This is a selected timeline of queer events and groups at Simon Fraser University, from their beginnings until the spring of 1998. It also includes some important milestones for Vancouver, BC and Canada, as well as a few international ones.
I started this project in the fall of 1997 when I heard last fall that someone at SFP!RG had found a box full of material from Out on Campus’s predecessor, GALA, some of it dating back almost ten years. I’ve been interested in queer history ever since I came out, and this was my chance to see some history first-hand. It was truly a labour of love. I finished it in July 1998 after about eight months of on-and-off work. The content has not been touched since then, except for a couple of small corrections, cleaning up typos, and fixing broken links.
Note: SFU operates on a semester schedule. The fall semester runs from September to December, the spring semester from January to April, and the summer semester from May to August. Times for meetings and other events, unless specified otherwise, are taken from ads in the post-it section (or “grassroots,” as it was called before 1992) of The Peak, SFU’s student paper.
Decades
Sources
- Correspondence and other material from GALA, the Gay And Lesbian Association of SFU (most of it from 1988–89, some up to 1994)
- Out on Campus minutes, from 1996 onward (no longer online)
- The Peak archives
- The BC Gay and Lesbian Archives, maintained by Ron Dutton
- The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives online
- The EGALE home page
- Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: A Selected Annotated Chronology, 1964-1975, by Donald McLeod, 1996.
- Flaunting It! A decade of gay journalism from The Body Politic, edited by Ed Jackson and Stan Persky, 1982.
- Restricted Entry: Censorship on Trial, by Janine Fuller and Stuart Blackley, 1995
- Thanks also to Jean-Philippe Wilmshurst for sharing his experiences with Gay People of SFU, and giving me material for the Out on Campus archives