The 60 Years of Queer and Trans Activism and Care Project: Learning to Conduct Archival Research and Write Dramatic Verbatim Monologues

By inergency On Mar 30, 2024

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1. Introduction

In this piece, we discuss an exciting full-year undergraduate research course which provided students an opportunity to conduct archival research on six decades of queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) activism and care that have challenged heteronormativity, cis-normativity, and racism in Canada.1 The 10-week course was offered between September 2022 and March 2023. Each class was two hours long.

For many years, LGBTQ2S+ and queer of colour researchers have been writing about the overrepresentation of White and middle-class perspectives in LGBTQ2S+ research and have called for more research with and about folks who identify as QTBIPOC (see, for example, Goldstein 2021; Moore and Brainer 2013; Owis 2022; Owis and Goldstein 2021). The goal of the course was to uncover unknown or lesser-known histories of QTBIPOC activism and care works to (1) challenge the overrepresentation of White middle-class perspectives in LGBTQ2S+ research and (2) create a space for our students to witness and tell stories from histories which were significant to them because they shed light on their own contemporary experiences of oppression, activism, and care.

While there are many ways to share the findings of archival research, we chose to teach our students how to create dramatic verbatim monologues from the material they uncovered. Verbatim theatre has been described as theatre that is created by interviewing people about their everyday lives or about an event that has happened in their community (Brown and Wake 2010; Goldstein 2019). In verbatim theatre, the words of real people (in this case, the words of QTBIPOC activists found in archival material) are edited, arranged, and/or recontextualized to form a dramatic monologue or play script, which can be performed on stage by actors who take on the characters of the real individuals whose words are being used (Hammond and Stewart 2008). There are several reasons why we chose to teach our students how to share their research through verbatim theatre. First, we were drawn to the way verbatim theatre allows researchers and writers to share information about past moments of activism and care by using the words of the activists themselves to describe these moments. Second, we were excited about the ways verbatim monologues allow the words of activists to explain why a particular moment of activism and care was needed. Third, because of these possibilities of verbatim theatre, we ourselves had already written a verbatim playscript to share archival research on queer and trans activism. Our work on The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays (Goldstein et al. 2023, forthcoming) taught us important skills around conducting archival research and sharing our findings through verbatim monologues and dialogues.2 We wanted to share our skills with our students.

5. Learning How to Uncover Histories of QTBIPOC Activism and Care through Archival Research

To prepare students for their research projects, we provided them with a variety of readings and three different workshops: a workshop in conducting archival research, a workshop about centring themselves and their communities in their research, and a workshop in verbatim monologue writing. A reflection on what we learned from the readings and workshops follows. Both the readings and the workshops considerably enriched our understanding of how archival QTBIPOC research on activism and care might be designed and carried out.

The course began with an introductory reading assignment that provided students with an overview of the steps involved in conducting archival research. We selected the 2022 Archival Research Guide from the City University of New York (CUNY) Mina Lees Library (CUNY Graduate Centre Mina Rees Library 2022) because it provided helpful information on how to work with primary sources and how to use archival finding aids that are available in community and library archives. The students then participated in two archival research workshops led by the University of Toronto History Professor and community archival researcher Elspeth Brown and community archivist Raegan Swanson. Both Brown and Swanson work at The ArQuives, which is the largest independent LGBTQ2S+ Archives in the world. Brown is a Co-Founder of The ArQuives, and Swanson is its current Executive Director. Located in Toronto, The ArQuives’ mandate is to “preserve, organize and give public access to information and materials in any medium by and about LGBTQ2S+ people, primarily produced in or concerning Canada” (https://arquives.ca/about, accessed on 17 September 2022). Research at The ArQuives can be undertaken digitally and in person in The ArQuives’ physical space. Some of the students relied on material that was available online, while others visited The ArQuives in person and worked with material that was there.

5.1. Archival Research and Individualized Storytelling

The first workshop, led by Elspeth Brown, was designed to introduce students to The ArQuives website. However, before sharing some practical tips about how to navigate The ArQuives database, Brown engaged the students in a discussion of an article they had asked them to read before the workshop. The article, written by Brown and their colleague Myrl Beam, discussed the challenges of undertaking archival research about QTBIPOC activism in the current context of increased queer and trans visibility. Here is an excerpt from the article that describes these challenges.

