Ryan Conrad

I’ve begun doing one-on-one in-person interviews with past contributors to the 1990-1991 cable-access community television show Toronto Living With AIDS as part of my book research. So far I’ve spoken with John Greyson, Richard Fung, and Kaspar Saxena. I’m setting up interviews with other contributors for the spring and I’ve already ransacked the organizational archives of Vtape and Trinity Square Video. I’m hopeful about publishing a definitive history of the series some time in 2020.  There’s also talk, through the Archive/Counter-Archive project of launching some sort of Toronto Living with HIV/AIDS series reboot in 2020.  Stay tuned!

This coming semester I’ll be guest lecturing at Brock University in Dr. Emma McKenna‘s labour studies course focusing on sex work/ers.  I’ll be doing a lecture on the crossover between queer, sex worker, and HIV/AIDS activism in Canada, focusing in particular on the work of the Prostitutes’ Safe Sex Project and under-recognized activist Danny Cockerline. I’ll be teaching Andy Sorfleet’s writing (Busting Sex Work Stigma: You Can’t Catch HIV from Money) and screening George Stamos’ brilliant short doc Our Bodies Our Business (2016) on sex worker activism at the Montreal International AIDS conference in 1989. Video still of Danny and Valerie Scott from OBOB to the right.

After launching the Research Repository (RR) with POWER folks this fall, I’m working on a systematic review of sex work research in/on Canada since PEPCA in December 2014. I’m interested to see what kind of research is being done, by whom, and to what ends. As sex workers are one of the most over-surveilled, overly criminalized, and misunderstood group of people, the type of research being done has the potential of fuelling already devastating social policy and further entrench various long-held stigmas. Other writing projects will likely come out of the RR committee of POWER after we meet early in the new year.

My review of Malynnda Johnson’s 2018 HIV on TV book review should be out any day now in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies (Vol. 28, No. 2).  While the book is worth checking out, my review points out a few epistemological gaps worth further investigation.  The book is prohibitively expensive, so definitely encourage your library to order a copy if you’re interested.

From August 16th-25th my new video Don’t Believe the Hype was on view as part of Knot Projections 2019: Imagining Publics in Ottawa. I organized a panel during Capital Pride with Tom Hooper, Ummni Khan, and Darrah Teitel to reflect on the video and the context of the 1969 Criminal Code reform that my video focuses on.  News coverage has appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, CBC’s All in a Day, and La Rotonde. In November, the Toronto Queer Film Fest (TQFF) and the concurrent Stonewall 50: The Future of Global Queer Liberation Art & Media symposium will be screening the video and hosting another panel with Andil Gosine, Tom Hooper, and Emma McKenna.

On September 12th a group of activists re-launched Prostitutes of Ottawa-Gatineau Work Educate Resist (POWER). As part of my contribution to the group I helped organize and launch POWER’s Research Repository, a clearing house of Canadian-focused sex work research that has been published in the aftermath of the Conservative’s Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (Bill C-36). MAX Ottawa has also hired a new male sex worker outreach staff member based on the work plan recommendations I made late last spring. Between POWER and MAX things are getting organized in Ottawa-Gatineau!  POWER even had a contingent at Capital Pride in August where I gleefully shamed Liberals for doing nothing about Bill C-36 with a majority in Parliament after voting as a block against it while in opposition.

My Upping the Anti interview with Gary Kinsman (Against the Mythologies of the 1969 Criminal Code Reform: An Interview with Gary Kinsman) and my contribution to the QED forum on remembering Stonewall (I Still Hate New Year’s Day) should be live any day now. Although they were intended for a summer time audience of pride season readers and were written this past spring, academic publishing timelines have thwarted a timely release of both.

The Sexuality Studies Association‘s annual conference CFP will be available soon along with information about next year’s conference at Western University in London, Ontario in late spring 2020. It will be our first year awarding the Thomas Waugh Emerging Scholar Award and there are lots of exciting events already in the works.  Stay tuned!

I’ll be giving a number of talks this academic year so keep an eye out for me at: Ruderman Conference on Cartography (10-12 October); Nat Taylor Tuesdays Lecture Series at York (16 November); and guest lectures at McMaster University (30 September), UC Berkeley (15 October), and Brock University (winter semester).

This June I began a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cinema & Media Studies at York University where I will be working with Janine Marchessault and John Greyson. My project entitled Excavating Technologies of Cultural Memory: Mining Canada’s AIDS Activist Video Archive was funded for two years. During this time I will be completing my manuscript, Radical VIHsion: Canadian AIDS Film & Video, and working on the HIV/AIDS activist video case study that is part of the Archive/Counter-Archive initiative.

