CHARLIE AND HIS CAMERA

Charles, aka my lover, being a man with a camera, has a collection of slides and photos of gay people and events, as well as other subjects. Not all that had been borrowed by various groups over the years returned, so there are large gaps including some of the best slides.

Many of his slides, along with those of Kyle Rae, were used at the huge 1980's GCDC (Gay Community Dance Committee) dances at the former Masonic Temple in Toronto, Yonge & Davenport. They were also used by the Lesbian and Gay Community Appeal (now the Community One Foundation) in their fundraising shows. The connection with the Appeal is of course Harvey Hamburg, close friend and occasional former housemate, who was in TAG with us and who was the principal founder of the Appeal, among his many credits.

An old friend of Charlie's and mine via Toronto Area Gays, started Kai Visionworks, a source library for images of social change. He borrowed many hundreds of Charlie's gay slides, sometimes returning copies to us and holding onto the originals for further copying on behalf of the slide library. Unfortunately many of these slides in particular didn't make their way back to us and the slide bank itself is now defunct. We've recently recovered several hundred but that still leaves much unaccounted for.

Besides working as a printer at the Toronto Star, Charlie was one of Guerilla's two photographers in the early 1970's. His photos were sometimes on the cover of that newspaper and they have occasionally appeared as cover photos elsewhere e.g. The BP, This Magazine. Because of his connection with Guerilla he also has a collection of negatives covering many Toronto countercultural events and struggles from those days. In the early days he managed to retrieve 100 rolls of his photos from Guerilla covering the second half of 1970. But efforts to find out what happened to all those from 1971 and 1972 have been unsuccessful.