Trans oral history is having a moment. In the wake of what Time [magazine] dubbed, in 2014, the “transgender tipping,” current interest in trans oral history is unfolding in the context of increased trans visibility and today’s sharp increase in violence against trans and gender nonconforming people, especially women of color. This new mainstream visibility of trans people in media and culture stems from a narrow vision of trans embodiment, a provisional acceptance that is predicated on a logic of medicalized identity, furthered by a style of narrative storytelling that individualizes and depoliticizes trans identity.

Brown and Beam’s argument that trans oral history and trans storytelling can individualize and depoliticize trans identity was an important argument for our students to discuss. Our 60 Years of Queer and Trans Activism and Care course was based on the premise that uncovering unknown or lesser-known stories of QTBIPOC activism and care could help us better understand and challenge ongoing oppression and systemic violence perpetuated against queer and trans BIPOC communities today. Following trans scholar Hil Malatino, we designed the 60 Years of QTBIPOC Activism and Care project believing that “when the milieu you inhabit feels hostile, it’s deeply comforting to turn to text and image from another time” (Malatino 2020, p. 51). We also believed that sharing queer and trans histories of activism and care could be “another roadmap for being” (Malatino 2020, p. 51) if we resisted sharing the kind of individualized narrative stories Brown and Beam wrote about. To conduct research that would provide our communities with what Brown and Beam (2022) called “a usable past” (p. 29), we needed to uncover and share moments of QTBIPOC activism and care that named and challenged institutional and structural practices of cis-heteronormativity and other forms of discrimination.

A good example of a student project that challenged individualized storytelling by focusing on systemic discrimination is Mia Jakobsen’s research on trans activist Rupert Raj. Raj’s work of activism embedded in care in the 1970s and 1980s responded to institutional cis-normativity in the Canadian health sector. In her research report, Mia wrote that Raj identifies as a pansexual transgender man of East Indian and Polish descent who transitioned in 1971. His work throughout Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s was indispensable to the trans community; as a psychotherapist, he provided transgender people, their significant others, and the Canadian medical and health communities with research, education, and counselling. Raj was the founder of several trans organizations in Canada, including the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Transsexuals (FACT), the Metamorphosis Medical Research Foundation (MMRF), which operated from December 1981 to May 1988, and the Gender Worker (later renamed to Gender Consultants in 1989), which ran from 1987 to 1990. In June 1999, he co-founded a peer support group for transgender men and women at the 519 Community Centre in Toronto. Mia’s guiding research question for her project was: How did Raj show activism and care for other trans people through his writing? She answered her research question in the following way.

Rupert Raj used writing to support his fellow trans friends by disseminating valuable information through three established trans publications. The first, Gender Review: the FACTual Journal, ran from 1978 to 1981 in Calgary and Toronto. The subsequent journal, Metamorphosis, ran from 1982 to 1988 in Toronto. It was a bi-monthly newsletter for transgender men that promised information regarding clinical research, hormones, surgery, tips to effectively passing as male in public, and legal reform for trans people. The third, Gender NetWorker, published two issues in Toronto in 1988, directing trans individuals to helpful professionals and resource providers. Raj stated that he wanted to facilitate a communication network between professional and lay providers, to bring together trans people and the medical and health professionals who worked with trans populations. From his work, Raj provided critical support to and for other trans men, essentially serving as an information broker between the medical/psychological community and trans individuals and their loved ones. Rupert Raj’s advocacy was done through a method of care, which, in turn, fostered a community among trans Canadians.

In addition to his journal writing, Raj also answered personal letters from people looking for advice and support around gender transitioning. To answer their questions, Raj wrote to doctors and clinics in Europe, the United States, Singapore, and Brazil. He then shared the information he received with fellow activists, friends, as well as people who wrote requesting information. The detailed information Raj requested from doctors and clinics included the success rate of procedures, patient satisfaction, cost, and available medical insurance coverage.

To create her verbatim monologue about Rupert Raj’s activism and care, Mia focused on the letters written to Raj in 1984 by a young person named David Liebman. She also focused on the subsequent letters Raj received in early 1985 from David’s family and friends after his death. Mia says she focused on the letter writing between Raj and David because “it stood out from all the letters [she had] read” and because it “encapsulated Raj’s work of activism and care toward trans people” (Jakobsen 2022, p. 7). Throughout 1984, Liebman wrote Raj six letters. Although the letters were often about updating Raj about his life, Mia writes that Liebman’s letters indicate that he wanted to make more trans and gay friends. Liebman mentioned he wanted to be added to a trans newsletter in Florida, stating that “it would be nice to have a friend like [himself] in the same state as [he was]” (Jakobsen 2022, p. 7). Later that year, Liebman wrote Raj, thanking him after a fellow trans man in Florida who he was planning to meet up with mentioned learning about him through Raj. Liebman signed off his letters to Raj with the complementary close “Your brother,” an indication of how much Liebman cherished Raj’s friendship (Jakobsen 2022, p. 8).

