Scarborough is an eastern suburb of Toronto with a rich, distinct history and culture shaped by its large racialized and immigrant populations. While narratives around queerness in Toronto are often situated within the downtown core, Scarborough has long been a space where queer people – and, particularly, queer people of colour – have existed and resisted. It was, as Richard Fung states in Marvellous Grounds (2018), where some of the first conversations around queerness within a Tamil context were held and, more recently, where the queer narratives of literary works like David Chariandy’s Brother (2017) and Catherine Hernandez’ Scarborough (2017) are set. Despite this recent attention placed on highlighting the unique experiences of queers in Scarborough, there remains a lack of any formally documented history of queerness in the east end. Our collective of university researchers, community organizers, lived experience (peer) collaborators, and arts service providers, aims to address this need and opportunity by exploring how digital spaces and artistic practice can expand notions of community and build new ones.
Affiliated Grants:
Queer and Trans Research Lab - Emerging Projects Grant
This project emerged with a focus on understanding the role of arts engagement on the social wellness of 2SLGBTQ+ youth in Scarborough. Community arts is rarely, if ever, framed as a pillar of health and wellness in Canada, despite growing scholarship advocating for increased valuation of the arts as/for wellness in other national settings like the UK, New Zealand, and Australia.
Research Questions
The 5-year-long community-based participatory action research project engaged queer Scarborough-based youth (aged 18-30) in a range of arts/craft-based workshops, from physical paper making to the digital creation of postcards. In our seven months of data collection, we conducted 9 one-on-one interviews and 5 focus groups with a total of 20 queer of colour participants, collecting a total of 1,241 minutes (20h41m) of recorded data (140,337 words transcribed).
Findings from our research have led to an understanding that there is a critical absence in Scarborough queer history, despite our lived realities highlighting otherwise. The project thus expanded and became a larger project of archiving these missing histories.
As our findings have highlighted, documenting queer histories in Scarborough requires us to think more creatively about our approaches to archiving. Rather than simply relying on the formalized archive, our team sought to document living histories through arts-based engagements.
As of April 2026, this project has involved 6 presentations, 4 research grants, 2 publications (and more to come), 6 public art workshops, and 55+ queer Scarborough youth engaged.
Publications
Presentations