As part of the Anti-69 Network that came out of the Anti-69 Symposium at Carleton University this spring, I have been up to a number of things:  I put out a graphic spoofing the Canadian Mint’s bizarre “Equality” coin, participated in a panel at Ottawa Art Gallery for 50th Anniversary of Action Canada alongside Tom Hooper and Carolyn Egan, and conducted an interview with long-time queer troublemaker Gary Kinsman for the forthcoming issue (#21) of Upping the Anti.

In addition to this ’69 related work, I’ve also finished my video for Knot Projections‘ first cohort of artists entitled Don’t Believe The Hype!. The video will be projected onto the side of a building in the so-called gay village in downtown Ottawa for the week leading up to, and the week of pride this August. I’ll also be giving a short artist talk followed by a panel of smart critical queers responding to the 1969 Criminal Code reform mythology that is the context for this piece.

I also have a short and pithy essay in the forthcoming issue of QED Journal (Summer 2019) entitled “I Still Hate New Year’s Day” reflecting on the double 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in the US and the 1969 Criminal Code reform in Canada. My friend and collaborator Yasmin Nair also has a good read on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall worth checking out as well!

Lastly, this year’s Sexuality Studies Association annual conference was a huge success in Vancouver with high turn out and fantastic panels, plenaries, and screenings.  We launched our new bilingual website, announced a new awards program, and have lots more in the works in the coming year. Dan Irving steps in as Chair and I’ve been elected as Vice Chair for the incoming 2019-2021 steering committee.  It’s going to be an exciting couple of years with the SSA!

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!

I’m neck deep in committee work with the Sexuality Studies Association as we prepare to launch our new bilingual website and call for proposals for our 2019 annual meeting at the Social Sciences and Humanities Congress. I should be finished with the french translation of the CFP by the end of October and it will be posted to both our website and facebook group. This year’s conference will be held at University of British Columbia in Vancouver the first week of June and transgender, indigenous, sex worker activist Jamie Lee Hamilton will be presenting our keynote lecture.

I’m putting the final touches on my article, “The Cost of Erotic Touch: Sex Work, Migration, and Employment Regulation in Canada” before submitting it to a sexuality studies journal in the coming month. I presented this as a work-in-progress at both the Othered Senses workshop at Concordia University and at the Law, Culture, and Humanities conference at Georgetown Law, both earlier this year. This paper analyzes the new legal regime imposed at Immigration Refugee and Citizenship Canada for temporary foreign workers in relationship to commercial sexual industries and investigates the media portrayals of migrant sex workers that impact the popular imagination regarding who is and isn’t a migrant sex worker.

I’ve added my signature to an open letter to parliament, “Bill C-75: Joint Statement on the repeal of Criminal Code laws used against LGBTQ2S+ people and sex workers.” This statement calls into question the limited provisions to make amendments to the Criminal Code regarding the sexual minority communities it currently criminalizes (queers, sex workers, HIV-positive people).  To learn more about Bill C-75 as it winds its way through parliament, check out this statement from gay and lesbian historians published earlier this summer and/or keep an eye here.

I was involved in two sex-work related curatorial projects this summer in Ottawa. I hosted a Sex Worker Social & Film Screening at SAW Video in collaboration with MAX Ottawa as well as curating and performing in the Rent Boy 101 edition of monthly literary salon Naked Boys Reading Ottawa. The film screening included George Stamos‘ short documentary Our Bodies Our Business (2016) and Gwendolyn’s NFB-funded animated short Prowling by Night (1990). Naked Boys Reading selections included reading from the works of Canadian activists/artists like Danny Cockerline, Andrew Sorfleet, and Daniel Allen Cox, as well as some qpoc memoirs from Craig Seymour and Abdellah Taïa, and of course some scholarly writing from me, Thierry Schaffauser, and the one and only Samuel Delany.  Photo from backstage by Handsome Zac

For the second year I will guest lecture at McGill in the introduction to sexual and gender diversity studies course. I’ll be be giving a lecture titled “HIV/AIDS: Social, Cultural, and Scientific Aspects of the Pandemic in Canada,” and sharing my own particular insights from working on the AIDS Activist History Project at Carleton for the last year and a half. Alexis Shotwell (from AAHP) and I will also be co-presenting at the American Studies Association annual conference in Atlanta in November as well.  Our paper, “Counting the Placebo Dead: Early AIDS Activism with and against Placebo-Based Drug Trials,” is based on our research at AAHP on early treatment activism in Canada.

Lastly, after my Banting application at York was quashed by an internal evaluation committee, I’ve reworked the application for the general SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow pool. I’ll still be doing work on the cable-access television series Toronto Living with AIDS if the proposal is accepted, but the project is much more humble in its outputs.

