From around the time of his retirement in 2005 to his passing in 2018, Neil Richards made the University of Saskatchewan Archives and Special Collections his home away from home. He had chosen to spend his retirement years doing what he loved: collecting rare or locally relevant materials related to LGBT+ lifestyles. Every morning he would enter with his distinctive shuffling step. A few jokes, a cheeky grin, a cup of coffee, and then he would settle down at his desk and begin a day of catching up on the latest in Queer news and chasing down the unique treasures that sang to his collector’s heart. These treasures would arrive in stacks of enticing packages, colorfully stamped. But Neil would always wait to open them until the afternoon — he enjoyed the anticipation. His desk was always piled high with these treasures–everything from sardonically witty postcards to comic books to a handwritten letter by iconic lesbian author Radcliffe Hall. Often, on my journeys back and forth across the archives, he would excitedly gesture me over, show me his latest E-Bay find, explain to me the fascinating history of the unassuming lavender pamphlet he held in a hand that had leafed through books by the thousands. His hands seemed to have an intelligence to them, as though he was able to gauge the value of anything he picked up just by touch. The joy Neil found in hunting down something rare, something unique, something one-of-a-kind was always present and often contagious. He inspired me to begin my own collections, showed me that collecting was not just about accumulating but about sharing, learning, and loving.

The Neil Richards Collection of Sexual and Gender Diversity, and all of Neil’s collection work was very much a labour of love, and in this post, I would like to share with you some of that work. Over the past thirteen years, numerous exhibitions, digital displays, blog posts and articles have been created around Neil’s collections. What follows is a (not nearly comprehensive) list of links to some of these byproducts of Neil’s devoted collecting work.

Digital Resources: 

• All Frocked Up: Glimpses of Cross-Dressing in Saskatchewan
• Ambisextrous: Gender Impersonators of Music Hall and Vaudeville
• Index of Wrestling Photographs
• Passions Uncovered: Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Pulps
• Saskatchewan Resources for Sexual and Gender Diversity

Blog Posts and Articles:

• Celebrating Saskatoon Pride: 25th Saskatoon Pride Festival – As a salute to Saskatoon Pride and its work, we highlight here a handful of our recent library acquisitions to the Neil Richards Collection. 
• Freedom to Read Week 2016: Some controversy-causing children’s books from the Neil Richards Collection.
• Neil Richards Collection for Sexual and Gender Diversity: Building the Collection – An update on ways in which the collection has grown (2016)
• Neil Richards Collection for Sexual and Gender Diversity: Promoting the Collections – an update on outreach projects (2016)
• Neil Richards Collection for Sexual and Gender Diversity: Using the Collections – An update on ways in which the collection is being used (2016)
• Queer Negative Literature: Why Collect it?
• Trans* Awareness Week (2014): Samples of Trans themed materials from the Richards Collection
• Trans* Awareness Week (2015): Some Trans themed children’s books

In the News: 

• Leading Change in the Library, One Book at a Time: The most recent issue of Generations features an article on Neil Richards, a 29 year veteran of the University Library and the man behind the institution’s massive collection of LGBT materials. 
• Transqueery: Miki Encounters the Neil Richards Collection: Miki Mappin, a somewhat eccentric trans gender individual is asked to submit a proposal for an artwork which would engage with a queer collection at the University of Saskatchewan Archives. 
• U of S houses one of the largest LGBT archives in the country: As part of their coverage of Saskatoon’s Pride Festival, CBC radio interviewed the man behind the Neil Richards Collection for Sexual and Gender diversity. 

Exhibitions and Events: 

• Neil Richards Collection of Sexual and Gender Diversity Launch – November-December 2011
• Strange Texts – March – May 2013
• QueerUS:Language, Space and the University of Saskatchewan – October – December 2013
  • QueerUS: Related Events
• Year of Queer / Books with Stories – September 2014
• Year of Queer 2 – September 2015
• Event: Returning to The Well: Radclyffe Hall and the Marketing of Lesbian Pulp Fiction – September 2015
• Olio: an unorganized collection or mixture of various things – October-November 2016
• Cabaret Display – April 2017
• Now You See It: Queer Films – September-November 2017

Using the Collections

In Making a Scene: Lesbians and Community Across Canada, 1964-84 (UBC Press 2015) author Liz Millward generously acknowledged the Richards collection at the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan for documenting the participation of lesbians in both social and political groups in the Canadian West.

