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Last week I wrapped up a marathon bargaining session over two long back-to-back days. At its conclusion, the bargaining team for Contract Faculty at Carleton University that I lead secured a new tentative agreement that will be presented to the membership early in the new year. I am very proud of the work the bargaining team did and I have high hopes that the TAs/RAs will be able to secure a fair deal early in the new year as well. Collective bargaining is an exhausting and at times infuriating process, but it is always worth it in the end. I am looking forward to a slower pace this winter semester with one of the bargaining teams finished and the other quite close to a deal.

Interviews will continue throughout this winter term with veteran sex workers as part of my SSHRC-funded research looking at the sex worker-authored materials in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive (CWMA). As mentioned previously, these interviews will contribute towards the creation of a guide for archives and memory institutions as to how to best steward sex-worker authored materials. Most archivists want to do right by these materials, but often do not know where to start. Interviews will take place in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto before I head to Vancouver a bit later in the spring.

This fall I will also teach two upper-level sexuality studies seminars at Carleton titled New Queer Cinema and Politics of Kink. Both of these brand new courses (to me!) will also include a graduate-level enrolment offering. If you want to follow along with my NQC course you can check out the course’s public Letterboxd page.

My most recent book titled Toronto Living With AIDS has been nominated for the 2025 Heritage Toronto Awards in the book category.  Since 1974 the Heritage Toronto Awards have celebrated outstanding accomplishments in the field of public history with a focus on Canada largest metropolitan centre. The award ceremony takes place on October 20th at the Carlu on Younge Street.

A screening of auto/biographical shorts featuring the voices of queer and trans Canadian sex workers will take place on Saturday November 8th as part of the ChromaQueer Film & Arts Festival. The Queer / Sex / Work screening features video works from the 1970s-90s and includes the voices of Margaret Dwight-Spore, Mirha-Soleil Ross, Danny Cockerline, Andrew Sorfleet, and many former staff members at Maggie’s. Most of the shorts haven’t been screened since they were first circultated in the late 20th century. The screening is presented by the “Sex Worker Self-Authoring in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive” project at Carleton University, Maggie’s, Ottawa Independent Companions, and C.O.R.A.‘s.

My SSHRC-funded research looking at the sex worker-authored materials in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive (CWMA) housed at the University of Ottawa continues. With the ethics protocol approved, the team is now moving into stage two of the project where we will be interviewing veteran sex workers whose materials, or their colleagues, have ended up in institutional archives without their knowledge. These interviews will contribute towards the creation of a guide for archives and memory institutions as to how to best steward these materials. Most archivists want to do right by these materials, but often do not know where to start. Interviews will begin later this fall and conclude in the spring.

This fall I am working hard on behalf of the 3,000 part-time contract academic workers at Carleton University. Both units of CUPE Local 4600, of which I am the president, are in negotiations with the employer for a new collective agreement. While funding in the university sector in Ontario is dismal, compounded by decades of neglect by both Liberal and Conservative governments, I am hopeful for a swift and successful round of bargaining.

Just last week I recorded a podcast episode with Jamila and Zeb from the Resistant Communiqués Collective to talk social movement history, radical queer politics, and the (de-)evolution of Pride.  The episode is available here and includes a helpful multi-media syllabus. I was honoured to participate in their well organized and well researched program and look forward to listening to future episodes that this collective creates!

This past May I began a one-year mandate as the President of the part-time contract faculty and teaching/research assistant union at Carleton University. Since then I’ve been busy learning my new role and helping both units prepare for bargaining that is set to commence upon the expiration of the current collective agreements at the end of August. I also attended the CUPE Ontario Convention, helping pass a resolution with my fellow colleagues to support university sector unions in seeking greater transparency from universities regarding their budgets and budgetary decisions.

This summer I’m finalizing an essay that will appear in the anthology that provides an overview of the case studies for the Archive/Counter-Archive project. I’ll be outlining the specifics of the case study that I helped lead on twentieth century Toronto HIV/AIDS activist tapes in Vtape’s sprawling and impressive video distribution collection. The chapter reflects on the team’s research questions, theoretical frames, archival methods, project outcomes, and musings for future directions/research. The book is edited by by members of the A/CA network and will be published by Concordia University Press next year.