I’ve continued my work with the AIDS Activist History Project (AAHP), slowly wrapping up the transcript indexing project and finalizing the last handful of interviews that have yet to go up online. While the project officially begins to close down since our funding has ended, there are still a number of web features and blog posts in the works before the pages become more static in the coming year. We’re also in the early stages of exploring the possibility of a sex worker history project modelled off of what we’ve learned over the last five years doing oral histories with HIV/AIDS activists in Canada.

Speaking of sex workers…  Since gay pride is an irrelevant corporate police state orgy with straight people yelling “HAPPY PRIDE” in your face on every street corner, I’ve been working on something decidedly different. Through volunteering with MAX, Ottawa’s health and well-being organization for guys into guys, I’ve organized a Sex Worker Social and Film Screening as a pre-pride event.  On Wednesday, August 15th from 6:30-8:30 we’ll be screening Gwendolyn’s Prowling by Night (1990) and George Stamos’ Our Bodies, Our Business (2016) at SAW Video Media Gallery at 2 Daly Ave in Ottawa. Director Stamos will be joining us in Ottawa for a Q&A and MAX will be providing delicious snacks. The event is free and open to current and former sex workers of all genders, along with their friends, families, and allies. For pride itself, I’ve been working on a special edition set of postcard prints to distribute that attack Canada’s long-held serophobic immigration polices.

In July I also took a full-time position with the Canadian AIDS Society as their new National Programs Coordinator. At CAS I’m collaborating with the Canadian Association of People who Use Drugs as well as with a group of doctors working to ensure continued safe access to medical cannabis in Canada in the aftermath of recreational legalization. I also hope to do some digitization and exhibition work with the Canadian AIDS Memorial Quilt that CAS has recently become the caretaker of.

I’ve almost finished with my book review of Avram Finkelstein‘s enthralling visual history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic titled After Silence and got the green light from QED Journal to pair it with a review of the newest publication/exhibition catalog from Visual AIDS titled Cell Count edited by Kyle Croft and Asher Mones. The review should be out late this fall for those that are interested!

This fall I continued my work for the AIDS Activist History Project, primarily indexing oral history transcripts from Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto. I also had the opportunity to interview Earl Pinchuk and Andy Sorfleet for the project, discussing ACT UP/Montreal and sex worker organizing in Toronto and Vancouver respectively. I’ve also continued with my “From the Video Vault” series for the project’s blog with an omnibus post for International Women’s Day on Canadian women making work on HIV/AIDS. In addition to this online writing, I just submitted a revised version of my piece “HIV Not Welcome Here: Canada’s Exclusion of HIV-Positive Immigrants” to the anthology Queer Migrations II that is due out in 2019. I’ll also co-present a paper reflecting on the last five years of the AAHP with my colleague Danielle Normandeau for the Sexuality Studies Association’s annual conference at the 2018 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (May 27-29, 2018) in Regina.

I’ve just returned from the Law, Culture, and Humanities annual conference at Georgetown Law (March 16-17, 2018) where I presented alongside Sheryl Hamilton and Chantal Nadeau. My paper, “The Cost of Erotic Touch: Sex Work, Migration, and Employment Regulation in Canada,” investigates the logic behind recent changes to Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program that excludes erotic services as the only type of labour from which migrant workers are excluded.  This paper will also be presented at the Othered Senses Workshop in Montreal later this spring (May 2-5,  2018).

I’m also working on a book review of Avram Finkelstein‘s After Silence: A History of AIDS through Its Images for QED Journal. It’s a fantastic book that demystifies the process by which the images that have come to be associated with ACT UP New York were made. Definitely one of the best books I’ve read in the last couple years and highly recommended.

I should also be able to finish my next experimental short video Nineteen-Ninety-Nothing in the coming months, hopefully in time to premiere at a yet-to-be-named queer experimental film festival. N-N-N is a media mashup that relays my own distaste for the nineties, the decade of my childhood, through the decade’s most-seen moving images: OJ Simpson, Waco, Gulf War, John Wayne Bobbitt, Columbine, Jenny Jones Show murder, Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky, Princess Diana, HIV/AIDS, Menendez brothers, pedophile priests, Boris Yeltsin, Daria, Kosovo, Nickelodeon, Yasser Araft, JonBenét Ramsey, MTV, BlockBuster, Jack Kevorkian, Nintendo, gay VHS video porn, AOL, Rodney King, 90210, and so much more…

This fall I continued my work for the AIDS Activist History Project, primarily indexing the oral history transcripts from Ottawa, Vancouver, and Montreal. This winter I will continue indexing the Halifax and Toronto transcripts. I’ve also continued my “From the Video Vault” series for the project, with short new pieces on Karate Kids (1990), ACT UP/MTL 1990-1993 (1993), The Colour of Immunity (1991) and The Facts on A.I.D.S. (1983). In addition to this online writing, I just submitted the final version of the co-authored piece “‘This Is My Body’: Historical Trauma, Activist Performance, and Embodied Rage” with Alexis Shotwell to a|b Auto/Biography Studies Journal.

