Fucking, sucking, and scissoring in the archive: Histories of queer sex in Nova Scotia through ephemeral archives and material history (1969–1999)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article surveys the current state of sex in Canadian queer history and seeks to establish its methodological basis as a productive and meaningful topic of historical inquiry. It considers sex as a physical and emotional experience, rather than how it is often understood discursively. The article first details three distinct narratives of sex in Canadian queer history: the prominent narratives of the criminalized and the deadly, as well as the more elusive erotic. Subsequently, through case studies of queer archives in Nova Scotia, it offers three possible ways of accessing the queer erotic using photo tracings, fiction, and the ephemeral. Each case study is a vignette into Nova Scotia queer history that also sheds light onto queer sexual practices in this communities during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The sources explore lesbian camping trips, a gay men's BDSM group, a coming out story in Cape Breton, and the use of poppers in the Halifax clubbing scene.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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".