Research with the Sex Worker Self-Authoring in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive project continues into its second year. The research team is working through the ethics process so that we can shift from wrapping up our archival research in the CWMA to begin doing interviews with a handful of veteran Canadian sex worker activists about how they would like to see their  materials (and their colleagues’) stewarded. Much of these materials, including the material at the CWMA, have ended up in formal archives and memory institutions without their knowledge or consent. We’ll begin working on creating an alternative finding aid for the sex worker-authored materials in the CWMA while we finish the ethics process and begin doing interviews. We are also preparing a video program of shorts featuring queer and trans Canadian sex workers talking about themselves, their activism, and their work for a new queer film festival launching in Ottawa this Fall called ChormaQueer.  More details to come in September!

Today begins another semester in the wonderful world of adjunct university teaching for me. I’ll be giving an interdisciplinary fine arts/arts and sciences research methods course through the lens of sexuality research. You can check out the course syllabus here if you’re curious.

Earlier this past spring my article on the changing sex work laws in Canada and the potential impact they might have on US northern border states like Maine was published in the Portland Phoenix.  The Future of Sex Work is available online for your reading pleasure. Surprisingly I have received very little hate mail after its publication which I can only attribute to the fact that no one reads long form journalism—or the Phoenix—anymore.

On September 27th I will be doing a small talk and Q&A at the Baltimore Book Festival discussing the new Against Equality anthology, Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion.  There are no other firm touring dates this fall for Against Equality, but in February and March I will be touring across Australia and New Zealand spreading the anti-assimilationist, anti-capitalist queer gospel that is Against Equality. Dates for this down under tour will be posted sometime in the next few months on the AE events page.

I’m also working on a few forthcoming journal articles and book chapters including a historical overview and analysis of the MIXNYC experimental queer film festival, an editorial about why I’m not a #truvadawhore, and a co-authored Against Equality piece for the UK-based Decolonizing Sexualities Network’s forthcoming anthology. There are a couple short film projects in the works as well!

Tomorrow I am leaving to go on tour with the new Against Equality anthology, Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion which just came out for AK Press in March. I will be bouncing from the northeast to the southwest in about four weeks doing lectures, panels, and book launches. Full details of the tour can be found here and you can order the book directly from AK Press here.

I’ve also published my third editorial in the quarterly gay paper Out in Maine which will be available online soon. “You Must Marry!” asks now that the campaign for gay marriage in Maine are over with and done, could we can all be a bit more honest with our ambivalence about marriage and our criticism of the campaigns to win such a right? And what can we do to address the new pressures that exists on queer and trans people to get married, as if that is what we are supposed to do now just because we can? This will be up on my publications page where you can check out all my articles, chapters, and books to date.

The short film Rituel Queers that I collaborated on with REB screened at The Boston Faerie Cabaret in February and was warmly received. With any luck the film will have its European premiere at Entzaubert—my favorite DIY queer/trans film festival in Europe—this July.

My old friend Jessy Kendall of S/H/A/R/P/S and I collaborated on a track on his new album Shit Show that just came out. This track is a remix of Micahel Callen’s track “Home” on the 1994 album Purple Heart. I’m also working on another similar audio/video remix of 90s talk shows, HIV/AIDS, satanic cults, televangelists, gay porn, and the boy scouts due out this summer.

Karma Chávez and I made our way to London, along with Yasmin Nair in digital form, for the Decolonizing Sexualities Network’s second roundtable event on November 29th.  Against Equality presented an overview of our activist and archival work to a packed room and got to meet lots of great activists and intellectuals from the UK including our gracious hosts Suhraiya Jivraj and Silvia Posocco.

Also, our chapter “Against Equality, Against Capitalism: Towards an Economic Critique of Gay Marriage” in the Australian anthology After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation (edited by Carolyn D’Cruz & Mark Pendleton) is set to launch in Melbourne at Hares & Hyenas on January 14th.

My chapter “Damn Right We’re Here to Destroy Marriage!” in The Gay Agenda: Claiming Space, Identity, and Justice (edited by Gerald Walton) is set to be published in early 2014.  Still no confirmed publishing date, but I’ve been told it should be out very soon.  This chapter argues against the politics of gay respectability and encourages queer activists to embrace rather than deflect the religious right’s worst fears about us—we are indeed to here to destroy marriage, the family, and the nation!

