Last year, when students in one of Steven Maynard’s history courses started talking about the erasure of queer and trans histories, particularly south of the border, he wanted to help them do something about it.
His idea, fittingly for an instructor, was to create a new course. Called “LGBTQ Lives and Archives,” the upper-year seminar gets students to explore queer and trans histories while working with the Kingston LGBTQ2S+ archive, a collection of the Queen’s University Archives.
For Maynard, MA’87, PhD’18, Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Queen’s, the course connects closely to his own history in Kingston and to the ways his work as a Queen’s alum continues to support students and the wider community.
He first arrived in the city in the mid-1980s to study history, eventually focusing on gay history in Canada. Around the same time, he got involved in local LGBTQ+ activism and helped organize some of Kingston’s first Pride marches.
“The first few involved only a dozen or so of us,” says Maynard. “We stuck to the sidewalks. Permits to march down Princess Street and to have Pride declared by the City didn’t come along until later and not without sustained struggle.”
We recently caught up with Maynard to hear more about the course, what students are taking away from it, and how Queen’s alumni and friends can help ensure more of these stories are preserved and shared.
The course centres on LGBTQ+ lives, archives, and the fight against historical erasure. What are students doing in the course to help bring those histories forward?
One of the ideas we discussed in the course was how to counter historical erasure by making queer history more visible. We talked a lot about how to take the queer past out of the archival closet and present it in public. My social-media-savvy students then turned the results of their archival research on the history of queer organizing at Queen’s into an Instagram series, “Resisting Erasure,” and spoke to the Queen’s Journal about their work.
How are students working with Queen’s University Archives, and can you share an example or two of the projects they’ve taken on?
For their main project, students worked on a series of records in the Kingston LGBTQ2+ collection at Queen’s University Archives. The records, related mainly to queer organizations and activists at Queen’s and in Kingston from the 1970s to 1990s, were only partially processed, which means we didn’t really know the detailed contents of the files. So, students divided up the files and worked collectively to essentially create a finding aid, which will eventually be available to researchers via the Archives’ database. Making the records of queer history available for public use is another way of countering historical erasure.
What do you hope students take away from the course, and what do you hope it contributes beyond the classroom?
One thing I’ve come to understand about students, much maligned these days for relying on AI to do their work for them, is that they’re eager to do original work that makes a difference. Rather than writing (or letting ChatGPT write) an essay for a professor, students are more energized by undertaking a project that makes a practical contribution. And it’s especially gratifying to me as a historian when students see that historical and archival work can have an impact. As one student put it in their course evaluation, “It was really incredible to gain practical skills and be able to produce something tangible and so impactful that will help the public learn about and research queer history.”
Are there ways that Queen’s alumni and friends can support this work?
Absolutely! One thing we realized as we immersed ourselves in the Archives’ LGBTQ collection is that there are gaps in the record, of course, and so many other stories out there. So, if you were involved in queer organizing during your time at Queen’s, if you have records or ephemera to share, get in touch with the Archives.
Have a piece of Queen’s LGBTQ+ history to share? Contact Queen’s University Archives, or consider supporting this work through the Friends of the Archives Fund or the Queen’s University Archives Digitization Fund.
