It began as the personal collection of one man, but today the Hamilton 2SLGBTQ+ Community Archives are meant for everyone in the queer community.
The archives, housed at the Hamilton Public Library, were founded by Michael Johnstone, a McMaster alumnus who bequeathed his records and documentation of queer life in Hamilton upon his passing in 2018.
“Michael always really understood that it’s important for queer people to have a community and for different generations to learn from one another,” said Cole Gately, Johnstone’s friend and one of the archives’ community stewards.
“He created a dinner club that ran every month for 20 years for any queer person who wanted to come along and meet other people, and his collection is an extension of that community building.
“He wanted queer Hamiltonians to know they aren’t alone.”
Johnstone’s archives, which included more than 50 boxes of news clippings, meeting minutes, photographs and VHS tapes spanning decades, are just the starting point for a collection that Gately and his fellow archivists hope will grow to encompass more diverse stories from the local 2SLGBTQ+ community.
“We’ve been trying to be very mindful of broadening and diversifying the stories that are being told about the queer past in Hamilton, because you can tell quite a detailed story from what Michael collected, but it’s still filtered through the perspective of one white gay man,” said Amber Dean, professor of English & Cultural Studies and co-organizer of a community-based research and teaching project working alongside the archives.
Dean’s students have been helping to develop descriptions for some of the materials in Johnstone’s collection and contributing to the archives with projects of their own, including multimedia zines and histories that are hosted online through the Building the Archives project website.
It’s been eye-opening for students to go through Johnstone’s donations and see that the struggles faced by Hamilton’s queer community today are not so different from those faced by older generations, Dean said.
“Sometimes my students are surprised when they see, for example, the way that HUGS (Hamilton United Gay Societies) pushed back against policing of the community and policing of cruising and things like that,” Dean said.
“They think that their generation is the first to push back against police, but they can look in the archives and see that there’s a long history of struggle that’s been documented that we can learn from.”
The initiative recently won an award through McMaster’s Office of Community Engagement, which earned Dean and Gately’s community-engaged research project $10,000 to expand storytelling and enable further accessibility through the online portal.
Dean said the funding also allows them to collaborate with other queer archivists across Canada and recently took the project to a conference in Halifax called From Marginalization to Visibility: 2SLGBTQ+ Archives & Public Memory.
Along with building a network of archives and learning from the joys and challenges of doing archival work, Dean said there were conversations about developing protocols for privacy versus public access of materials that might include people who may not have foreseen they might be documented in archives where their queer identity is on display.
“How do you navigate that question of respecting people’s privacy in photos taken before the internet existed versus the desire of people today to know that there is a gay past?”
“Some of the photographs in Michael’s collection, from these fall get-togethers and corn roasts, are beautiful, but if you want to see those photos, you have to go in-person to the library to view them,” Dean said. “They’re not available anywhere online.”
Shelley McKay, manager of communications for the Hamilton Public Library, said the Local History and Archives department has resumed collecting donations for the 2SLGBTQ+ Community Archives after a pause during the pandemic.
The library aims to be a “responsible steward and safe and trusted place for the 2SLGBTQ+ community” and is encouraging those interested in donating material to reach out for more information, McKay said.
“We hope to have a local historical record that can be consulted, compared, contrasted and analyzed with similar records from other 2SLGBTQ+ archives to paint an accurate picture of the lived experiences of 2SLGBTQ+ people across the country and across time,” said McKay.
Anyone interested in donating to the archives or contributing their own story can reach out through the project’s website.
Gately said the archives carry on what Johnstone had always hoped to achieve through his monthly dinner parties, which is the creation of a community for every queer Hamiltonian.
“We may all have different interests and intersections and political leanings, but we can all learn something from one another. It’s a back and forth, and Michael always saw the benefit of that.”