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!