Curators from MIX MILANO have invited the collaborative team behind Does This Bother You?, of which I was a part, to recreate the exhibition in Milano in the Summer of June 2014.  This second iteration of our project is sure to scandalize the newly elected Pope and stuffy respectable gays alike.  More news to come…

things are different now… continue to have a life through another public screening at the Queer Lisboa 17 film festival this past September. The experimental short will be available for viewing online this winter once it completes its other festival screenings lined up this fall.

Est-ce que ça vous dérange? Does This Bother You?, a collaborative exhibition I worked on, opened at RATS9 Galerie on October 11th and ran through October 26th.  In addition to the opening I gave an artist talk with my collaborator on October 15th to a full house and it will be available as a video on the exhibition website shortly.  A digital version of the exhibition catalog featuring writing by journalist Matthew Hays and art historian Erin Silver is available here.

The short experimental Super 8mm film that I created in collaboration with Richard E. Bump will having its premiere (of sorts) in all its rich color-saturated glory at the 26th edition of MIXNYC on November 16th. Rituels Queer will be shown as a double projection with an original soundtrack by friend and co-conspirator Chadd Beverlin.  Rituels Queer is part of a larger program of twelve sexy steamy shorts not to be missed!

In mid-October I presented my paper “Revisiting AIDS and Its Metaphors” at the Universities Art Association of Canada‘s annual conference in Banff, Alberta.  The paper, which reviews the work of queer artists that framed the pre-protease inhibitor days of the AIDS crisis as a form of genocide, focuses in detail on the short film By Any Means Necessary by James Wentzy.  The paper has since been submitted to a number of academic journals and with any luck will be available publicly in the first half of 2014.

Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion, an anthology of all the combined writing from our first three books along with a new introduction from the collective, is on schedule to hit the streets in March 2014.  This book will save the AE collective time, money, and work by alleviating our need to keep three books in print as opposed to just one. And all of this has been made possible by our wonderful pals over at AK Press who have been a supportive distributor for our first three book projects and have taken on the task of publishing this final anthology.

In other Against Equality news, Karma Chávez, Yasmin Nair, and I will be doing a roundtable talk in London with the Decolonizing Sexualities Network on the 29th of November.  At the roundtable we will be discussing our work with AE, focusing on the three sections of our archive: marriage, militarism, and prisons.  The event will be recorded and available on the DSN website soon after the event.

Lastly, I’ve been one of the co-coordinators of a fundraising effort to support the production of a film by LGBTQ identified Russians about the impact of the anti-gay propaganda bill recently signed into law by Putin.  This project differs from similar media attention in that the documentary film Children 404 is being made by Russian queers as opposed to other outsiders from the West.  You can check out the fundraising campaign that runs through November 15th here.

After being selected to show my work at the Frameline International LGBT Film Festival in San Francisco, I’ve pulled my short experimental film things are different now… in order to support the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.  Frameline has been targeted for it’s complicity with Israeli pinkwashing. The festival has been targeted by local queer activist groups like Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT) and Gay Shame for over a decade.  I gave a short interview with ArtThreat over pulling my film and things are differnet now… will be screened alternatively at Periwinkle Cinema’s Rejected!!! on June 20th at the Artist Television Access in San Francisco instead.

things are different now… has also screened as part of NOT OVER: 25 Years of Visual AIDS in New York at LaMama gallery.  The show also includes a small print version of my broadsheet Down Is Not Up. The show, currated by Kris Nuzzi and Sur Rodney (Sur), is up for the entire month of June and features the work of lots of friends and colleagues.

Does This Bother You? a collaborative street based poster project that I participated in this spring will see a full scale exhibition and catalog in the fall of 2013 in Montréal.  More information about the project is forthcoming, but in the mean time the project has already provoked a bit of press both locally and nationally in Canada.

Also my You Must Marry posters, a pastiche based on the original Homocult poster, made there first appearance at Southern Maine Pride and will be coming with me for a special night of wheat pasting in NYC for Pride.  More details about this project forthcoming after I hit the streets for NYC Pride.