In January 1985, both Liebman’s sister and mother wrote to Raj to tell him of David’s suicide. David’s sister said she was grateful for Raj’s help. David’s mother thanked Raj for reaching out to David. She said Raj’s friendship meant a great deal to him. Three of Raj’s friends additionally reached out to Raj to mourn Liebman. For Mia, the letters to Raj from David Liebman and his family and friends demonstrate the importance of care and community amongst trans people in the 1980s. The care and community received from Raj challenged the isolation David experienced.

In reflecting on Mia’s monologue entitled “Your Brother, David” (which was how David signed his letters to Raj), we note that the monologue is a community story that resists the typical tropes of individual storytelling. So often, we want to tell stories with happy endings. This story does not have a happy ending. While David was connected to the community and experienced some hope through his letter writing to Raj, in the end, he did not survive.

Verbatim theatre can resist individualized storytelling by resisting the structure of what is often thought of as a well-made play with a beginning, middle, and end. It resists the structure of a premise, inciting incident, climax, and denouement. Verbatim work comes into the middle of messy lives and does not tell a story that neatly resolves conflicts.

5.2. Working with Indigenous Archival Material

Knowing that some of our students might be interested in working with Indigenous archival material, we asked archivist Raegan Swanson to lead a second workshop about how students might use the Indigenous archival material they found in The ArQuives. Swanson has worked as an archivist at the Library and Archives Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and the Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute. They have also worked as the Archival Advisor for the Council of Archives New Brunswick and are currently working on a doctoral thesis that focuses on the creation of community archives in Indigenous communities. To prepare for Raegan’s workshop, the students read the following two important documents.

Understanding how these two documents came into being and how they are relevant to our students’ archival research work requires an understanding of some Canadian history. In June 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada issued 94 Calls to Action to the Canadian government and its citizens in the hope that the wrongs that had been done and continue to be done to the Indigenous Peoples of Canada would be addressed. Call to Action #70 specifically called upon the Canadian Association of Archivists to undertake, in collaboration with Indigenous Peoples, a national review of archival policies and practices to (1) ensure that the truth of what happened in residential schools was uncovered and (2) provide recommendations for how the truth might be uncovered.

In her talk with us, Raegan Swanson explained that while no Canadian Association of Archivists exists, in September 2015, a “Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives” was established with representatives from a variety of Canadian archival associations to create a Response to the Truth and Reconciliation Task Force3 (The Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives 2022b). The mandate of the Steering Committee was to address Call #70 specifically but also to address the additional 93 Calls in spirit.

With a small grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Steering Committee spent the next five years engaged in extensive research to better understand how archival practices have continued to perpetuate colonial ideas and restrict access to information in archives across the country. Relegating the small amount of funding they received to pay for a report writer, editor, and designer, the Steering Committee spent their lunch hours and hours after work conducting research and compiling the report. The findings of their research are included in the first report Raegan asked us to read, Response to the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Taskforce. The Steering Committee’s recommendations for action are included in the second report: Reconciliation Framework: The Response to the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Taskforce.

In her talk with the students, Swanson discussed the framework as a road map that sets out a vision, a set of foundational principles, and a path forward for the Archives profession in Canada. The broad objectives point to areas of archival practice that immediately need change, and the action-oriented strategies describe the kind of practices that support respectful relationship-building initiatives, embrace the intellectual sovereignty of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples over records created by or about them, and encourage the reconceptualization of mainstream archival theory and practice.

The students spent a good deal of our time with Swanson discussing the first objective articulated in the framework: Creating relationships of respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility when engaging with Indigenous archival research materials and Indigenous communities wanting access to archival research materials. Addressing the students as researchers who were about to begin a new archival research project, Raegan posed a set of questions students needed to ask themselves before they started their research.

