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. We preserve gay, queer, and trans life stories, using new 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 for future scholars, artists, and community members, while creating a “usable past” for LGBTQ+ people in the present.

Among many other, more focused, research questions we ask: How can we co-create digital history sources about our queer and trans past that can lead to the creation of non-extractive, trans-centric, anti-racist histories in the future? How do we resist the dominant model of the university as the producer of 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.

Some of these oral history projects include two 1980s, community-based projects (Lesbians Making History and Foolscap Gay Oral History Project, c.130 interviews) and three new projects: Trans Health Care Activism in Ontario, Trans Activism Oral History Project, and the Pussy Palace Oral History Project (66 interviews total). In addition to these discrete projects, the Collaboratory has also digitized many interviews held in The ArQuives’ collections, including interviews conducted by David Churchill, among others.