Wilde ’82: A Conference of Some Importance
PIs: Jason Boyd and Craig Jennex
Collaborators: Jillian Vandervoort and Nadia Ozzorluoglu
Wilde '82: A Conference of Some Importance (external link)
The Wilde ’82 history conference took place at Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson Polytechnical Institute) from June 30–July 3, 1982. This conference brought together academics, community historians, and activists whose work was vital to the development of queer studies. It served as one of the earliest manifestations of a new school of gay history that saw homosexuality not as a fixed biological phenomenon, but as a modern social construct.
Wilde '82: A Conference of Some Importance—developed by faculty and students at TMU alongside conference organizer Alan Miller—celebrates and chronicles Wilde ’82 and the new directions in LGBTQ2+ studies that developed in its wake. The site contains information about the conference (including the program and historical context), the participants, photographs, audio recordings and transcripts of the main panel, “The Making of the Modern Homosexual.”
Craig Jennex (Associate Professor, English) and Jason Boyd (Associate Professor, English) were co-investigators of the project
Nadia Ozzorluoglu and Jillian Vandervoort were Student Research Fellows on the project.