Beautiful coffee table book full of the pictures, documents and ephemera collected by the Arquives in Toronto, which is I believe the country's largest queer archive. The layout is roughly by decade, with a text section setting up that period in Canadian history, more or less starting in WWII, and moving forward to the present day, followed by pages or page spreads on different parts of the collection relevant to that period. As a history, it's not that comprehensive, but I love the life and details, the little bits of queers like kudzu hanging in there and fighting back, rebuilding broken communities, and mixing rage and humour and disco. It's nice seeing our fingerprints all over history.

The editors are keen to emphasise that this is not the history of queer Canada, but a history, and admit that it's more white, male and Toronto than they'd like, and that the story they're telling isn't one of a march towards progress, but of continual work, renegotiation, and celebration and loss. I liked it, am getting a couple things from their excellent further reading section at the back, have already read a few.