Hard to archive: Preserving gay male erotica and pornography in Canada

M. Barriault

Original presented on the 32nd annual conference session 6a in Kingston, Ontario 21-23 June 2007, titled: On becoming witnesses to the past : selective memory, archives and society, 2007. This paper dealt with how male gay erotica and pornography have previously been a 'hidden' archival material - and how it is becoming more 'acceptable' to not only preserve it, but also to apply the appropriate metadata so that the material can be accessed by researchers. The author was interested in whether there has been any effort to examine previously accessioned items that may have been identified less clearly - either to 'hide' it (when it wasn't destroyed outright), or identified using out-moded terms (the terminology used to refer to LGBT issues, or related individuals has changed throughout history to reflect social attitudes). A great part of this paper is about the (erotical) physique magazine for gay males Physique Pictorial.