University of Toronto’s Queer Orientation tour of The ArQuives – September 23, 2015 As part of the third annual, week-long Queer Orientation, undergrads and grads of iSchool (Faculty of Information) and Sexual Diversity Studies (SDS), toured The ArQuives (The ArQuives) at 34 Isabella Street. Jade Pichette, The ArQuives Volunteer + Community Outreach Coordinator, welcomed the fourteen students to, ‘The largest independent LGBTQ+ archives in the world.’ 
Rebecka Sheffield, The ArQuives Executive Director + Archives Manager (and graduate of iSchool and SDS), also welcomed the group, explaining, ‘The ArQuives, now more than forty years old, is run mainly by a core group of older volunteers, including some the original founders. The ArQuives is unique in that it collects materials that other archives don’t. Like an anthropologist looking for your people, there are glimpses of history on the walls.’ The students shared their areas of interest, including: LGBTQ+ history; information management; library, museum, and archival studies; LGBTQ+ focused anthropology; Digital collections; The Body Politic Newspaper; and Buttons! 
As Jade guided the students through the building, she described the evolution of The ArQuives, from its early beginnings in 1973, as ‘a shelf and filing cabinet’ in the office of The Body Politic, to its current holdings—historical records, personal papers, unpublished publications, audio visual material, art, photographs, posters, artifacts and more—at the historic Jared Sessions House at 34 Isabella avenue, as well as offsite at 65 Wellesley Street East and in deep storage. 
The first floor’s Reading Room contains rare books, biographies and anthologies, from the James Fraser Library, and the typewriter of John Herbert (author of the 1967 Fortune and Men’s Eyes, the first Canadian play to deal with homosexuality, illegal at that time). The walls are graced with photos from The ArQuives’s Queer and Muslim exhibit, and a stained glass mural inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt by artist Lynette Richards. Beside the LGBTQ+ protest history display-case in the foyer, Jade led an animated discussion of the first gay protest in Canada in 1971; the demonstrations and marches following the 1981 Bathhouse raids and 2000 Pussy Palace invasion; and the resultant changes in policing and legislation. The students viewed the vertical files, which contain files on over 25,000 different individuals, events and groups before heading up the stairs. 
The second floor houses a large, bright Gallery Space, the Executive Director + Archives Manager office (containing the ‘Archives of the Archives’ and 1996 Olympic Torch donated by Mark Tewksbury), an Audio Visual room, and an accessions room. Jade mentioned that The ArQuives’s upcoming shows would include an installation by Margaret Flood for Nuit Blanche and the ‘Dissident Family’ Exhibit by Amy Gottlieb. 
The tour paused to view and discuss the trans display-case artifacts from the Trans Histories Launch. Jade guided the students to the third floor where they viewed numerous selections from The ArQuives’s National Portrait Collection. 
Throughout the tour, Jade fielded questions on a range of topics including; funding, privacy, digital space, playback capability, and the fiction collection. The students ended the tour back in the Reading room, with a special look at duplicates of some of the over 1500 pin buttons in The ArQuives’s collection. The students were also given an assortment of historic photo postcards. According to Beck, an iSchool grad student, ‘It was a super tour!’ If you would like to book a tour of the archives for your class, group of friends, or community email Jade Pichette at jpichette@arquives.ca Author: Janice Martin, The ArQuives volunteer 
