Gender Diversity, Organizational Obliviousness, and Queering the Archive in Newfoundland and Labrador

A Conversation with Sarah Worthman

Sarah Worthman is executive director of the NL Queer Research Initiative (NLQRI), a social science research collective based out of Newfoundland and Labrador. In February 2025, she sat down to talk with series editor Jess Wilton about her work on queer history in the province.

Jess Wilton: What type of work do you do at the NLQRI? 
Sarah Worthman: The bulk of our research has focused on creating a digital queer archive for Newfoundland and Labrador—the first ever. We also do a lot of different outreach events, including a recent Black History Month event where we are prioritizing Black Queer voices.

JW: What kind of history/artistic/archival projects are you involved with around queer Atlantic Canada, other than the NLQRI? 
SW: I am also a freelance researcher, so I have done a lot of work into the queer history of the First World War. I’ve published a report on that, and am currently working on a book on that subject. It’s mainly focused on Canada writ large, but a lot of the things I’ve found—and it might be a certain bias in the type of research I do. As an Atlantic Canadian, I’m always on the lookout for stories that represent us. I’ve found a lot of queer soldiers and nursing sisters with connections to Atlantic Canada through that research, including one drag queen who I have done a lot of work on and outreach related to. His name was Ross Douglas Hamilton and he was born in Pugwash, Nova Scotia. His drag persona was “Marjorie.” We also have a project here in St. John’s that we launched as part of the NLQRI that challenged traditional notions of oral history through what was called, colloquially, Solidari-tea. It had its own tea and the project was all about connecting elders and youth in the 2sLGBTQ+ community over a 13-week oral history project. It focused on connection and consent of the elders involved as opposed to more traditional approaches and models. It also gave the youth a lot of training opportunities as well. One other thing we do, though less historically-related, is we run a queer library in St. John’s. It’s currently the largest queer library and I’m just about to add some of the forty books sitting on my floor right now.

JW: That’s amazing. Is the library open to anyone? 
SW: Yeah, yeah! All you need is an email or a phone number, and we do need to know if you’re 18+ because we have some sexual health content that’s geared towards adults. Most of the books are physically based in St. John’s. But we are going to work on some pilot projects to ship around the province (funding dependent). 

JW: Always funding dependent. Do you have any kind of favourite or unique findings or stories or archives from any of your work? 
SW: To emphasize the Newfoundland and Labrador perspective, I really wanted to highlight the story of Peter Miller, who right now is very relevant. Peter Miller was a poet—who is publically known by their birth name Florence—but was known as Peter to close friends and family. He went by a mix of she/her and he/him pronouns, and we have this fantastic quote from Peter that was written in the early 20^th century. Peter was born in July of 1889 and worked professionally as a poet, designing hallmark cards, and as postmaster/postmistress in their community of Topsail. What’s been really interesting about Peter is that we’ve found a lot of his letters to other people in his life and have a scrapbook. The letters are fascinating and give an insight into the nature of gender diversity, especially at a time when it wasn’t as safe to share that experience and those expressions. There’s a passage where Peter actually transforms his brother’s overalls so that they would fit and writes, “I feel like a fine young man.” There’s also one that was about gender and it’s one of the most evident examples I’ve seen expressing gender diversity, especially in a private letter. This was from a letter from August 15, 1946 between Edwin Duder and Florence Miller which said “there was a mistake made once, long ago. The angels of protoplasm bungled and made me a girl instead of a man” (6.06.022 Coll-016, p.1). All of this in collective, I think, brings into account the nuances of gender identity and the fact that gender identity has always been a lot more diverse than popular imagination likes to imagine or depict. Peter is such a good example of that.

JW: What issues or frustrations have you encountered during your research?  
SW: The story of Charles Danielle and the Octagon Castle is fascinating to me for many reasons, but I think in particular the extent to which people used to cover up his queerness is a major frustration. When we started this research on Charles Danielle and publishing these records, we noticed something about most of the articles that were written about him and his life—and there’s a fair number of them as he was a popular and unique figure. So, a lot of folks wrote about his life, and what’s interesting is that none of those records, including ones published by the provincial archives and the MUN (Memorial University of Newfoundland) archives, none of them mentioned his sexuality at all. They just used coded language. They say, “oh well he was an eccentric man,” or, “he never married,” but none of them outright called him queer. And I think what was frustrating for us is that this information wasn’t difficult to find really at all. We found these letters maybe two weeks into research. They were just at the public library collection with complete public access. Clearly, it was either the case of someone not doing their research or—what I suspect was more likely—that people came across these records and chose to ignore them. For me, the biggest frustration in doing queer history is the censorship that just continues to go on and the way that people are so willing to uphold these illusions of heteronormativity. It’s almost infuriating; on one hand because that’s just bad research practice, but also because people are going out of their way to paint these figures in our history as straight and cis, when the answer is much more complicated than that. As I mentioned before this interview, I’m in the deep thralls of my literature review, and I recently came across this interesting theoretical framework called institutional or organizational obliviousness. It looks at the way that people uphold discriminatory policies and do so in the name of neutrality or precedence, like saying, “this is the way it’s always been” or in some cases, “we don’t want to upset anyone.” They consider the opinions and feelings of heterosexual people and, frankly, homophobic people to a much higher degree than they do members of the 2sLGBTQ+ community, so that has been a really harsh reality I’ve had to reckon with in doing this type of research. 

To me the neutrality argument is really fascinating. I’ve never had a queer person say this, but there’s so many straight people worried about outing someone in history. They’ll say, “Well you don’t want to out somebody!” and I’ll respond to them: “They’ve been dead for a hundred years and you can’t go back in time and ask them if they want to be outed or not.” But honestly who knows? But what we know now is that it is a net-positive for the community seeing themselves represented in history.

JW: Do you have any final comments on region or the future of queer history?  
SW: If I can offer a critique of how we measure history, I think that we really need to diversify how we find sources to talk about queer history. In Newfoundland, a lot of what we rely on are academic institutions and what I’ve found is that you’re getting the voices deemed important enough to catalogue and unfortunately that means we’ve lost a lot of racialized queer history. For example, it’s Black History Month, and I’ve dug through so many collections to try and find anything related to Black queer history in Newfoundland and it was very difficult to find. What we chose instead was to go with a series of people who are making Black queer history. This includes the activists, artists, and writers who are doing incredible things in the province that will eventually be in the history books. I think we need to prioritize getting creative in terms of how we collect our data and share our history. Not to mention accessibility to that history.

The preceding was an audio interview, transcribed and edited for length and clarity. Sarah and the Newfoundland Queer Research Initiative can be found on Facebook and Instagram where they share amazing queer stories from the province. They can also be contacted at NLQueerResearch@gmail.com.

Further Reading: 

NL Digital Queer Archive, Collections.

Rhea Rollmann, A Queer History of Newfoundland, 2023.

Mark Tara, host, Rainbow Country, podcast, episode 409, “A Queer History of Newfoundland,” August 30, 2024.

Sarah Worthman, “The Untold Queer History of WWI”, Report LGBT Purge Fund, 2023.