Ottawa | Calgary Gay History

Tag Archives: Ottawa

The LGBT Purge: The True Story

Posted on July 11, 2024 by Kevin Allen | 1 comment

Montreal-based journalist Shawn Dearn has released the second season of his award-winning podcast, Queer Legends: The True Story of Canada’s LGBT Purge. Impeccably researched, it tells the story of the LGBT Purge in Canada from World War I until today. “The Purge” was the Government of Canada’s effort to eliminate queers from the military and public service, which the Government apologized for in 2017. The story of the purge is significant queer history in its own right, but it also parallels the community’s ongoing struggle to achieve equality.

Kevin Allen from the Calgary Gay History Project is featured in episode 3. He discusses Calgary bus driver Everett Klippert and his pivotal role in Canadian history.

Queer Legends was sponsored by the LGBT Purge Fund, which notably has also commissioned Thunderhead a national queer history monument in Ottawa. The Purge Fund is programming events across the country. Rumour has it that there will be a pop-up event in Calgary sometime in August. We’ll keep you posted when we find out more.

{KA}

1 Comment

Posted in Gay history

Tagged bisexual, Everett Klippert, gay, Gay history, human-rights, lesbian, LGBT Purge, LGBT Purge Fund, Ottawa, queer, Queer Legends, Shawn Dearn, Thunderhead, transgender

YYC Gay History in YOW

Posted on August 18, 2017 by Kevin Allen | Leave a comment

Kevin has spent the week in Ottawa: working, doing research and going to museums. The Canadian Museum of History just unveiled its new permanent exhibition: the Canadian History Hall – quite impressive. Looking for Calgary gay history connections, we were surprised to find a couple. A photo of Jean L’Heureux (the subject of last week’s post – although he was not cited in the picture) and a rainbow pride banner with its origin story which was created in Calgary in 2005.

We also stopped into the Canadian War Museum to get some snaps of the “Electropsychometer” also know as the Fruit Machine, which the Canadian Government used to eliminate homosexuals from the public service in the 1960s. Tereasa wrote a post about it a few years ago.

The Fruit Machine at the Canadian War Museum, Kevin Allen photo.

Pride Week in Ottawa begins shortly and there are already signs of rainbows popping up in the nation’s capital, but I am looking forward to coming home to experience YYC Pride. We will have a history booth at Pride in the Park on September 3rd and there are a couple of gay history walks planned on August 31st and September 2nd. We hope to see you out.

{KA}