3.: How am I coming into my research work? How do I fit in? For example, if I am a non-Indigenous researcher doing research with or about Indigenous people, why am I doing this work? Have I been invited to do this work by an Indigenous community? If not, have I created a relationship with the Indigenous people I want to work with to ensure I have their support to take on this research?
4.: What is the relevance of my research work? Is my research work relevant to the Indigenous people/community I want to work with? How? To whom in particular?
5.: What responsibility do I need to take in my research work? How do I respect the people I’m working with? (Swanson 2022).

While some researchers might argue that these questions are basic to conducting good research and did not need to be articulated in the framework document, Swanson told us why the Steering Committee felt the following questions needed to be included.

While people should be approaching relationships with any community with respect, it needed to be written, it needed to be said, because so many people are so unfamiliar about working with communities outside their own sphere. This is especially true for university researchers. We see a lot of people parachuting in, doing their research, and parachuting out again. If we’re talking about what our role is and creating these relationships, we need to think about the coming in and leaving.

In our discussion about the framework, student Chika Duru told us that the statement about researchers having access to archives and knowledge really stood out to her. “At university,” she said, “students have access to many archives. Having this access means showing respect for the materials we have access to and access knowledge we are gaining.” Other students agreed, acknowledging that a researcher’s access to knowledge is a gift, not an entitlement.

Mia Jakobsen, whose work was discussed earlier, said that the part of the framework that stood out to her was the need to reimagine the foundations of mainstream archival theory, practice, and research to reflect First Nations, Inuit, and Métis knowledge systems and world views. “This goes beyond being nice,” Mia said. “[It means] involving people in research, making sure people are involved in the process of research.” Goldstein agreed with Mia, noting that the word “reimagine” points to the depth of the responsibility that the document is calling for. A few weeks after our discussion with Swanson, Mia returned to one of the ideas that came out of our discussion of the framework. In her research report, she returned to the idea of needing to break “archival silences” (Jakobsen 2022, p. 3). Thinking about what knowledge has been documented and presented to the world and what knowledge has not, was one of the reasons Mia chose to research the activist work of Rupert Raj.

7. Learning to Write Dramatic Verbatim Monologues

To prepare the students for verbatim monologue writing, theatre artist and arts-based researcher Salisbury conducted a verbatim theatre workshop to demonstrate how the students might share the moments of activism and care they researched in the form of a verbatim monologue. Resources for the students to consult as they began to create their monologues included a video about the steps involved in creating a verbatim theatre piece produced by the National Theatre in the United Kingdom (National Theatre 2014), a short article on tips for writing dramatic monologues (MasterClass 2021), and Clare’s Summerskill’s book Creating Verbatim Theatre from Oral Histories (Summerskill 2020). Summerskill’s writing on ethical considerations in verbatim theatre is complemented by our learnings from Raegan Swanson’s workshop on working with Indigenous archival material. As a research team working towards designing a project based on respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility (Wilson 2008) we needed to ensure individuals and communities represented in the students’ monologues had a say in how their stories were being narrated. When our students chose to write monologues featuring activists who were still living, we asked them to contact these activists and send them their monologues for approval before publishing them online.

To show the students how to write a dramatic verbatim monologue, Salisbury used an example of our work from our play Out at School. She showed students how we created a monologue from the words from an interview with parent Victoria Mason (a pseudonym). In her interview, Victoria talked about the work her daughter’s school was doing and not doing to create a welcoming space for LGBTQ2S+ families. The monologue is called “Putting Lipstick on a Pig.” The verbatim title came from Victoria’s assessment of the limited benefits of putting up “safe space” posters on the wall of her daughter’s classroom. Safe space posters alone, she argued, are not enough to create a safer and more welcoming classroom. In schools where there is a culture of cis-heteronormativity and bullying against students and families who do not identify as cisgender or heterosexual, putting posters up on the wall is like “putting lipstick on a pig.” After analyzing the ways Salisbury and Goldstein worked with Victoria’s interview to create a verbatim monologue based on her words, each student wrote their verbatim monologue based on the findings of their archival research. First drafts of each monologue were shared in the course and each student received feedback on their first draft. When the students’ monologues had been revised and polished, we asked them to work in groups of three or four to arrange their monologues into a play script. Each group presented their arrangement and explained how their arrangement of each scene layered the meaning of the previous scene and the next scene. The students then discussed the possibilities of each arrangement, learning the skill of developing a larger playscript from a set of monologues. Finally, the students discussed how all ten monologues might be arranged to create a verbatim playscript that could be made publicly available on the Gailey Road website after receiving permission from those activists who are still living. An electronic collection of all the students’ monologues is available on the Gailey Road website at https://gaileyroad.com/10-moments-of-queer-and-trans-activism-and-care-in-canada/, accessed on 17 September 2022.

