Memory is a funny thing. We remember the big moments, but it is often the smaller details that tell us who we were and how we survived.
That is one of the great strengths of Season Two of Late in ’88, the podcast created by Bronwin Parks and Elinor Svoboda. This new season jumps ahead to 1998, their senior year at a Calgary high school, and asks what had changed for queer youth in the decade since 1988—and what had not.
The Calgary Gay History Project’s Kevin Allen was pleased to join Bronwin and Elinor again in Episode 2, “The Decade That Changed Queer Canada.” Together, we discuss the AIDS crisis, Calgary’s first Pride parade in 1990, the Delwin Vriend case, cultural backlash, queer community spaces, and the activism that helped reshape Canada in the 1990s.
The episode is a reminder that queer history is not abstract. It lives in classrooms, bars, courtrooms, bedrooms, hospital rooms, community meetings, and the memories we carry with us. The 1990s brought meaningful legal and social change, but that progress was hard-won. It came from people willing to organize, speak up, care for one another, and imagine a different future.
Podcasts like Late in ’88 matter. They do what good oral history should do: they connect personal memory to a larger historical moment. Bronwin and Elinor are generous and thoughtful guides through their own past. They understand that memory is complicated—and powerful.
Season Two of Late in ’88 is well worth your time. Listen, share it, and then ask yourself: whose story still needs to be recorded?
{KA}
Calgary Gay History 