Internet fishing...

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20 Questions (Okay, maybe 30...)

Finally,

My supervisor warned me that ethics clearance to do interviews can take a while, and I should get it done
sooner than later. That was May. I wanted to get going on interviews around July/August, so I thought if I did it in June I'd be in fine shape.

I just got a email saying I am cleared. Three months later. You gotta love university administrations. Lesson learned.

So, now begins the process of interviews. I've been thinking about the process of gathering oral histories; how the interaction between me and the narrator/interviewee is so crucial to building a level of trust that will put everyone at ease and willing to talk and the questions I'll be asking which hopefully elicit some interesting and thoughtful responses.

Charles T. Morrissey wrote an article in 1971 titled On Oral History Interviewing, as a guide to neophyte oral historians. He begins his article by saying that there is no set method to doing interviews: that techniques and other aspects of oral history vary according to the person being interviewed. There are the variables of the interviewer, his experience and chemistry with the interviewee; where the interview is conducted; when the interviewee is questioned (late in the day? Is the person tired?); if you have a fixed amount of time, or can one let the interview go on until it ends of its own accord. According to Morrissey reducing an interview to a fixed set of techniques is akin to “reducing courtship to a formula”: while being versed in a range of techniques is important, experience and intuition should guide you as to what tools to use in order to engage your interviewee. As a beginner, Morrissey stresses that preparation and familiarity with the topic and the community that the interviewee is from can help overcome inexperience.

So, with all that in mind, I have prepared a list of questions I'd like some feed back on. I expect that I won't ask all of them to everyone, and probably will use them more as a framework to work from, ad-libbing when something someone is saying is interesting, or trying to direct the conversation in a certain direction. When a person does that, it usually indicates that they have something they really want to discuss, or thinks is more important than what you are asking; a good historian (Not that I am one, but I'm trying) follows their narrator, because often the prioritizing of subjects means that the subject a person wants to talk about first this is what the narrator remembers best, and also indicates what mattered most to people in thier daily lives.

Please, take a look and comment. What am I missing? Would you change the wording of some questions? Are their any events/places you thing I should mention specifically? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks and have a good evening.

Grant

SAMPLE LIST OF QUESTIONS:

-Name, age, gender, sexual orientation, occupation, relationship status.

- Where are you from?

-How long have you lived in Ottawa? What brought you to the city?

-When did you come out? Why then?

-If not, why are you still closeted?

-Generally speaking, how would you sum up Ottawa as a place to live? Do you like it?

-What do you think are the factors that contribute to your point of view?

-How would you describe it as a place for a GLBT person to live?

-How would you describe Ottawa’s GLBT community, if you were/are a part of it?

-Why were you not a part of it?

-What activities did you partake in (ex: political, social)?

-What and where was your first encounter with GLBT life in Ottawa?

-When you came out, how did straights and Ottawa as a whole relate to/treat queers? How has it changed?

-How were the police?

-What places did you frequent the most? Why? What was/is your favorite place? What was your least favorite?

-Where did you not go? Why?

- Do you think there were a lot of divisions in the community? Do you think they were expressed in terms of who went where?

Who used what spaces? When? Why?

-As you can best remember, what neighborhoods were considered ‘queer’ in Ottawa, and when?

- Could you talk to me about Hull, and how the spots in Hull related to Ottawa’s GLBT community?

- How did you experience Ottawa’s reaction to the GLBT community? Were you ever a victim of violence? Where and when? By whom?

-Did your professional life affect where you went or whom you associated with?

-In your opinion, how did bigger cities like Montreal and Toronto affect the gay community? How did you see/used the communities and spaces in other cities?

-how free did you feel to be open about your sexuality in these places?

-How did you find out about new GLBT spots/clubs ?

-What do you think of the current number of spaces in Ottawa, compared to the past?

-Is it better or worse? Why?

-In your opinion, what caused the decline in spaces?

-How did the activist community create/use spaces? Did those spaces play a role in your life?

-Can you discuss the phenomena of house parties in Ottawa? Did you go to them, why were they seemingly so popular?

-Did you life as a queer person result in any interaction with queers of the opposite gender or transsexual/transgendered people?

-What in your opinion, do you consider the 5 or ten most important events for the queer community that has happened locally?

-How about nationally?

-Do you think different classes (working class, poor, middle class) us space differently? Why? How? Did different classes interact together?

-How did couples/married people use spaces?

-How did bi folks use spaces?

-Was there a very sharp divide between French and English Queers? How was that expressed?

-Did you ever go cruising? Where? When? Did spots you use come and go?

-Ever use a tearoom or a bath house? Which one(s)? Any outside of Ottawa

-What do you think of the village initiative?

What 130 bucks gets you (into).

So the first week of school in upon me and I find myself the victim of excessive grad-school meet-and-greet; I am wildly hungover after hosting the welcome/welcome back history graduate student BBQ at my place. So, rather than pedal over to the archives, I decided I'd share with my readers (all three of you) my excitement over my new purchase: a HP printer.

