Founded in 2014 by Professor Elspeth Brown and based at the University of Toronto Mississauga, the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory is a public and digital humanities research initiative dedicated to preserving gay, queer, and trans life stories. We use emerging methodologies in digital history, collaborative research, and archival practice.

As the largest LGBTQ+ oral history project in North American history, the Collaboratory connects archives across Canada and the United States to co-create anti-racist, queer, and trans documentary heritage—both for future scholars, artists, and community members and to build a “usable past” for LGBTQ+ people in the present.

Among our core research questions are: How can we co-create digital history sources about our queer and trans past that support the making of non-extractive, trans-centric, anti-racist histories? And how can we resist dominant academic models that narrowly define what constitutes valuable knowledge?

In partnership with several archives—including The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, the Transgender Archives, the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony, and the Digital Transgender Archive—we have collected, digitized, and created over 250 individual oral histories about LGBTQ+ life in Canada and the United States.

These include two foundational community-based projects from the 1980s—Lesbians Making History and the Foolscap Gay Oral History Project (approx. 130 interviews)—as well as three newer initiatives: Trans Health Care Activism in Ontario, Trans Activism Oral History Project, and the Pussy Palace Oral History Project (66 interviews total). We have also digitized additional interviews housed at The ArQuives, including those conducted by David Churchill and others.

The Collaboratory is supported by a multi-year research grant from the Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada.