Borders of Belonging: Situating Bisexual Communities in Toronto’s Queer History, 1980s-2000s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholarship on queer activism and communities has tended to focus mainly on gay and lesbian politics and organizations that began establishing themselves in the mid-twentieth century. As a result of the pervasiveness of the hetero/homosexual binary that insists upon a distinct separation between the gay and straight worlds, bisexual people and their historical contributions to the queer community have remained understudied, especially in a Canadian context. This thesis seeks to illuminate histories of bisexual activism and community organizing in Toronto from the 1980s to the 2000s, in the midst of and following the peak years of Canadian gay liberation. It demonstrates how widespread exclusion of bisexual people from the gay rights movement motivated activists to establish support, discussion and advocacy groups that sought to combat bisexual erasure within queer spaces and foster attitudes of pride within the city’s queer community. Through oral history interviews with bisexual activists and other primary source records, it will become evident that bisexual community organizers in Toronto were concerned with creating safe, affirming spaces for bisexual people where their particular issues and experiences could be discussed, while also publicly engaging in educational advocacy that would enhance their visibility. This thesis directly addresses the lack of bisexual presence within the Canadian queer historical record, inviting historians to challenge still-pervasive binary notions of sexuality and expand ideas of who “belongs” and who might be excluded from dominant historical narratives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".