And staying close to my bed and toilet is pretty appealing today, I must admit.

My old printer died after a surprisingly long life, considering how many times I swore at it, bashed it, and threw things at it when it would take up four pages printing all the web page backgrounds I told it NOT to do. Have a happy afterlife my friend, and frolic with plump toner cartridges , you deserved it.

The new printer I got at best buy, and am floored at what it can do: Color, 2-sided printing, fax photocopy and scanning. Did I mention wireless connection? Hell yeah! What really got me excited, in relation to my thesis and my extended goal is the scanner. It can do letter-sized high-resolution flatbed scans. Good enough for photos and documents. In fact, the posters in my new gallery to the left of this post is mostly the result of me figuring out how to use the scanner properly over an afternoon (2 sided printing is another matter; cue the baptism of the printer in profanities).

In terms of my work, it means I can easily put photos and paper ephemera into my database and hopefully into my thesis. In relation to my mandate to collect and preserve whatever materials I encounter and am asked to find a safe, secure home for, this is awesome. I can scan them, ensuring a long-term record of any fragile materials, and reproduce them for any number of archives, regardless of where they materials are physically kept.

This purchase is timely too: Last week, I was contacted by a person who said that they had 3 boxes of old newspapers, organization documents and photos that are their basement and are beginning to get moldy. The person wants the documents to be preserved and kept in Ottawa, and not sent to the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. My initial response was, "cool, I can scan all the materials I think are really important and give a disk of them to the archives!"

However, with deeper reflection problems present themselves:

- I can scan all this stuff now, but what if I get deluged with material(oh please oh please oh please deluge me)? How much scanning can a 130 dollar scanner do before it's fried?
-do any archives have the technology to use an external hard drive and make the material available for researchers?
-how much time could scanning and sorting add to my thesis time? Ideally I'd like to be done by next August, maybe December. Yet, if I am preserving materials as well as interpreting them for my thesis, can I make the time? Will I have a mountain of work to do after I publish, to keep my promise to myself and to the people whose memories I've been entrusted with? Don't get me wrong, I don't mind doing it, but I am wondering how much I've decided to take on, and if it's manageable in a year.
- Where can I send it, if not to the CLGA? To me, Toronto makes sense for several reasons: it's one of the first places people doing queer history go to when they start research; it has a permanent, funded home with staff and a stable core of volunteers to look after the collections. In Ottawa, I am not sure there is a place that would be both prominent enough for researchers to find materials, and funded and stable enough to preserve materials. Perhaps the Woman's Archive at U of O, or the city archives. Any suggestions?

Finally, I am left pondering how all this commitment will be reflected in my thesis review. Now don't get me wrong, I am not doing this blog/gallery/forum just for marks, but it would be nice if it was considered by my committee. Especially if it's a senario where they go "well, his theory is weak, --he doesn't even mention Foucault-- but look at all the work he's done for the community; let's pass him."

Hell, I'm not fussy: a pass is a pass. So long as you call me Master.

Reflecting 25 Years of Pride: the exhibit.

So, for anyone who didn't know -which would be the majority of you- Ottawa pride celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, by having two window displays during pride week and an exhibit in city hall on the day of the parade. I was lucky enough to finagle a table at the last minute next to the exhibit; pride said they were happy to have me there, since no one really knew what they were doing. This comment kinda surprised me, because if you couldn't find someone who didn't know how to put an exhibit together in this town, it suggested to me that Pride didn't really try too hard to put this together.

Unfortunately, my suspicions were confirmed when I saw the exhibit: they tried, but not too hard. The result? Not many more people know more about their history now than they did before pride week. I have plenty of evidence to back up that previous statement after Sunday, when I saw equal amounts of senior and baby-queers walk by the exhibit (and me) without slowing their pace. That was a shame, because Ottawa's queer community has a lot to be proud of in what it has achieved over the decades.
Now, the blame should not totally be hoisted on pride's shoulders. I am glad they did something, anything, to show the gay community its own history, a history that generally is under-appreciated, by young an old alike.That said, the displays could have been so much more; if they had perhaps more people would've stopped and the generosity of the folks who provided material would not have gone mostly unnoticed.

While I am really grateful pride even bothered, the exhibit was not very effective in conveying the evolution of Pride, which is a drag since exhibits like these represent one of the few opportunities Queers get to learn about their history, especially their local history. While I am loathe to whine and moan about the work of a bunch of volunteers, I feel a critique is necessary, considering that next year is the 40th anniversary of the first gay rights protest in Canada (known as 'We Demand'). I have heard that Pride wants to do another exhibit to commemorate that date, but I believe it needs someone skilled to do a better job.

