Thursday, March 3rd 2026
2:00 p.m.
KMDI
Robarts Library, Room 7020, 130 St George St, Toronto, ON M5S 3H1, Canada
Abstract
In her forthcoming book, Digital Queers and High Tech Gays, Dr. Alex D. Ketchum explores how queer communities have long shaped internet culture by organizing, sharing knowledge, and preserving their own histories. From zines and phone lines to early websites, LGBTQ+ activists built digital infrastructures that offer vital lessons for today’s debates about technology, power, and activism.
Digital Queers and High Tech Gays traces the history of LGBTQ+ cyber activism in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and beyond. Beginning in the 1980s, queer cyber activists founded professional networks, built employee resource groups, distributed hardware and software to community organizations, and produced guidebooks, zines, and manuals as part of a broader project of information activism. Using print media, phone lines, and the early web, they expanded ideas of who could be an internet user while also developing archival practices to preserve their own histories. Centering joy alongside serious technical labor, these activists transformed both digital infrastructures and everyday queer life—on and off the screen.
In collaboration with DigiLabour and Jackman Humanities Institute.
About the speaker
Alex D. Ketchum is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University and Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab. Their research brings together queer, feminist, labour, and technology history. Ketchum is the author of Ingredients for Revolution and the forthcoming Digital Queers and High Tech Gays, and has led multiple SSHRC-funded projects on feminist publishing, digital archives, and inclusive knowledge production.