For World AIDS Day / Day With(out) Art on December 1st the AIDS Activist History Project co-hosted a screening put together by the folks at Visual AIDS.  We paired the program of new short works by Black American activists/artists provided by Visual AIDS titled ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS with The Colour of Immunity (1991), an early for-and-by Black Canadian HIV prevention tape. The AHHP also produced a blog post foregrounding the work of African, Caribbean, and Black communities in Canada and their struggle against HIV/AIDS as it came up in the oral history interviews we’ve conducted to date.

I’ve joined the programming committee for the Sexuality Studies Association’s annual conference at the 2018 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (May 27-29, 2018). Along with helping organize the conference program I hope to be co-presenting a paper reflecting on the last five years of the AIDS Activist History Project with my AAHP colleague River Normandeau.

I’ll be at the Law, Culture, and Humanities annual conference at Georgetown this spring (March 16-17, 2018) with Sheryl Hamilton and Chantal Nadeau presenting our panel “Dirty touch: States, Bodies, and Sensuous Law.”  I’ll be presenting my work on the regulation of sex work and immigration law in Canada. I’ll presenting this work at the Uncommon Senses 2: Art, Technology, Education, Law, Society conference in Montreal later this spring (May 2-5,  2018).

In the mean time I’m still waiting on my Permanent Residency and Banting post-doc applications to wind their way through each system.

It has been a busy summer packing up in Montréal and beginning a new life in Ottawa. Plus applying for Permanent Residence in Canada is pretty much a full time job in itself… But that did not keep me from marching in the Ottawa Pride Parade with POWER and volunteering with Ottawa’s Gay Men’s Health Initiative, MAX.  And now I’m volunteering with InsideOut Ottawa as the queer film festival gets underway November 10-12, 2017.

Working my research-based post-doc with the AIDS Activist History Project under the direction of Gary Kinsman and Alexis Shotwell has picked up now that the fall semester is in full swing. My main focus is indexing the oral history transcripts collected by the project thus far, but I’ve also been working on a blog series for AAHP called “From the Video Vault” exploring Canadian AIDS activist video from the 80s, 90s, and 00s. I also co-organized a workshop for Pervers/Cité at the Archives Gaies du Quebec teaching participants about how the AAHP does their oral history work and how we are trying to mobilize our research.

I’ve also just submitted a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship application through the Communication and Media Studies department at Carleton University under the supervision of Sheryl Hamilton. I’ll find out in February 2018 if this two year gig researching the Toronto: Living With AIDS cable access series that was distributed on Roger’s and MacLean Hunter cable networks in Toronto from 1990-1991 comes through.

In the mean time I have been taking gigs indexing academic books in film/media studies. I highly recommend checking out Lee Greiveson’s Cinema and the Wealth of Nations Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System for an example of cultural Marxism done right. I’ll be indexing Aubrey Anable’s Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect next.

On April 10th I will be defending my dissertation titled Reinvigorating the Queer Political Imagination: Affect, Archives, and Anti-Normativity. My defence will be chaired by Rebecca Duclos and the examining jury will be comprised of Thomas Waugh, Anne Whitelaw, Deborah Gould, Monika Gagnon, and Susan Knabe. Susan Knabe and her collaborator Wendy Gay Pearson will be giving a talk the day before on April 9th, “Recipes For Survival: Muffins for Granny and the Legacy of Residential Schooling.”

In the mean time I have taken a spring/summer contract with the AIDS Activist History Project, indexing their 1,500 pages of oral history interviews from participants all over Canada.

Alexis Shotwell and I are also working on a journal article for a special issue on embodiment for a|b Auto/Biography Studies Journal titled “‘This Is My Body’: Historical Trauma, Activist Performance, and Embodied Rage.” This piece expands on some of our earlier work with content from the AIDS Activist History Project including the theatrical work of Michael Smith.

I am organizing an HIV/AIDS film & videomaker roundtable on May 29th with Cecilia Aldarondo, Vincent Chevalier, Alison Duke, and Étienne Ganjohian  at the Sexual Studies Association Annual Conference taking place as part of the 2017 Social Sciences and Humanities Congress. I’ll also be presenting at the Feeling Queer / Queer Feeling Colloquium at University of Toronto taking place a few days before congress from May 24-26 2017.