In the summer of 2015 Shawna Lipton of Washington State University Vancouver travelled to Saskatoon to explore lesbian titles in the Neil Richards Collection of Sexual and Gender Diversity. She returned to Saskatoon in September for a public presentation of her findings with Prof. Ann Martin of the U of S English Department. Titled Returning to the Well: Radclyffe Hall and the Marketing of Lesbian Pulp Fiction the presentation examined how the Well of Loneliness and Hall’s iconic lesbian status, affected the content and marketing of preStonewall lesbian fiction. The Library used this opportunity to greatly expand its collection of Hall titles, including sheet music based upon on her early poems

April 2016 brought a visit by Kevin Allen of the Calgary Gay History Project who discovered material about gay organizing in Calgary in the 1970s at the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, particularly dealing with participation in Prairie and National Gay Rights Conferences and the networking of private member gay social clubs that existed in Prairie cities in the 1970s.

Jonathan Petrychn, a doctoral candidate at York University, visited the Provincial and University Archives in June 2016, finding material for his thesis on the history of LGBT film festivals and screenings on the Canadian Prairies.

Promoting the Collections

The U of S Archives & Special Collections regularly promotes the visibility and use of its sexual and gender diversity collections through in-house exhibitions and descriptive pieces on the unit’s blog.

In each of the past three years the collections have been highlighted with displays at the annual U of S Breaking the Silence conference and through contributions to exhibits presented each February by Out Saskatoon at the Heritage Festival of Saskatoon.

In March 2016 the Library prepared and displayed an exhibit from its extensive collection of vintage lesbian pulp fiction in conjunction with a screening of the classic Canadian documentary Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories O f Lesbian Lives (1992) at the Broadway Theatre. Co-director Lynne Fernie travelled from Toronto to reintroduce the remastered film to a new audience.

An exhibition of classic LGBT themed movie posters was also provided to the Saskatoon Public Library in conjunction with its spring series of LGBT documentaries Queer as Film

From October 2013 to summer 2016 the Saskatoon office of the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan welcomed visitors and researchers with a large exhibition on Saskatchewan LGBT history in its corridor display cases. The exhibit was curated by Joe Wickenhauser with material drawn principally from the Archives’ Neil Richards fonds.

To keep track of the Neil Richards Collection as it is being shared with audiences all over Saskatoon, follow us on twitter @sask_uasc or Facebook.

The following is an ever-growing list of the Neil Richards Collection for Sexual and Gender Diversity’s online presence:

• Passions Uncovered: Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered Pulps
• All Frocked Up : Cross Dressing in Saskatchewan
• Ambisextrous : Gender Impersonators of Music Hall and Vaudeville
• Year of Queer
• Year of Queer 2
• QueerUS: Language, Space, and the University of Saskatchewan
• Strange Texts
• Freedom to Read Week 2016
• Queer Negative Literature : Why Collect It?
• Trans* Awareness Week
• Olio: an unorganized collection or mixture of various things
• Leading Change in the Library, One Book at a Time

Building the Collections

The Neil Richards Collection of Sexual and Gender Diversity has continued to expand rapidly through in-kind gifts, purchases and the occasional commission.

In 2014 Special Collections was able to commission Cathryn Miller to produce a book artwork commemorating Joe Wickenhauser’s 2013 project Greystone Secrets: A Queerstorical Campus Walking Tour. The final product delighted everyone and provided the library with another major work by Saskatchewan’s most accomplished book artist. For more information see Miller’s description

https://byopiapress.wordpress.com/2014/09/14/greystone-secrets/

In 2016 the Library was able to purchase two early titles of great historical interest. The first is the two volume 2^nd edition (1821) of Johann Winckelmann’s (1717-1768) Monumenti Antichi Inediti, a collection of over 240 copper engravings of Greek and Roman sculpture. Winckelmann is considered the founder of the discipline of art history and the leading catalyst for the neoclassical style. His ‘homosexual’ affairs were widely known to his contemporaries (including Goethe) and it is generally agreed that his aesthetic ideals were strongly influenced by the homoeroticism he saw in classical art. To mark its recent accession of its 5,000^th title, the Library purchased a rare 1871 edition of Joseph and his Friend: a Story of Pennsylvania by American novelist Bayard Taylor (1825-1878). Taylor’s work has been described as “ America’s first homosexual novel” for its defence of those “who cannot shape themselves according to the common-place pattern of society.”

The Library’s most important recent gift is an enormous collection of books, magazines, papers and ephemera from the estate of local activist Gens Hellquist (1946-2013). Hellquist was one of the original organizers of Saskatoon’s gay community in the early 1970s and played a founding and leadership role in many of its organizations until his death. It is hoped this valuable collection can be made be available for research in 2017.

