For the last four months I’ve been working with a cohort of artists selected as part of SAW Video’s inaugural “Public Projections” program. Over the next two months I’ll be shooting and editing a newly commissioned work to be projected outdoors in Ottawa during the annual capital pride festivities. The work will challenge the commemoration of the 1969 criminal code reform that only partially decriminalized sodomy in private—a reality obfuscated by the mythology perpetuated by pride organizers that suggests the criminal code reform decriminalized homosexuality in Canada, which it did not.
I’ll be presenting at the 2019 Law, Culture, Humanities conference at the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa on March 22nd along with Khaled Kchouk and Emily McBain. We’ll all be speaking to the theme of HIV and immigration, both in Canada and abroad. The following few days after LCH I’ll be at the Anti-69: Against the Mythologies of the 1969 Criminal Code Reform symposium with a two-day video program I curated focusing on the themes of gay and lesbian rights, sex workers’ rights, abortion access, and indigenous sovereignty, all themes central to the political climate of 1969. Following the conference I will be interviewing Gary Kinsman, one of the conference organizers, for the summer issue of Upping the Anti.
I’m also finishing up a bunch of contract work: teaching an MFA seminar course on Sexuality and Censorship at Concordia University; doing preliminary research work for the Archive/Counter-Archive project at York University focusing on a case study of AIDS activist video; finishing up the index of the oral history transcripts at the AIDS Activist History Project at Carleton University; and doing some foundation-laying work for MAX to better support the health and well-being of male sex workers in the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto corridor.
Lastly, I’m off to the Social Science and Humanities Congress June 1-4th in Vancouver for the Sexuality Studies Association‘s annual conference. I’ll be presenting my work on international students, immigration, and sex work in Canada alongside some other great scholars of sex work. I’m also very excited for Jamie Lee Hamilton‘s keynote at the conference and the Triple-X-organized Red Umbrella March that will take place in Vancouver a few days later on June 8th!