City of Vancouver asks for help to identify unknown LGBTQ people in photos
Posted October 26, 2019 11:22 am.
Last Updated October 26, 2019 12:50 pm.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Nearly a year after thousands of pictures and posters from the BC Gay and Lesbian Archives showed up with the City of Vancouver, thousands of those pictures are now online. And the City of Vancouver hopes you can help identify some of the people seen in these photos.
Last Year, Ron Dutton decided that it was time to donate his collection of photos to the city.
His contributions include photos from the 40s’ to the 2000s’ where life for the LGBTQ community was much different at the front end of that time frame than the end.
Kira Baker, reference archivist, worked on the project of digitizing those voluminous documents, which is now complete.
“Dutton was so interested in so many of the different micro-communities and different interest groups, that he was really open to collecting such a range of material,” she says.
Some of those pieces advertise Drag shows, implore people to volunteer, or to go to a doctor and make sure they’re getting tested for STIs.
But among the thousands of photos, a lot of the people in them are unknown.
Some of the events included in the photos are a mystery, too.
“We were asking if people could help add that descriptive information and make it more discoverable for other researchers as well.”
Baker says that they previously had events where people could come identify what’s going on in some of the photos, which were somewhat successful.
Saturday an event will be held between 1 – 5 p.m. at the SUM Gallery on Keefer street where you can help identify more people and events in person.
