At The ArQuives, we believe in the importance of acting as an educational resource to the community.
Our main avenues for providing educational support are through presentations about our collections, tours of our Jared Sessions House where we hold public programming and our collections reside, and walking tours of Toronto’s LGBTQ2+ historical neighbourhoods.
Qaleidoscope Gala 2021 - Cancelled
Due to COVID-19 the 2021 Gala event has been cancelled.

Online Queer Trivia: Trailblazers – Celebrating LGBTQ2S+ firsts
OntarioJoin us for Online Queer Trivia: Trailblazers - Celebrating LGBTQ2S+ firsts!
Online Trivia Night: Fashion
OntarioQUEER TRIVIA: Come learn cool queer fashion tidbits at the next queer trivia night. Jeans, ruby slippers, YSL, Birkenstocks... It’s going to be Absolutely Fabulous!!!!!!
The ArQuives’ Trans Collections Guide Launch
OntarioThe LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory and The ArQuives invite you to celebrate the launch of The ArQuives' Trans Collections Guide on December 3rd, 2020 - 4-6 pm EST.
Historical Inequities Community Consultation
The ArQuives 34 Isabella Street, 2nd Floor, TorontoWe invite you to join us on November 25 at 7 pm for community consultation and discussion around The ArQuives Historical Inequities draft statement.
Marked: Tattoos & Queer Identity
Exhibit dates: Thursday, April 9, 2015 to Friday, May 29, 2015 Reception date & time: [...]
Public Sins / Private Desires: Tracing Lesbian Lives in the Archives, 1950 – 1980
Public Sins/Private Desires, celebrates the 20th anniversary of Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman’s 1992 documentary, Forbidden Love: Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Livesand examines the contradictions, tensions and victories in the daily lives of lesbians during the period from 1950 to 1980.
Tape Condition: degraded
The ArQuives 34 Isabella Street, 2nd Floor, TorontoTape Condition: degraded is an immersive installation and community digitization station that engages with The ArQuives’s collection of more than 3,000 VHS tapes, about one-third of which are porn.
We Could Be Heroes (Just For One Day)
The ArQuives 34 Isabella Street, 2nd Floor, TorontoLGBTQ+ communities and community-based archives have long searched for ‘gay heroes’ to showcase both queer existence and accomplishment across time and space.
Traces
The ArQuives 34 Isabella Street, 2nd Floor, TorontoFor the solo exhibition Traces, Ottawa-based multidisciplinary artist Christos Pantieras brings together five of his existing series, all of which explore, appropriate, and recontextualize the remnants of everyday human practices.
Dissident Family
The ArQuives 34 Isabella Street, 2nd Floor, Toronto"Dissident Family" brings together artworks that speak to the biological family that the artist grew up in, and to the family she has created and nurtured. It speaks to the central place of dissidence in her spiritual, political and familial life.
Queering Space
The ArQuives 34 Isabella Street, 2nd Floor, TorontoPresented by The ArQuives in partnership with Nuit Rose, Queering Space invites celebrated Canadian queer artists to create contemporary multidisciplinary responses to The ArQuives’s historical collection, reigniting its relevance while exploring the evolution of queer sites across space and time.
Code, Read: Hollywood’s Hays Code and the Queer Stereotypes of the Silver Screen
The ArQuives 34 Isabella Street, 2nd Floor, TorontoFrom the first appearance of subversive same-sex interaction on film, in William K.L. Dickson’s motion picture The Dickson Experimental Sound Film/The Gay Brothers (1895), the representation of LGBTQ characters and themes in popular cinema has been largely stereotypical.
Butch: Not Like the Other Girls
The ArQuives 34 Isabella Street, 2nd Floor, TorontoButch: Not Like the Other Girls is a photographic exploration of the liminal spaces occupied by female masculinity in contemporary communities by photographer SD Holman.
Imaging Home: Resistance, Migration, Contradiction
The ArQuives 34 Isabella Street, 2nd Floor, TorontoThe ArQuives’s 2014 WorldPride exhibition, Imaging Home: Resistance, Migration, and Contradiction, brings together documentary video and photographic work that raises significant questions about the meaning of “home” in a world that keeps refining homophobic and racist oppression.
TAG TEAM: Gay Premises
The ArQuives 34 Isabella Street, 2nd Floor, TorontoTaken in tandem with the recent surge in interest, among younger and increasingly diverse generations of queer academic, activist, and artistic communities, in mining queer archives, Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archives, 1973-1983, timely in its confluence with The ArQuives’s 40th anniversary, operates at the threshold between Canada’s gay liberation past as a complex and contested foundation for the queer present and its potential futures.