"I Have a Sense that Gay is Diluting Significantly." Gay Nostalgia in a Post-Gay World and the Intergenerational Transitions of Toronto's Church-Wellesley Village (1973-2023)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understandings and/or experiences of being gay in Toronto have changed over the past 50 years and are now at risk of being revised or forgotten. There is a diminishment of gay villages, spaces, and organizations across North America, Western Europe and Australia. A post-gay period has emerged in these spaces with a recognition of greater fluidity in sexual and gendered identities. This includes Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village (TCWV). The social, cultural, and political experiences of an older generation of gay men differ from a younger queer generation who no longer align themselves to gay identity, gay culture, or gay villages and see little need to sustain them. Changes in the built and demographic environments are also contributing to these concerns. Fears about such changes and the risk that the histories of older gay men will be lost are prompting some gay men to express nostalgia during a transitional period. This dissertation explores perspectives about the past, present and future of Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village (TCWV) through oral histories of 27 self-identified gay men and written narratives on Vintage Gay Toronto (VGT) Facebook website to map the changing social, political, cultural, and spatial environment of the neighbourhood and gay Toronto. This work presents their experiences before and after the area was reconceptualized from a ghetto of segregated and predominantly gay residential space in the 1970s, a flourishing gay commercial, entertainment, and residential village by the late 1980s and 1990s, to a transitional period in which many gay men feel a lost sense of community and identity. This research is also informed by a knowledge mobilization strategy of community engagement. It provides a step-by-step process of a Community Engagement Workshop. The workshop generated feedback and research themes to prioritize questions for the project’s oral history interviews.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".