8. Conclusions

To conclude our reflection on what we learned from our 60 Years of QTBIPOC Activism and Care project, we want to describe the ways our students have begun to share their work. We also want to share some of the challenges we faced during the course and our students’ take-aways from the course.

Three students, Chika, Shakira, and Julia Chapman, presented their monologues at the Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) at the University of Toronto in February 2023. Four students, Julia, Giovanna El-Warrak, Anya Shen, and Vivian Wang, presented a poster of all the students’ research projects at the University of Toronto’s Research Opportunity Program Research Fair in March 2023. The poster presented at the Research Fair is also available on the Gailey Road website. Mitzi, Anya, and Vivian presented their monologues at Congress, the annual national conference of Social Science and Humanities research in Canada, in May 2023.

Turning now to some of the challenges we experienced in the course, two seem particularly important. The first involved questions of language and legitimacy. How does one define “activist”? Who counts? Does a person have to identify personally as an activist, or can a researcher bestow that title on someone else? Does a person have to have a lifetime of activism, or is a single moment of public work enough? Does activism have to be public facing? We encountered this struggle with terms and categories throughout our work, not only with “activist” and “activism” but also “care”, “history”, “community”, and “justice.” Each of these terms is broad and can incorporate many differing examples. Our team often found ourselves discussing these questions and how different answers might influence our work.

The second challenge we faced will be familiar to anyone who works within research-based theatre research, verbatim theatre specifically, and that is the question of ethical representation. Specifically, when someone takes on the role of “playwright” and begins to craft and edit words into a speech assigned to a living person, where are the lines of appropriation, misappropriation, and misrepresentation? There are no hard and fast rules in verbatim theatre and often no ethics board to guide a theatrical research project. Working with the readings and discussions discussed above, we became an ethics community for one another. Each person on the team brought their thinking, their choices, and their concerns to our classes, and we pushed each other to look at our editing and citation practices with a critical eye. We questioned together what the possible harms and benefits were connected to each students’ monologue project.

To encourage this process during the team’s work with the verbatim monologue “Putting Lipstick on a Pig” described earlier, Jenny showed the students the original interview, the transcript, and the resulting monologue. We discussed the choices and practices that the Out at School team made, the moments of erasure, the moments of clarity, and how a monologue can both capture and miss original source material. This conversation helped the students, most of whom were writing verbatim monologues for the first time, to shift their effort from striving for “correct” or “perfect” to “strong”, “clear”, and “persuasive.” However, the challenge of getting it right, of serving our interview subjects with respect and care continues to be the most important challenge and commitment in creating verbatim theatre.

On the last day of the course, we asked our students what they were taking away from the work we had done together. Shakira said that she’s taking away the idea that she can research things she feels passionate about. She also said our work to uncover histories of activism and care and share them through verbatim theatre will inform her future scholarship in political science. Mitzi told us that she had a great time and that she felt proud of how her project had developed since the beginning of the course. Like Shakira, Mitzi said what she learned about conducting research from Elspeth, Raegan, and d’bi will impact her research in other courses. “The course changed my life”, she told us. For Giovanna, finding freedom to express herself in forms other than writing essays was also life-changing.

Vivian told us she appreciated learning how to approach research in ethical ways. She also appreciated the solidarity that had developed among the students in the course. Anya learned how treating people with love and care is a form of radical power which can be integrated into academia. Mia also talked about learning how the practice of care was important not only to the activists we researched but to their communities as well.

Like Shakira, Julia said she now feels empowered to pursue research she deeply cares about. For Jialu Lulu Li, learning how to support herself and others in completing a research project was very important. She now feels confident about applying to graduate school. Like Lulu, Chika also mentioned the pleasure of working on a project as part of a research community. Research, she noted, does not have to be a solitary practice.

While the small number of students involved in the course makes it impossible to draw general conclusions about the success or possibilities of the course and archival verbatim research, we believe the project can be replicated by other researchers and practitioners. In particular, the idea that research does not have to be a solitary practice, that it can be taken up in community, within relationships that are respectful, and through commitments of relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility are ideas we believe are worthy of being shared with undergraduate students. They are ideas that will continue to ground our own future research practices and ideas, which we hope will continue to ground the research our students will engage in over their careers.

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