Alternative Toronto 1980 - 1995

What is Alternative Toronto? A digital community archive of Toronto’s alternative cultures, scenes and spaces of the 1980s and 1990s. 

Our mandate: To document the history of Toronto’s alternative communities from 1980 to 1998 by creating a digital repository to which anyone with materials can contribute. Alternative Toronto uses open source archival tools to help visitors learn about this history in a way that is publicly accessible and in the public interest. As historians, archivists and activists, we are committed to the practice of critical community history.

Who we are: Alternative Toronto is coordinated by Dr. Lilian Radovac, who is a media and cultural historian at the University of Toronto and the project’s lead investigator. It’s guided by an ad hoc advisory collective whose founding members include researcher Sophie Toupin (McGill), archivist Sarah R. Demb (Harvard) and author Cory Doctorow. Historian Simon Vickers, documentary artist Sylvia Nowak and archivists Jessica Lapp and Tamara Rayan have worked with the project as research assistants. Pete Gray is our webmaster.

What it covers: Radical, countercultural, anti-racist and trans/feminist/queer activism, art, music, theatre, dance, publishing, bookselling, cinema, education, health care, computing, housing, and more.

What we want: Posters, flyers, zines, pamphlets, manifestos, meeting minutes, photographs, artwork, cassette recordings, video footage, setlists, playbills, stories, essays, reflections, correspondence, newspaper clippings and code. We’re also looking for addresses, leases, rent receipts, social assistance cheque stubs, student loan documents, and other items that will help us to document the spaces these cultures happened in.