Defining Moments Canada -- Three Queer History Articles

I have a strong working relationship with the ArQuives, Canada's 2SLGBTQ+ Archives, and in 2025, they reached out to hire me to write a few articles for Defining Moments Canada. DMC and the ArQuives were working on a project together called Proud To Be about queer Canadian history and DMC wanted to highlight the role that the ArQuives played in that. I was thus commissioned to write three articles; two on the history of the ArQuives and one on the Clarke Institute of Psychology's gender identity clinic. 

I had previously written about the Clarke's GIC with my first exhibition, but I had never fully researched the history of the ArQuives at that point. What followed was a significant research into the history of the institution, both through books like Out North by Craig Jennex and Nisha Eswaran, and in person archival research at the ArQuives. I had decided that the first article was going to be a StoryMap, a kind of pseudo-exhibition that would follow the geographic location of the ArQuives over time. This required uncovering obscure photos of the ArQuives offices throughout its fifty year lifespan. I paired these with discussions about what the ArQuives was experiencing while in those locations. Many of these photos were either photo negatives or slides, which required utilizing the flatbed scanner at the ArQuives to create digital versions. I ensured these were scanned with a high DPI so that they could be blown up to much larger sizes if needed. See the example below. I did this for dozens of photos. 

The final result was A Geographic History of the ArQuives. I tend to think of this less an article and more as an exhibition; my approach toward developing it echoes my experience designing digital exhibitions and so I focused heavily on visual materials in my research. 

An example of a photo slide before I scanned it. ArQuives file 1996-093 09P

The same photo slide after I had scanned it. ArQuives file 1996-093 09P

The article on the Clarke Institute's Gender Identity Clinic was one I pitched to DMC directly. At the time, I had noticed that the project did not include much trans history, and the Clarke seemed like a good inclusion. The full history of the Clarke is not as well known and it does not have the paper trail that the ArQuives does. Very few sources are easily accessible, and since I strongly believe that stories like these should highlight the voices of trans patients, I actively sought out those that wrote about their experiences at the Clarke, notably to journals like Chrysalis Quarterly or in Viviane Namaste's book chapter "Access Denied" from Invisible Lives. There are shockingly few accounts from the early years of the Clarke, meaning this was largely dependent on activists like Diana LaMonte and her oral history.

The resulting article, Jurassic Clarke: The Problematic History of Canada's First Gender Clinic is currently one of the first results for Clarke Institute Gender Identity Clinic on Google.