Tucked away on the lower level of the University College building are two tiny rooms, filled floor-to-ceiling with archive-quality banker boxes containing one of the University of Toronto’s most unusual collections.

This is U of T’s Sexual Representation Collection, a comprehensive archive of modern sexuality belonging to the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

The boxes contain everything from pornographic VHS tapes, erotic novels and Playboy magazines to documents related to legal battles around censorship – all acquired by previous collection directors and donated by a variety of benefactors including a sex shop in Scarborough, a former CBC producer and prominent sex educators.

The collection serves as a historical record of the shifts in how sexuality is viewed and understood, says Patrickcard processing all originates or was heavily promoted by the porn industry,” he says.



The Sexual Representation Collection has a complete run of Playboy magazines from 1963 to 2000, which Keilty says is unusual (photos by Romi Levine)

The archives are available to researchers studying various aspects of sexuality inside and outside the university and are incorporated into class curricula. This coming year, several classes will be using the archives for research projects, says Keilty.

Students in a history course called Hacking History will be creating a digital exhibition of the Max Allen collection – an archive of materials donated by the CBC producer that includes documents relating to his legal battles around obscenity laws from the 1970s to the ’90s.

Keilty will be running a workshop out of the Faculty of