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It must have made an odd tableau. In Toronto last December, volunteers gathered in a room to smash open the cases of hundreds of gay porn videos, mangling the tapes so that they could never be viewed again. The setting was curious: the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archive. What was going on?

The Toronto-based archive is a trove of homosexual history, with one of largest collections in the world, and the most complete run of lesbian and gay periodicals anywhere. Its members include many of the best-known gay historians writing today. The CLGA runs entirely on the labor of volunteers, among them professional librarians and archivists. Their offices in downtown Toronto are "packed to the gunnels," says president Edward Tompkins. The CLGA has all the papers of the now-demised Body Politic, one of gay journalism's brightest beacons during the 70s and 80s. In the CLGA collection you can find the records of the Toronto and Vancouver AIDS committees, personal histories, diaries, books, movies, and erotica. Rarities abound: here is the repository of records from Poland's communist-era gay organizing, brought to Toronto by emigres. The doings of local gay communities are preserved, if at all, in ephemeral forms-- handwritten minutes, organizational newsletters, and bar giveaways. Upon their owners' deaths, diaries and porn stashes often end up shredded or burned by embarrassed relatives. Historians of the next millennium will be able to write the history of this century's gay life thanks to places like the CLGA.

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Filtering for the future

Inevitably, that history will have holes. The videos selected for destruction last December had been chosen, archivists at the CLGA say, after a painstaking weeding of the collection. Mostly, the tapes destroyed were commercial porn of American provenance. Some were second- and third-generation copies, others worn from overuse or duplicates of items already collected. Before the sorting there were 600-700 videos, mostly porn tapes. Now the collection is down to about 100, with some 20 percent of that recordings of community events, documentaries, and the like.

"Initially when we were offered videos a number of years ago we took pretty well everything, because we didn't know what was there," says Harold Averill, an archivist and longtime CLGA volunteer. "We sat down with the video material and set out a rationale of what we wanted. The same thing happens with textual records-- material you thought was very important at one time may prove later not to be so significant. This is a process that happens in any archives."

Dan Stroud, who oversaw the CLGR's video collection, spent almost two years poring through the archive's tapes. His goal: a selection that would show the full range of gay pornographic expression. Stroud and the archive worked out careful criteria: every film before 1981 was saved, any porn with Canadian content, movies documenting major trends in style or theme, those from important directors, and anything highlighting a particular hue in the homosexual rainbow-- from bestiality to piss play, transgender to intergenerational, fisting to sock fetishes.

Reducing the video collection was important, CLGA archivists say, because, in the long view of a preservationist, video tapes might as well be skywriting. After about ten years, magnetic tape decays. Eventually, the hot action of Butthole Bonanza or the panoply of a Montreal pride parade turns to televisual snow. A video can be recopied to fresh tape, but duplication itself degrades contents. Analog video can be digitized, but for now the cost is prohibitive-- the CLGA struggles as it is to pay its C$60,000 annual rent. Saving for all time every video the CLGA had accumulated was never an option, the archive says. Just do nothing, and time's ravages would consign the entire collection to the historical dustbin. With a well-picked sampling, the archive can now see to their videos' long-term preservation-- in cold storage or maybe through digitization, whose cost is set to plummet in a few years.

In a tight spot

Nonetheless, the decision to destroy hundreds of gay porn tapes caused a stir. "I was shocked, totally shocked," Dan Stroud says, when he found out, after the fact. He assumed the tapes he had culled from the archive would enjoy a second life-- preserved at other archives, sold to aficionados, returned to donors, or just given away. Chronically pressed for space, the archive had recently winnowed its collection of paperback novels, saving hardcover duplicates. Donated to Ryerson Polytechnic, the stash of paperbacks became the kernel of a new gay library.

Archives maintain a lively exchange with each other-- trading material that's redundant or superfluous to their main focus. It was in part squeamishness over pornography, Stroud felt-- an uneasiness over letting porn out into the world with the imprimatur of the archive-- that led the CLGA board to choose destruction over rechanneling. "I've always thought pornography was a valid, integral part of gay life," says Stroud, who resigned in wake of the destruction, "but there are people who disagree."

The archive's choices were limited, say CLGA staffers, who defend the destruction as unfortunate but unavoidable. The trouble, says Alan Miller, a bibliographer and CLGA volunteer, is that no other Canadian archive collects pornography-- though this would seem a strong reason for the CLGA to collect porn more thoroughly. Shipping porn across the border to US or European archives that do collect it would mean tangling with customs-- though across the border is whence most of the doomed tapes originally came. Returning the videos to donors wasn't an option, Miller says. Once archives in Canada issue a tax receipt for donated material, they own it and can't legally give it back. Otherwise donors could earn deductions twice for the same gift. Putting a box of free porn outside the archive's front door might have proved popular, but would brush against the prickly porcupine of Canadian sex law. Even putting whole tapes out into the trash could have been the makings of a tabloid scandal. At the least, being seen casually handing out porn could tarnish the CLGA's legitimacy as a research institution, a status that helps it safeguard gay erotica currently proscribed as criminal.

Though the tapes, Miller says, were the CLGA's property, to do with as it wanted, Miller adds that he understands that the board expected donors to be notified about the impending destruction. The letter from the CLGA would have been frustrating-- something along the lines of, "We are about to destroy material that you collected, and that we accepted, and we are bound not to give it back to you, in case you would have liked another shot at saving it for posterity." Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that such letters were never written. Archive president Edward Tompkins says that he knows of no expectation among board members that they would be.

CLGA volunteer Harold Averill says that the archive tries now to be more discriminating in the materials it accepts in the first place, and to be frank with donors about how their bequests might be culled for preservation. And at the CLGA, Averill assures, culling will never be a means of covert censorship.

There is little doubt that the pornography destroyed at the CLGA last December, in part because it is ubiquitous today throughout the Western world, will 20 years hence be vanishingly rare. Video porn's commodity status together with magnetic tape's mortality insures that. Whether this pornography will be interesting in the future for anything but its scarcity is unknowable. Historians today would kill for more than the snippets they have of erotica from ancient China, the Etruscans, or classical Greece. Historians of the future may be as covetous about what could be the equally rare pornography of the 1980s and 90s. Unless gay and lesbian archives are well funded, encouraged, and guided by the communities they serve, they may not have the means or fortitude to save more. And more of our sexual history will be pushed down the memory hole.