First off, before I (humbly) present my critiques, I want to say I am not a public historian; I don't know how to make one historical exhibit more attractive, engaging and informative for a non-academic audience than another. However, to paraphrase Monty Python, I know what doesn't work, and the display in After Stonewall Books didn't:

First off, my friend Maureen pointed this out to me after she waited for a bus in from of the bookstore (the one advantage to this exhibit was that it had a constant audience of people waiting at the stop): putting old newspapers in the sun for a better part of the week is a bad thing. There is a reasons all those horrible, brutalist libraries that sprouted up in the 60's and 70's have small windows, and it is not just because of some anti-human aesthetic (although that is a part of it): the sun destroys newspapers! Maybe because they are only 25-ish years old that no one thought of it, but if you have been around archivists long enough, you learn that it does not take too much to make newsprint really brittle and delicate, and a week in the sun does plenty. Once these are gone, they are gone, 25 years young or not.
At least the were not in direct sun, since the window had posters for other pride events in it, effectively covering the papers and photos. Why have a exhibit if it is blocked by other posters?

Although I am mentioning this here, this is a complaint for all the exhibits: few if any of them had any tags explaining what the artifacts were, or how did they relate to pride. Frankly, a lot of them didn't: they were just GO INFO's from the 80's thrown down on the floor along with some pictures of people I had no clue they were. Were they pride organizers? Activists? Both? Neither? Or were they included on the merits of their awesome haircuts?









The display at the Second Cup on Bank/Somerset was better, partly because the documents were in from the sun, but also because they attempted to explain what the photos up on the wall were about. However, there was no overall narrative to them, just a general theme of overcoming obstacles and protests to having pride.

More pragmatically were the issues of setup and access. These panels (examples are pictured left) were on the walls around the shop and above the tables. If you wanted to take a good look at them, you were often wandering up to a table and placing your crotch in the personal space of anyone seated there. While I am a great fan of faces meeting crotches generally, having them meet in this situation was not a great situation for either party. If there were two people at a table you would basically have to interrupt their conversation to look at the exhibit. So, keeping a respectful distance from the patrons meant also keeping the exhibit at a distance too.

The Sunday exhibit at town hall allowed people to get up close with the material on display, finally. The material at After Stonewall and at Second Cup weren't transferred to city hall on Sunday, and I am of two minds about that: It was good, because the diffusion of materials meant more people could see it, but the strongest of the displays -the Second Cup panels- were not at pride for an audience that I suspect would have found them really engaging, as I had.


The picture above shows how the place was set up after I rearranged it. Changing things around was not a problem: When I came in at 3pm, the time I was told to, pride was already in full swing and while there was a table there for me already, the whole day I did not see one pride official. I know they were busy, but really, anyone could have come over and either taken over the exhibit space, or simply taken whatever they wanted from the displays. I couldn't even find someone with duct tape to fix the banner that had fallen down (see pic).

Needless to say the exhibit was kinda a jumble and needed some help ASAP; It was set waaaay back against the windows, far from where most people were walking. I moved it forward by about 20 meters. all the tripods were clustered at one end of the exhibit behind a table. I spaced them out between tables so the exhibits had a more balanced feel and people could get up close to the tripods. The materials on the tables I didn't do anything with , what could I? The materials -pictures, pamphlets, newspapers and posters mostly- were assembled in a collage; lots and lots of stuff overlapping each other, making it impossible to read any documents of look at any picture with out part of it being obscured. The materiel was not even thematically assembled, it would have made sense to have the material on each table cover either a particular era, or a theme/event important to the community. But there was nothing like that, just a lot of gay stuff on a table covered with a plastic tarp to protect it, but also reflected light all over the place, making it difficult to look at some parts of the 'collages'.

While I was disappointed at the turnout for the display and the general disinterest showed by passer-bys (I suppose they were in a rush to go see the performances, or get to the beer tent), I can't say there was a lot to lure them in. I regret I was not thinking about pride until a week before the event. Had I, I would have offered my humble skills to the project, and wrangled a few hundred dollars and some AV equipment out of them, to make some narrative storyboards, and get some news footage out of the local archives to show.

Next year, I will to not just sit here and gripe, but will get involved. Promise.

Mastering technology.

Well, After a couple of tries, I have finally figured out how to use my new camcorder. Turns out that Cannon doesn't provide software to transfer its recording format to regular video for Macs. Grrr. Sixty bucks later, I installed software and have been able to convert this, my first interview, to a viewable format.

Other parts of the learning curve:
-Blogger allows only for 100 mb of video at a time but doesn't tell you that.
-imovie is pretty simple to get going with, but I think is going to be a pain to master.
-I think I need to take off my glasses when focusing my camera

I thought I would post this one as an example of what the interviews will be like, and also I am hoping to get a discussion going about John's comments (if there is anyone reading this). Do you agree with John's description of Ottawa and why it is so closeted? What would you add?

I think I will add segments of videos from time to time and if there are comments I would like some community feedback on. Please note however, it will only be from people that agree to have their videos released to the public: all confidentiality agreements will be strictly observed.

If you see someone staring at this poster:

Tell them I am friendly, trustworthy, generally awesome, and yes, should help a homo out and contact him. If you see anyone tearing down a poster, or otherwise messing with it, kick them, and then let me know. Thanks. Anyone have any suggestions where I should put these, that aren't the obvious bars/coffee shops/stores?