Hundreds of popular and academic titles have been acquired through the interest and generosity of The Rainbow Link,  a Toronto based organization which gathers and redistributes books of LGBT interest to community organizations and libraries across Canada, especially  to those not located in the biggest cities.

Neil Richards has continued donations to the collection, including additions to previous gifts of vintage physique magazines, sheet music associated with early cross-dressed entertainment, and magazine issues from the 1950s and 1960s featuring articles on homosexuality. Bruce Hugh Russell continued his generosity with the gift of many volumes dealing with Christianity and homosexuality. Several donors, including the USSU Pride Centre and Ron Jaremko, have provided many older issues of lesbian and gay lifestyle magazines, from the US, France, Australia and Russia.

Among the U of S Archives most recent accessions is a large collection of movie posters and other ephemera that document the film industry’s long and rather tangled relationship to homosexuality and to LGBT audiences. The collection includes examples from over 150 LGBT themed films spanning the period 1961 to the present. The earliest example is a rare poster for Victim , a 1961 British suspense film dealing with the blackmail of homosexual men. It is credited with being the first English language feature to use the word homosexual and was an important early step towards the decriminalization of homosexual acts in England and Wales in 1967.

The collection is unusual in containing posters not only from Hollywood productions but also a large number from Canadian and European producers. An initial exhibition from the collection was presented in conjunction with Queer as Film ,the Saskatoon Public Library’s spring 2016 series of LGBT documentaries.

In the past year, the Neil Richards Collection for Sexual and Gender Diversity has begun expanding in a direction which may be surprising to many. Not only does this collection hold one of the widest arrays of queer literature in Canada, and not only does it contain numerous texts documenting the lives, struggles, and triumphs of LGBTQ2 persons from around the world – it now contains a small-but-growing selection of literature which may be considered by many LGBT or allies as homophobic, transphobic, or heterosexist. These are books which oppose or at the very least disagree with the goals of many LGBTQ2 persons, including anti-discrimination laws, same sex marriage, and the greater tolerance and acceptance of gay identity.

It may seem counter-intuitive to include materials of this ilk in a collection geared towards a creative and scholarly examination of differences of gender and sexuality. Indeed, texts which overtly denounce LGBTQ2 persons, which propose ways in which they can be “cured,” run exactly contrary to the spirit in which the Neil Richards Collection for Gender and Sexual Diversity was formed. Yet, without tracts of this nature, an important part of the history of gender and sexual diversity is lost.

If gay-negative texts were to be excluded from collections—if they were erased from history entirely– it would be easy to forget about the challenges faced by LGBTQ2 persons through time, and impossible to trace the ways in which society has evolved. In her article “Absence of Context: Gay Politics Without a Past,” Jen Manion makes the alarming observation that “the contemporary political movement for LGBTQ rights and equality has shown little interest in or . . . knowledge of [it’s] community’s history.” The loss of history for any community is a staggering blow, and it is this “dehistoricizing [of] queerness” that the Neil Richards Collection aims to combat. Only by preserving multiple aspects of queer history may a sense of community that stretches beyond spatial and temporal boundaries be formed, and only then may the suffering and successes of that community be fully understood.

Another significant reason for collecting anti-queer texts resides with societal accountability. Destroying texts which may be considered hateful does not erase that negative sentiment, but rather absolves the author of their words. On a large scale, the banishment of discriminatory literature provides a convenient reason to forget that discrimination and hate still exist within our society. If society is to be held accountable for discriminatory practices through time, evidence of that discrimination must be preserved. As Duff et al state in their 2013 study on the role archives and special collections may have in the realm of social justice : “Archival action . . . has the impact of raising awareness of inequality and discrimination,” which in turn leads to the “employment of intellectual and physical resources to challenge [those] inequalities.” Only by understanding historical imbalances can change come about.

The inclusion of such titles as Growing up Straight, Homosexuality: It’s Causes and Cure, and The Crises of     Homosexuality in the Neil Richards Collection for Sexual and Gender Diversity may, at first glance, be surprising. However, making these texts available to researchers provides a larger window onto LGBTQ2 history than that given from the queer perspective alone. It is the hope that, by providing as full a picture as possible, queer history can be reclaimed and society can be reminded of its responsibilities towards a segment of the population that has long been marginalized.

Sources:

Duff, Wendy ; Flinn, Andrew ; Suurtamm, Karen ; Wallace, David. Social justice impact of archives: a preliminary investigation. Archival Science, 2013, Vol.13(4), pp.317-348

Manion, Jen.The Absence of Context: Gay Politics without a Past. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking July 2014, Vol.1(2), pp.115-131.