Tag Archives: CLUE Magazine

Be your own queer historian!

Posted on October 4, 2024 by Kevin Allen | 1 comment

October is queer history month in Canada. We want to highlight some local and digital queer history resources that are public and accessible. Curious historians take note!

The new Calgary Gay History Project Collection at the University of Calgary launched during Pride and are already being used by researchers. We’re planning a launch party on October 22 at 5 PM, details TBA.

*Dr. William Bridel, Archivist Kim Geraldi, and the Calgary Gay History Project’s Kevin Allen exploring the collection.* *Image by Andy Nichols, 2024, University of Calgary Archives Photographs, Libraries and Cultural Resources.*

Our colleagues at the Edmonton Queer History Project launched an online digitized queer Alberta magazine collection. Of particular interest to Calgarians are Outlooks, Modern Pink, and A.G.L.P. They’ve kindly pledged to add more Calgary publications in the near future.

The Central Library has hard copies of queer publications Outlook, Clue! and QC Magazine in their fourth-floor Local History collection (as well as circulating copies of Our Past Matters: Stories of Gay Calgary).

Gay Calgary and Edmonton magazine has their back catalogue digitized and online (2003-2019).

*Cover August 2006 of GayCalgary Magazine*

Many significant queer archives are digitizing some of their holdings and creating online exhibits—notably the ArQuives in Toronto and the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria.

When you are travelling, seek out the queer histories of the places you are visiting. We just went to Spokane, Washington, last week and discovered Spokane Pride’s queer history project online—fascinating!

*1950’s newspaper advert from the Spokane Pride History Project*

Finally, when you have discovered something interesting, share it! You can use the social media tags @2SQHMCan and #2SQHMCan to link up with a national conversation about queer history.

{KA}

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Posted in Gay history

Tagged 2SQHMC, A.G.L.P., ArQuives, bisexual, Calgary, Calgary Gay History Project Collection, CLUE Magazine, edmonton queer history project, gay, gay calgary magazine, Gay history, Kim Geraldi, lesbian, lgbtq, Modern Pink, Outlooks, Pride, QC Magazine, queer, Spokane Pride, transgender, Transgender Archives, William Bridel

Gaps in recounting the past?

Posted on June 30, 2022 by Kevin Allen | 3 comments

*The cover of CLUE! Magazine: January 1993*

One’s personal gay history is part of a larger gay history narrative. Having just returned this month from a long trip to Greece, where I lived in my early 20s, I’ve been combing through my personal archives to recollect my former life abroad. Fortunately, there is a written record—I volunteered for the ’90s local queer publication, CLUE! Magazine, and after I left Calgary I wrote a column called “Notes from Greece.”

Reading my 22-year-old musing does induce some cringing but the part of the column that haunts me the most is what I have forgotten. Broad strokes are remembered but a few important details have vanished over time. As someone whose research leans heavily on oral history accounts, the vacancies in my own story give me pause. Our stories have holes.

*Kevin Allen: first time in the Mediterranean Sea, age 22.*

Academic historians, of course, enumerate all sorts of limitations in historical research: issues of memory, subjectivity, privilege, etc. However, when your own story has gaps, you feel this limitation profoundly. Yet, I’m thankful for the written word, the fact that this column even existed, and that the magazine has been collected and preserved. I can read it 28 years later and learn something about my own gay history—a “clue” about who I was.

I’m uploading a few of the columns for interested readers—feel free to cringe! Perhaps there is a hint of a future historian in the making…

notes-from-greece-columns Download

{KA}

{Note: the column was handwritten, mailed to Canada as a letter, and then typed into CLUE!’s graphic design program. Email was not a widespread thing then—true story!}

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Posted in Gay history

Tagged bisexual, CLUE Magazine, gay, Gay history, Greece, lesbian, queer, transgender

It Was a Place to Meet People Like Me: Sport & YYC LGBTQ+ History

Posted on November 26, 2021 by Kevin Allen | Leave a comment

{Free public lecture at the University of Calgary on December 2nd at 7 PM, hosted by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities—see their press release below. – Kevin}

Please join us for a talk by Calgary Institute for the Humanities 2020-21 Resident Fellow William Bridel

“Our history is about the stories, lives, experiences, and thoughts of individuals who built their lives around their newfound and often hard-won identity. We cannot lose that”. Stephen Lock wrote those words in the October 1994 issue of Clue!, one of Calgary’s queer publications at the time. In 2018, LGBTQ+ historian Kevin Allen released Our Past Matters: Stories of Gay Calgary, noting that the project was “ultimately about memory, and recording these essential stories of our humanity.” In this talk I follow the lead of Lock and Allen, by using archival and interview materials to explore the place of sport in Calgary’s LGBTQ+ history, from the 1970s through to the early 2000s. From softball to volleyball, running to swimming, Apollo Friends in Sport, and the Gay Games, the retelling of these stories on their own and in conversation with one another, reveal that sport played a necessary but sometimes complicated role in individual empowerment, community-building, and the Pride movement.

Dr. William Bridel is Associate Professor and Associate Dean (Academic) in the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary. He specializes in sociocultural aspects of sport, physical activity, and the body. Current projects include investigations of LGBTQI2S+ inclusion in sport, as well as inclusion and safe sport policy. He is also interested in sport-related pain and injury, with a recent focus on athletes’ experiences of sport-related concussion.

This event will be simultaneously hosted in a live venue (University of Calgary, Taylor Institute Forum) and online on Zoom. All registrants will receive event details one week before the event and may decide to attend in either setting.

In-person attendees are required to follow all UCalgary COVID-19 event requirements: see event for details.

{KA}