A Queer Map: A Guide to the LGBTQ+ History of Calgary

The Calgary Institute for the Humanities is proud to announce the launch of the first map of The Calgary Atlas Project. This project seeks to recover crucial stories about Calgary’s past and present, stories that will illuminate in surprising ways the character of the city. In A Queer Map: A Guide to the LGBTQ+ History of Calgary, Mark Clintberg, working with research by Kevin Allen, has mapped the early histories of Calgary’s Queer communities. The University of Calgary has a long history of engagement with LGBTQ2S+ issues and this map is a fantastic start to a project that layers multiple histories, experiences, and geographies over our dominant urban narrative.To request a map, please email cih@ucalgary.ca and we will send one to you. 

If you would like to support The Calgary Atlas Project and the annual lecture series in LGBTQ2S+ Studies at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, please make a donation at netcommunity.ucalgary.ca/cih_endowment. Our first lecture in LGBTQ2S+ Studies was held last August, when we invited guest speaker George Chauncey to give a free, public lecture at the Calgary Central Library; Dr. Chauncey is author of the groundbreaking history Gay New York, and was expert witness in more than thirty gay rights cases in the US, including Romer v. Evans (1996), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), and the marriage equality cases decided by the Supreme Court in 2013 and 2015. 

About the Calgary Atlas Project

A city is a constantly evolving entity: a place that contains many other places, the intersection of innumerable routes that bring together temporarily a particular mix of people, ideas and things.  A city is more than an assemblage of structures and beings in a particular geographical location; it is both a state of mind and a place of forgetting, as new buildings and communities are erected on the sites of the old, and past versions of the city recede into memory.

This project seeks to recover crucial stories about Calgary’s past and present, stories that will illuminate in surprising ways the character of the city.Research and illustration of the first three maps is underway. Mark Clintberg, working with research by Kevin Allen, has mapped the early histories of Calgary’s Queer communities. Adrian Stimpson will map the history of Indigenous involvement with the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth. Kirk Niergarth and Karen Jeanne Mills are mapping the history of labour movements in our city. Future maps will explore the routes of animals, food, oil and water as they move through the city, film production and exhibition history, and the evolution of Calgary's underground art scene. 

Individual essays will document such phenomena as the landmarks of Stampede Wresting and the early histories of Calgary’s queer communities. Contributors will map the history of the First Nations’ involvement with the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth, and the traces left by immigrant communities. The Atlas will document the movies that were made here as well as the long-lost cinemas in which they were once shown. Other entries will explore the routes of animals, food, oil and water as they move through the city, under or around us or through us. The Atlas aims to bring a new vision of Calgary to Calgary; to show us how we got to where we are, and who we came to be.