One of the major outcomes from Vtape’s Archive/Counter-Archive Case Study is the 2024 book Toronto Living With AIDS, edited by Ryan Conrad, and published by PUBLIC Books with support from Vtape and Archive/Counter-Archive. We are very proud to announce that the book has been nominated for a Heritage Toronto Book Award! A significant work of scholarship, this volume digs deep into the motivations and community context for HIV/AIDS activist video in the early 1990s. It includes a major essay by Conrad, as well as his interviews with video-makers Debbie Douglas, Richard Fung, John Greyson, Colman Jones, Glace Lawrence, James MacSwain, Ted Myerscough, Ian Rashid, Kaspar Saxena, and Darien Taylor, and contemporary reflections on the original Toronto Living With AIDS video series by Chase Joynt, Alison Duke, Andil Gosine, Peter Knegt, Kiera Boult, Kristin Li, Alex McClelland, Mikki Burino, Jamie Whitecrow, Jon Davies, and Jessica Whitbread.
“AIDS activists changed the world. They organized, strategized, and put their bodies on the line to change their medical, social, and political circumstances. Importantly, AIDS activists in North America did all this with early consumer-grade video technologies in hand. From the committed documentary to the experimental short, AIDS activists engaged in change-making at the level of culture through moving images in new ways and on a scale not possible during previous social movements. Due to the parallel development of increasingly affordable consumer grade video technologies alongside the rapidly expanding AIDS crisis, scholars, activists, and media makers have an expansive decentralized archive from which to consult, study, and make new meaning. The importance of revisiting and maintaining this archive, as film scholar Roger Hallas notes, is not merely to preserve the past for the sake of history, but to attend to the stories that emerge from AIDS activist cultural archives and their revelatory potential for historical consciousness in the present” (from Ryan Conrad’s essay, “Cable Access Queer”).
Ryan Conrad is an activist, artist, and cultural studies scholar whose research, teaching, and cultural production interests in the study of sexuality include queer studies, queer of colour critique, affect theory, archival practices, film and media, HIV/AIDS, sex work, migration, and social movement history. In addition to his extensive research on the Toronto Living With AIDS series and subsequent publication, Conrad is currently working on a SSHRC-funded research project titled Sex Worker Self-Authoring in the Canadian Women’s Movement Archive, exploring the holdings of the CWMA housed in the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Ottawa.
Image credits: home page image, cover of Toronto Living With AIDS (designed by Charlene Lo); Ryan Conrad portrait courtesy of Ryan Conrad