Историк Кевин Аллен сохраняет наследие ЛГБТК+ сообщества в Калгари

Changemaker: 'We have to be seen' — Kevin Allen is preserving Calgary's LGBTQ+ history 'I feel like the history project really does a good job of taking up space in the history narrative of Calgary,' Allen said. 'It's not just about the Stampede and oil exploration ... but there's other stories and we've been here' Article content On a Sunday night at his parents’ house, Kevin Allen asked a question that seemed simple enough — where did gay Calgarians hang out in the 1950s and ’60s? It was the early 2010s and Allen, a born-and-raised Calgarian who had spent much of his career working in arts administration, had begun wondering what Calgary’s queer community looked like before he was born. His mother told him there were no gay people in Calgary at the time, but his father remembered differently. He recalled that gay men drank at the Palliser Hotel in the ’60s, a fact he only remembered because he avoided the hotel out of fear of being misidentified. That small family conversation created an itch for history Allen has never been able to fully satiate. “That got me interested in history and led me down the rabbit hole of becoming a historian,” he said, adding that he eventually quit his arts administration job at the time. “And this is where we find ourselves now.” Six months after that conversation with his parents, Allen applied for a small grant to become a historian-in-residence at the Old Y building on 12th Avenue, a space itself entrenched in Calgary’s LGBTQ+ history. It was home to queer support services for more than 50 years, including Calgary Outlink up until the building’s closure in 2025. The Calgary Gay History Project began there in 2012. It initially started as little more than a website and blog dedicated to collecting stories about Calgary’s queer community, Allen said. Since then, the project has grown into a research hub, with a team of researchers and community members who help sift through decades-old newspapers and magazines. Nearly 15 years later, Allen has become one of Calgary’s most prominent keepers of queer history. He leads historical walking tours throughout downtown, worked in collaboration with the University of Calgary to create a queer map of the city as part of the Calgary Atlas project and presents his research to bring better awareness to LGBTQ+ issues. It even led him to writing a book on the subject in 2018, Our Past Matters: Stories of Gay Calgary, which is a collection of 70 short stories detailing the various lived experiences of gay Calgarians. “There was a vacuum to be filled or a niche to be filled,” Allen said. “I basically said yes to most opportunities that have come my way, and it’s been really gratifying. But Allen’s connection to Calgary’s queer community runs much deeper than his historical expertise. As a fourth-generation Calgarian, his roots in the city stretch back decades. A graduate of Crescent Heights High School and the University of Calgary, Allen spent much of his professional life immersed in Calgary’s arts scene. He worked with organizations including the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers and Arts Commons, and was a founding member of what is now the Calgary Queer Arts Society, which began with the annual Fairy Tales Queer Art & Film Festival. Allen’s passion for film eventually led him to produce a short documentary in 2018 about Everett Klippert, a Calgary bus driver who was the last Canadian jailed for being gay before the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969. Gross Indecency: The Everett Klippert Story won the Best of Alberta award at the 2018 Calgary International Film Festival. Allen sees preserving the stories of Calgarians like Klippert or Lois Szabo — a pioneer in the community who co-founded Club Carousel in 1970, Calgary’s first gay bar — as about more than diversifying the history books. “Queer people have to take up space, we have to be seen and we have to demand our space at the table and physically take up space in the community,” he said. That, Allen said, is the motivation behind the Calgary Gay History Project, to ensure that Calgary’s queer community is not relegated to the margins of its own history. “I feel like the history project really does a good job of taking up space in the history narrative of Calgary,” Allen said. “It’s not just about the Stampede and oil exploration — those two things are big in the city — but there’s other stories and we’ve been here.” ‘We have to gather these stories while we can’ While Allen can now passionately discuss and dissect tidbits of Calgary’s niche pieces of history, he never set out to become a historian. He did not study history in university and, by his own admission, had little interest in it when he was younger. It was only once he got older, when he had more life experience and perspective, that he saw the appeal. “I fell into history, and the more I’ve been doing it, the more rewarding