David Aveline’s favourite piece from his queer archive that took six decades to collect, is a book he purchased from a gay bookstore in Montreal just before he came out.
“I bought it and I looked at it and I just stared at the picture of every single person there. Wow. He’s gay like me. He likes the same things as I do,” said Aveline while reminiscing about the moment from his youth.
Aveline, a professor at Mount Royal University, recently donated his collection of queer history to the institution’s archive. The material includes pamphlets, photos, literature and more. It follows a trail of Aveline’s life, with many pieces originating from his time as a young man living in Montreal.
His favourite book, The Gay Liberation Book, edited by Len Richmond and Gary Naguero, is only one artifact of his time in Montreal and is a physical precursor to his early career in activism.
An archive built on activism
In 1977, Montreal police raided two gay bars, Truxx Bar and Le Mystique. Over 100 men were arrested, forcibly tested for sexually transmitted diseases, and denied access to their lawyers.
“Thank God I wasn’t one of them because I was, if it were 10 more minutes, I probably would have been,” says Aveline, who just like the men arrested, was out that night having fun with his friends.
Aveline describes the rally the following day at Peel and Sainte Catherine Street downtown. An estimated 2,000 people protested in the streets, demanding the men be released. However, Aveline thinks he may be the only one to have saved fliers and protest material from the historic day.
“I don’t think anybody kept them except me, you know, or if they did, they’re sitting in a box somewhere in somebody’s basement, you know, long forgotten.”
Some of the flyers, now over 40 years old, are beginning to fade. However the materials still radiate the heaviness associated with the 1977 protest.
“These are like part of a bygone era, you know, that they’ll never crop up again or whatever, I mean, you rarely have fliers,” Aveline adds.
Many more impactful pieces can be found among the archival material, but one of the most consistent and inescapable themes throughout the archives is the AIDS crisis.
Sharing the archive
Last month, Sydney Morrissette, an archive intern with MRU Library, shared the collection with a group during a ‘Queering the Archive’ event.
Morrissette shared dozens of pamphlets from the collection that contained detailed advice to those living and dying of AIDS. One pamphlet distributed during the height of the crisis to volunteers looking to assist those who had been diagnosed. The final page gave personal advice to late-stage sufferers, and Morrissette read to the room amongst quiet tears and sniffles.
Visitors were able to look through the physical archives and many did just that, to both laughter and quiet.
In an disposable era, Morrissette noted that it’s important that Aveline was able to preserve these items for the future.
“People either don’t know what it is and throw it away or they do know what it is and throw it away,” says Morrissette.
The Aveline-Vasquez collection is on the fourth floor of Mount Royal’s Riddell Library and will soon be accessible through their online archives.
