CHAIR: Antoine Damiens

Axelle Demus

“I Have Waited 44 Years”: Preserving, Remediating, and Remembering the Archives of 1970s Queer Community Television

Liberation Movement, and, in the process of gaining visibility, took to the small screen thanks to new policies established by the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)which established cable television channels dedicated to community programming. This resulted in ground-breaking television programs, which now constitute a unique window into LGBTQ2+ cultures and politics before the devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic. These programs are also records of queer lives and attachments that once were but are no longer. This presentation looks at the archives of two Toronto-based shows from the 1970s: Gay News and Views (1977-1978) and This Show May Be Offensive to Heterosexuals (1978-1979). Despite their historical value, no complete run of these shows has been preserved; and, although a total of six video reels were donated to the ArQuives in Toronto, no one had been able to watch the reels since their original donation until very recently. While the tapes were initially thought to be Type-C video reels, digitization attempts have revealed this information to be inaccurate, thus making the reels much more at risk of disappearing due to the rarity of their format. Proposing that some of the same impulses behind the creation of community television programs made for and by LGBTQ2+ communities should be mobilized to ensure their recovery and survival, I argue that collaborative and intergenerational archival methods are needed for the preservation, restoration, and remembrance of fragile and ephemeral queer media objects. In doing so, I will discuss the challenges that the reels have faced since the 1970s, delve into the restoration efforts undertaken in collaboration with the ArQuives, and consider what it means for former program participants and the Toronto LGBTQ2+ community at large to be able to watch these reels after 40 years.

Ellie Turner-Kilburn

Our Screen Heritage: Transforming Screen Heritage through Community Collaboration

This presentation will explore, through the case study of the Our Screen Heritage project, the potential of, and challenges to, community collaboration as a means of reimagining and expanding an archive and its collection. The case study for this presentation, the Our Screen Heritage project was overseen by Screen Archive South East (SASE), in collaboration with Queer Heritage South and Margate and Folkestone Pride. The project was rooted in a belief that it was not only important to make visible LGBTQ+ stories within the collection, but that these stories be curated by the communities themselves, therefore addressing a lack of queer representation within the archive’s current collection. The project presented several challenges, such as how does a community work with an archive collection from which they are absent? And how does an institution support collaboration with a community it has neglected? Moreover, as Cvetkovich argued, queer community archives are often made up of the marginal and ephemeral. Objects such as club flyers, badges and meeting minutes put the object but not necessarily the owner in the forefront of the story, and it is the object which is displayed as part of the collection, and not the depositor. Subsequently, SASE’s remit as a film archive presented the question of how a community whose history is often told through the marginal, might approach a medium which requires a subject, and if lacking a discernible subject, needs the contextual information for the donor/depositor to justify it becoming part of the collection. The learnings and successes of the project will be the central consideration of this presentation as well as reflecting on the potential examples for future queer community engagement by institutional archives."

Travis Wagner

“In A Way I’m Coming Out To All Of You Tonight”: Activist Analog Media, Digital Curation Pedagogy, and the Queer Futurities"

The rise of magnetic media in the 1980s afforded communities new modes of documentation previously inaccessible. Among the groups utilizing the new format were queer activist groups who saw the technology as foundational to recording HIV/AIDs activist work at a moment when the American government refused to acknowledge the epidemic's presence in the queer community (Juhasz, 1995). Despite magnetic media's important role in queer historiography, the format remains chronically under-preserved and without digital surrogates, despite being notoriously unstable. The volatility of the format only exacerbates as the technologies required to digitize magnetic media continue to grow obsolete. This obsolescence and lack of digital curation results in queer history continuing to disappear despite a growing demand to chronicle and preserve this chronically overlooked history (Wagner,2019). While institutional archives continue to make strides to digitize analog media, the abundance of materials, their continued degradation, and the complexities of supporting sustainability to preservation initiatives leave many artifacts of queer activism without digital surrogates. This presentation highlights an evolving project of utilizing queer activist videos (alongside other obsolete media formats) from South Carolina to prepare undergraduate and graduate students in digital curation practices. By highlighting not only the rich historical value of the tapes themselves but also the unique challenges of digitally curating queer history, the project expands and builds a method for digitizing queer analog media and offers scalable solutions replicable across both institutional and community based archival work. Following the reflection of this ongoing project, the presentation will conclude by theorizing the potential impacts of this pedagogy-centric approach to digitizing queer history and highlighting its value in providing students across multiple degrees and levels of education ways to build upon and learn from queer history simultaneously.

Zsombor Bobák (online: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/84610593747)

NSFW Histories; or A Look at Queer Media Archives in Central and Eastern Europe

Histories of LGBTQ+ communities in Central and Eastern Europe are generally characterized by a multiplicity of violent absences, silences, and voids which hinders the writing of specifically queer historical accounts and also poses difficulties in imagining the future of these communities. As political tensions and aggression around LGBTQ+ matters grew considerably across the region in the last decade, queer historiographical efforts are further jeopardized. Thus, this paper investigates the role of moving images in the creation of alternative, queer media archives that could challenge the domineering, heteronormative structures of historiographies and knowledge production through audiovisual media in the region. By closely examining Karol Radziszewski’s three short films Mon chéri Soviétique, Kisieland, and Afterimage, and Jaanus Samma’s multimedia installation NSFW: A Chairman’s Tale, the paper aims to shed light on how hidden histories accumulated in personal archives can be recovered and (re)animated by the means of moving images. The “new” archives born out of the artistic interventions into a normative archival landscape that these works perform are negotiated by and navigated through a number of media transformations and media concurrences, at once calling into question the material hierarchies of archives and presenting a fluid, queer(ed) archival domain allowing queer sensibilities of the past to emerge in the present. As such, they manage to disrupt the temporal order of traditional histories and generate an affective mode of queer historicity, thus fostering a restitution of queer memory and experience, which, as this paper argues, bears a significant transformative power regarding socio-political realities of the region.