As for Against Equality news, I’ve been busily working away on the manuscript for a new unabridged addition of Against Equality’s three anthologies all in one along with some new material.  The new anthology will help us greatly reduce our printing and shipping costs while still providing free books to prisoners.  It is due out in the spring of 2014 through AK Press and AE members will be touring to support the launch of the new anthology

Also, the video from the Imagining Queer Justice panel I spoke at on behalf of Against Equality this past spring with Eric Stanley and Reina Gossett is now available online below.  Special thanks to Margot Weiss at Wesleyan University for making it all possible!

My short experimental film on HIV/AIDS and inter-generational memory loss, things are different now…, has shown in Berlin, New York, and London, and screenings in Prague, Copenhagen, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Portland OR, and Providence RI are all in the works.  In fact, the short will be showing in Portland OR today as part of the Where Do We Go From Here exhibition.

I have a book review of Benjamin Heim Shepard‘s Play, Creativity, and Social Movements (2011) the most recent edition of the journal Socialism & Democracy and I am working on a review of Nicola Barker’s Not The Marrying Kind: A Feminist Critique of Same-Sex Marriage (2012) for the soon-to-be-launched QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking.

I’ve also got an interview with New York City based prolific writer and agitator Sarah Schulman in the forthcoming issue of e-flux journal edited by Carlos Motta.  In it we discuss her most recent two book as well as the nature of queer collaborations, the rapidly changing publishing industry, queer mentorship, and the politics of always coming from the margins.

Against Equality also just got word that the book coming out of the After Homosexual conference I presented at a year ago finally got the green light. A co-authored piece between Yasmin Nair, Kárma Chavez, and myself titled, Against Equality, Against Capitalism: Towards an Economic Critique of Gay Marriage will appear there.  The three of us also co-authored the introduction to another forthcoming Australia-based book project called To The Exclusion of All Others where our piece titled, Against Equality: From the Belly of the Beast to the Land Down Under, will appear.

In other Against Equality news, I will be participating in a panel with Eric Stanley and Reina Gossett titled Imagining Queer Justice: Prison Abolition and LGBT Hate Crimes Legislation on April 26th at Wesleyan University.  On this panel organized by the wonderful Margot Weiss, I will be talking about Against Equality and or work challenging the logic of LGBT hate crime laws which is highlighted in our most recent anthology, Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You.

My chapter “(Gay) Marriage and (Queer) Love”, which picks up where Emma Goldman’s searing critique of marriage titled “Marriage and Love” left off about 100 years ago, appears in the opening chapter of the new AK Press title Queering Anarchism edited by C.B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano.  This book is available in both print and as an ebook through AK Press.

Additionally my chapter exploring the work of and politics of Against Equality, “Damn Right We’re Here to Destroy Marriage!” will be in the forthcoming anthology The Gay Agenda: Claiming Space, Identity, and Justice, due out in the fall of 2013.

I have a forthcoming roundtable discussion with Eric A. Stanley and Chris E. Vargas about their film projects Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2012) in the forthcoming special issue on sex and gender in performance produced by APARTÉ Journal .

There is also a roundtable discussion with a few of us from Against Equality in the new issue of American Quarterly, “’Reinvigorating the Queer Political Imagination’: A Roundtable with Ryan Conrad, Yasmin Nair, and Karma Chávez of Against Equality” in which we discuss our relationships to academia and activism.  This roundtable was conducted by one of the journal’s wonderful editors, Margot Weiss.

This fall I was asked to participate in the annual AIDS Action Now! Poster/VIRUS project.  I was tapped to design two posters for the series which debuted at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and at the VAV gallery in Montreal in and around world AIDS day.  The first poster titled “Fuck the Supreme Court*” focuses on the recent decision by the supreme court of Canada to further criminalize HIV non-disclosure while the second poster titled “Working Conditions” focuses on male sex workers and HIV/AIDS.  These posters channel the aesthetics and feminist politics of Barbara Kruger, the work of David Wojnarowicz, and the early aesthetic of sexually explicit HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns.

Lastly, my short film things are different now… had it’s American premiere at the 25th MIX experimental film fest in New York City this past November and will be screening for the first time in Canada early in the new year.  Stay tuned for details…