second half of Intro to LGBT Studies to first year students and a course on sex work titled Sex for Sale to second and third year students. I’m excited to be back in the classroom and I have a great combination of guest speakers and archival field trips planned for this semester!

Emma McKenna and I have been invited to share the results of our study on sex workers’ tax filing habits and access to social safety nets in Ottawa-Gatineau at Carleton as part of an international roundtable: Sex Work and COVID-19 in Global Perspective. This online event will take place on zoom at 5pm EST on January 19th.

The article I’ve been working on for the past five years with my colleague Gary Lee Pelletier titled “Here, Queer, and Paranoid! On Acrid Sociality and Collaborating Otherwise” is now published in QED Journal (Vol 9 No 2). The article theorizes a particular form of  destructive queer sociality we name as “acrid sociality,” trying to figure out why queers treat each other so poorly in activist spaces.  This has been a long time coming, but we are happy that it is finally in print!

Lastly, I continue my work with the part-time faculty union at Carleton, CUPE 4600. In addition to sitting on the Executive Board as the Recording Secretary, I am also on the negotiating team fighting for an improved collective agreement and fair deal for part-time faculty. Carleton remains the third worst employer in Ontario in terms of wage competitiveness for part-time faculty and we are fighting to change that among other priorities this round of bargaining.

The Sexuality Studies Association‘s annual Conference was held virtually this year, with an eye towards finally returning to some form of in-person conferencing in the spring of 2023.  We had solid attendance at our keynote and plenary events, and our virtual asynchronous conference website was ablaze with comments and feedback on all papers. At the AGM we elected new board members and made a big step as an organization to officially incorporate. This will allow us to do some of the professionalization work the association greatly needs and I am happy to be leaving the association in better shape, with more sustainable structures in place, when I finish my tenure as Chair in May of 2023.

Just days ago I presented my research on “orphaned” HIV/AIDS tapes authored by gay men in the ’80s and ’90s who have since died at the Orphan Film Symposium hosted at Concordia University and organized by both Concordia and New York University. The symposium’s theme was on Counter-Archives, which was fitting as I was presenting on my research that came out of the “AIDS Activist Media” case study that is part of the Archive/Counter-Archive research project where I completed my postdoc. My talk was recorded and should be made available online in the near future.

Renowned Canadian artist collective General Idea is currently exhibiting a grand retrospective at National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. As a primer for the uninitiated, I conducted a brief interview with AA Bronson of GI for Positive Side. The interview  titled “Art AIDS, & AA Bronson: Artist AA Bronson Talks to Ryan Conrad About Art and HIV” should be out in print and digital any day now.  The exhibition is open through November 20th, 2022.

This coming academic year I’ll be teaching a full 2/2 course load at Carleton: Intro to LGBTQ Studies (Fall/Winter); Sexuality, Gender, & Security (Fall); Sex for Sale (Winter). The courses span the Sexuality Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Human Rights programs at Carleton, most of which fall under the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation where I am also currently an Adjunct Research Faculty member.

Otherwise I’m just writing, researching, preparing new syllabi, and editing video for the rest of the summer!

My SSHRC postdoc in Cinema and Media Studies at York University has ended anti-climatically, where most of the archives I was to work in over the last two years remain shuttered. This Fall I officially became an Adjunct Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies department at Carleton University. This institutional affiliation allows me to apply for research grants and provides some minimal institutional support, but it is an unpaid position. I’ll continue to work as a contract instructor at Carleton as well, teaching courses on a contract to contract basis while I continue my search for full-time employment.

The Sexuality Studies Association 2022 program will launch in May, but we already have two wonderful events lined up: a keynote lecture titled Grappling with Care: Femme Emotional Labour, Somatic Politics, and the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus by Dr. Ann Cvetkovich and a poetry plenary organized by Dr. Ricky Varghese. At this tenth annual conference participants from across the world will also present nearly fifty papers on the cutting edge of sexuality and gender diversity scholarship!

Dr. Emma McKenna and I have published our chapter “Lessons Learned, Lessons Shared: Doing Research in Collaboration with Sex Workers and Sex Worker Organizations” in the anthology Facilitating Community Research for Social Change: Case Studies in Qualitative, Arts-Based and Visual Research edited by Casey Burkholder, Funké Aladejebi, & Joshua Schwab-Cartasand. The book chapter chronicles the methodological questions that grappled with while doing a recent qualitative research project in collaboration with activists from POWER. A virtual book launch event hosted by the book’s editors is scheduled for April 18. A digital copy of the chapter will be available on my academia.edu page in April for anyone interested.

