An inspiring talk with Ross Higgins on the foundation of the Archives Gaies du Québec.
The podcast may be listened to here:
The podcast may also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT
and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546
How did the Archives come into being? Why did it come to be? What social and historical contexts shaped it? What particular problems did an archive from a marginalised community face on its inception? How did the Archives develop from materials stored and used in his flat to an archive of national and international importance soon to start its fifth decade? Ross, who along with Jacques Prince, founded the archive, offers various histories and contexts, from changes in the law to changing concepts of sexual and social identities that informed how the archive developed and how it came to be what it now is, taking into account particularities of place but always conscious of larger forces and the interplay between them.
Ross calls up dimly remembered political groups (Groupe Homosexuelle d’Action Politique, Comité Homosexuelle Anti-repression, Front de Libération Homosexuelle), early community magazines (Le Tier, L’Arcadie), the various police raids (Sauna Aquarius, Neptune Sauna, Truxx, Sex Garage, KOX) that along with the AIDS crisis shaped community organising in Montreal. We talk of the importance of community involvement (illustrated talks by Ross and Tom Waugh were an early and significant source of funding), important donations (from Ken Morrison and many others), significant holdings (the work of Alan B. Stone and Peter Flinsch, the original logbook of the Front de Libération Homosexuelle). Ross reminds us that it took five attempts to start a gay community centre in Montreal before the current one succeeded in the 1980s, and that such institutions are still fragile and shouldn’t be taken for granted. He also reminds us that there is a very helpful pamphlet titled How to Start an Archive, now in the archive, and available to anyone keen on getting started on one. A talk anyone interested in histories of sexualities, communities and the place of the archive in all of that will find fascinating.
José Arroyo