Reading the Multimedia Archive Surrounding Montreal’s Post-War LGBTQ Bars: A Genealogical Return to Madame Arthur and <i>Il était une fois dans l’Est</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article proposes a genealogical meditation on the changing meanings and “eventfulness” of Montreal’s post-war LGBTQ bars read through a multimedia archive. Bars are understood here as material and discursive chronotopes or articulations of space-time (Bakhtin) frequently understood as metonymic to LGBTQ experience and historical struggle. I analyze an archive (social histories, photographs and drawings, journalism, fiction, and memoirs) associated with two “events” from 1974: a raid on the lesbian bar Madame Arthur, and the release of a feature film Il était une fois dans l’Est based on Michel Tremblay’s œuvre. I set in dialogue a genealogical historiography with a “cartographic” tendency in foundational Montreal lesbian and gay histories, where the historical significance of LGBTQ bars is collapsed into struggles for public space; these spatial struggles are embedded in a progressive discourse of liberation that articulates problematically with sexual and Quebec national liberation. With a particular attention to gender differences, I read the archive for conflictual lesbian, gay, and transsexual traces of historical experience and subjectivity. Highlighting methodological approaches to a multimedia LGBTQ archive, I explore how different media and genres of discourse contribute to dissonant accounts of Montréal LGBTQ bars of the 1970s.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".