I was asked to participate as a special guest for Maggie’s Book Club, a new project launched by Canada’s oldest/longest running sex worker advocacy project. I’ll be talking about my chapter in the Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis and my ongoing research on sex workers’ data privacy and security in aftermath of the raid on Rentboy.com. The virtual event on April 28th is open to current, former, and aspiring sex workers and the people who love them.

Lastly, I’m wrapping up my two courses for the Winter 2022 semester at Carleton, “Introduction to LGBTQ Studies” and “Social & Political Movements”. With any luck, I’ll be teaching them again for the next academic year, but nothing is guaranteed.  In the meantime I continue to organize with my union as a member of the Executive as we prepare for bargaining. Our collective agreement expires at the end of August and we are preparing for an all out fight with the employer who has for years underpaid and undervalued our work.

Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis is out October 5th 2021. My contribution to the book, “Looking for Gaëtan,” reflects on my childhood growing up alongside a plethora of film and media depictions of both HIV/AIDS and queer culture, and how these moving-image representations shaped my understanding of, and relationship to HIV/AIDS as a non-urban queer white kid growing up in the ’80s and ’90s.  I’ll be participating in a few virtual book launch events with anthology’s editor Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and a number of other incredible contributors to this volume. On October 14th  at 7pm will be Zooming with the Harvard Book Store in Boston and November 1st as part of the Ottawa International Writers Festival.

Emma McKenna and I are finishing up our research collaboration with folks at POWER and we will be launching the COVID-19, Social Safety Nets, and Sex Work in the Capital Report in November. This report will discuss the findings from our survey of nearly 300 sex workers in Ottawa-Gatineau last spring. The survey focused on how COVID-19 impacted sex workers’ working conditions and how sex workers navigated new and existing social safety net programs.

A few weeks ago I began teaching in person again at Carleton University’s Pauline Jewett Institute. This academic year I’m teaching the two semester long first year seminar course titled Intro to LGBTQ Studies that I developed and taught last year for the first time. The course was redeveloped over the summer in collaboration with a student from the previous cohort and I’m excited to see how teaching it again with a new and improved syllabus pans out.

I assumed a leadership position within the Sexuality Studies Association last summer as the Chair of the Steering Committee. In this role over the next two years I will work with the rest of the Steering Committee to further professionalize the organization and build the necessary internal structures to leave the organization stronger than when I joined. I’m hopeful for the organization’s future and for a return to in-person annual conferences health guidelines permitting.

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The “Locating Media Archives” course I co-taught through the A/CA Summer Institute has come to an end last week. Video recordings of two guest panels with Karen Knights, Richard Fung, Ian Iqbal Rashid, Darien Taylor, and Alison Duke will be available soon. I also finished up regular Spring 2021 teaching at Concordia and Carleton, and it looks like I will be teaching the same class at Carleton again next year—perhaps even in person!

The COVID-19, Social Safety Nets, and Sex Work in the Capital 2021 Survey that was created in collaboration with folks at POWER is now live and we are collecting responses through the end of June 2021. I’ll be part of a small team analyzing the data later this summer with the intention of producing a bilingual report come the fall. To our knowledge this is the first scholarly research into the economic impact of COVID-19 on sex workers, as well as their ability to access federal income replacement programs for workers who lost their income due to the pandemic, in Canada.

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John Greyson, Sarah Flicker, and I have received three years of SSHRC funding for our project, Viral Interventions: Artists, Communities and AIDS Activist Media. We’ll be hosting three one-year residencies for cohorts of five artists all making new video work about HIV/AIDS in the present, cellphilm workshops, and launching an I-doc project. The project has just begun this month, but we’ll be launching a website later this year with lots of exciting content and details about all the artists involved and forthcoming screenings!

Lastly, I’m set to finish my book manuscript on Working Girls for the Queer Film Classics book series on McGill-Queen’s Press by the end of summer. I did a fantastic interview with director Lizzie Borden last March in preparation for writing and it turns out the film will be fully restored and re-released by the Criterion Collection this summer as well!