S7E16 The 1979 Binational Lesbian Conference

Curious Canadian History

In 1979 a conference was held in Toronto which became a pivotal event for both Toronto and Canada’s lesbian community. While so much attention at the time was focused around the emerging visibility of Canada’s gay community, it was heavily gendered, focsuing almost exclusively on gay men, much less visilbity existed for Candaa’s lesbian community. The 1979 conference was thus a key moment in helping bring visibility to Canada’s lesbian community while also acting as a rally point for the community itself. To cover this fascinating topic we are talking with Rebecka Taves Sheffield, an archivist, author, and educator based in Hamilton, Ontario.

Rebecka was the first Executive Director and Archives Manager of the ArQuives (formerly the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives), an organization that is the inspiration for much of her scholarly work. She trained as an archivist at the University of Toronto (UofT) iSchool and earned a PhD at UofT’s Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. Rebecka has served as a senior policy advisor for the Archives of Ontario and is now advising on digital and data policy with Ontario Digital Service.

She is the author of Documenting Rebellions: A Study of Four Lesbian and Gay Archives in Queer Times (Litwin, 2020), and was part of the award-winning editorial team that produced Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer (Coach House, 2017). Her work has been published in Archivaria, American Archivist, Radical History Review, Library Trends, Papers/Cahiers, and the International Journal of Information, Diversity & Inclusion.

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