Tag Archives: CLUE Magazine

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}

Were you sporty in the last century?

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Kevin Allen | Leave a comment

{This week we are sharing a call for participants in a research project investigating local LGBTQ+ sports history.}

My name is William Bridel and I am an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary. I am also a 2020-2021 Calgary Institute for the Humanities Fellow. I am a member of the LGBTQ+ community.

*Calgary’s CLUE Magazine and their cover story about the 1994 Gay Games*

I am conducting research to explore sport and physical activity in the lives of Calgarians who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or another LGBTQ+ identity and who participated in sport or physical activity during the time period of approximately 1960 to the early 2000s. My primary interest is in investigating the role sport and physical activity played in individuals’ lives but also in relation to community-building. My project seeks to build on the amazing work of Kevin Allen and the Calgary Gay History Project as well as research done with a former honours student at the University of Calgary, Connor MacDonald. The University of Calgary Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board has approved this research study (REB20-1526).

*A Calgary Softball Team from the 1960’s that was predominantly lesbian*

For this study, I am seeking individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ and who participated in sport or physical activity in Calgary at some point between the 1960s and early 2000s. Participants must also be English-speaking as I am unilingual. You will be asked to participate in an interview lasting around 60 to 90 minutes during which we will talk about your participation in sport—mainstream and/or LGBTQ+ specific (e.g., Apollo, Different Strokes, softball, bowling, etc.)—or physical activity (e.g., YMCA/YWCA). I would also like to discuss the meaning that sport and physical activity has had in your life.

*Calgary’s Different Strokes Swim Club at the Gay Games in Australia (2002)*

I will be conducting interviews virtually given the global pandemic; we can discuss different options such as Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, phone, etc. The interviews will be confidential, and steps will be taken to ensure your privacy throughout the process. If you choose, a pseudonym can be used in place of your name and team and organization names can be altered at your request. Interviews will be scheduled for a day/time that is most convenient for you.

If you are interested in participating in this study, please email me at william.bridel@ucalgary.ca with the following information: (1) name; (2) brief comment on your involvement in sport and/or physical activity during the 1960s to early 2000s; (3) your gender identity and sexuality; and (4) your pronouns. Once your message is received, I will contact you to discuss the study in further detail and to determine if you are still interested in volunteering to participate.

*Womyn’s Annual Golf Classic organizers, Sam & Bailey, organized Lesbian long weekends in Fernie, BC in the 90s*

I am also happy to answer any questions that you may have about the study. I can be reached at william.bridel@ucalgary.ca. Thanks so much for your time and consideration. —William (he/him)