it’s been,” Allen said. “Now I’m just a big history buff all the way around.” But the type of history Allen looks for isn’t typically found in easily accessible history books. His research often requires him to “read between the lines” and go outside the expected channels. However, his most important database isn’t a physical object. It’s people. “I do have a pretty strong conviction that we have to gather these stories while we can,” Allen said. “The early ’70s and ’80s were a really important, formative time for community building in the gay community. And those people are getting quite old now, so we have to save their stories.” At his first Pride after beginning the project, Allen remembered scanning the crowd for older Calgarians. “I embarrassingly started age profiling at the pride parade. If they had grey hair, I’d say, ‘Are you from Calgary?’ ” he said. He laughs now at the memory, acknowledging he likely “freaked out a lot of people,” but eventually he earned his way into the city’s community of queer elders and people began trusting him with their stories. Incidentally, this year’s Calgary Pride events take place through Sept. 6. That trust mattered. Several of the queer elders Allen interviewed have since died, making the work of preserving their memories that much more meaningful. Allen actually prefers documenting the history of the living, as he finds beauty in the messiness of human memory. People remember the same events differently. New details emerge. A story that might seem straightforward in an archive can become complicated when the people who lived it are invited to tell their version. “There’s something easier about writing about history, about dead people that can’t talk back, or complicate the narrative,” he said. “I like to talk to real people and make it messy.” That philosophy is evident on Allen’s historical walking tours, where the stories he has spent years researching become conversations rather than lectures. “I think it also positions me less as the authority; I sometimes feel like I don’t always like to be there, I like to be in conversation,” he said. On a recent tour through the Beltline, one person who had frequented Goliath’s Bathhouse before its 2002 police raid shared a detail Allen had never heard before. During the six months police were staking out the bathhouse and going undercover, the officers could apparently be identified by their socks. “They always wore their white tube socks,” Allen said. “So everyone knew that there. That is such a colourful, funny detail in something that was fairly traumatic for the community to deal with.” It is a small detail, but it is exactly the kind of detail that can disappear if nobody asks. ‘I’d like more voices’ Next year, the Calgary Gay History Project will mark its 15th anniversary, but the work to be done is still immense. “I’d like more voices, more people writing stories and interpreting history from their own perspectives,” he said. In particular, he wants to elevate Calgary’s trans history, as there is a perception that transgender people are a new phenomenon, said Allen. “The first gender clinic that was doing surgeries in Canada was in Calgary in 1978,” he said. “People need to know that.” That is part of the reason Allen doesn’t want the history project to become a single person’s account of Calgary’s queer past. He wants more people to have a say in the city’s narrative. “Sometimes I fear in our contemporary society, people want an easy story, like a one-liner, or they want to erase the complication. They just want an easy answer, and I think having minority histories prevents that in a good way,” he said. Allen has already seen what happens when those stories become part of the city itself. In 2021, he supported efforts to recognize Lois Szabo by naming a public space in her honour. Lois Szabo Commons now sits in the Beltline, giving a physical place in Calgary to a woman whose contribution to the city’s queer community might otherwise have been known by far fewer people. Perhaps the clearest example of Allen’s impact is one of the stories that initially drew him into the role of historian. Allen’s research into Klippert’s life eventually connected him with Klippert’s former lawyer, who agreed to represent his family pro bono in an effort to clear his criminal record. In 2021, more than half a century after his conviction, Klippert’s record was expunged. For Allen, it was a rare moment when the work of looking backward created tangible change in the present. “That was a very special moment for me and the history project, to actually make material change,” he said. “And to facilitate it somehow because of my interest in connecting the dots? (It was) amazing.” It was proof that history is not always confined to the past. Sometimes, simply remembering can change what comes next. Bookmark this website and support our journalism: Subscribe now so you don’t miss the Calgary news you need to know and sign up for our free newsletters.