Resources

Desh Pardesh was a South Asian arts festival that was held between the years 1988 and 2001. It began under the name Salaam Toronto in collaboration with the Khush collective — an organization for gay men of South Asian background. We have collaborated with The ArQuives, the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), and the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory to compile this festival's oral history. Our findings are presented below. The South Asian Visual Arts Centre created these oral history interviews with artists and organizers involved in the festival in 2016. 

Please note that the snippets of interviewee respondents included are very small portions of much larger conversations. We encourage you to listen to and leaf through the actual full interviews for context and clarity purposes. We have linked the snippets of interviews to the full interviews for this purpose.

This exhibit aims to layout the festival year by year and highlights significant events or ideologies that emerged during these times. You can click through each set of years and find clips of interviews discussing the festival and related archival documents that provide more context to what the interviewees are saying. 

We’ll be looking at mentions of asexuality* in history, worldwide. Starting with a first documented mention of ‘monosexual’ in 1869. We’ll go over the specifics, show evidence of these historic pieces if they are available, as well as explaining context if needed. We’ll keep adding on to this post as more information becomes available.

*Keep in mind that the term asexuality/asexuals was formed later and identifying early instances of asexuality is a matter of interpretation. That being said, historical figures have long discussed their low levels of sexual attraction, even if they did not have an official term for it yet.

A list of Young Adult genre fiction books featuring main characters of Iranian/Persian descent, that are also queer.

The Ten Oaks Project is a charitable, volunteer-driven organization that engages and connects children and youth from 2SLGBTQ+ (two spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer) identities, families, and communities.

The Ten Oaks Project engages and connects children and youth from LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, two-spirit, queer) communities through programs and activities rooted in play. Ten Oaks offer four annual camp programs to children and youth: Camp Ten Oaks (ages 8-17), Project Acorn (ages 16-24), Oak Grove Family Camp (all ages), and Camp Lifting Leaves (ages 8-21).

This article is by the scholar, Brittney Miles, University of Cincinatti

Asexuality is often defined as some degree of being void of sexual attraction, interest, or desire. Black asexual people have been made invisible, silent, or pathologized in most fiction, scholarly literature, and mainstream LGBTQ movements. Claire Kann’s 2018 young adult romance novel, Let’s Talk About Love, explores Black asexuality at the intersection of race and (a)sexuality. Through the story of the Black, bi-romantic, asexual, 19 year-old college student Alice Johnston, this text illuminates the diversity of Black sexuality in the Black Diaspora. Using a Black feminist sociological literary analysis to complete a close reading of the novel, I interrogate what Let’s Talk about Love offers for defining a Black asexual politic. To consider Black asexual politics beyond the controlling images of the asexual Mammy figure, and not merely in juxtaposition to the hypersexual Jezebel, calls us to instead center agency and self-definition. This project seeks to answer what Conscious Black Asexuality is, why it is a necessary concept for asexuality studies and the Diaspora, where we locate Black asexuality in Black history, and how Let’s Talk about Love by Claire Kann presents a depiction of Black agentic queerness that reclaims agency and intimacy within one’s sexual politics.

This infographic shares three concrete actions that service providers can take to support Rainbow Seniors who are part of the 2SLGBTQI+ community.