ABSTRACT
Drawing inspiration from Ann Cvetkovich's (2003. An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) work on trauma and public affects, I explore contradictions in the public and private stories of my father's life, with a focus on the ways sexual, gendered and colonial power shaped the different narratives he revealed in extremity. My focus is on the development of a condoling methodology to explore this archive. Jack Francis (1918-2019) was a senior public servant in Canadian government during the anti-homosexual purges of the mid-twentieth century and a church archivist. As Cvetkovich (2003) argues, all archives serve as a technology of identity, and contain within them an ‘archive of feelings’ and narratives of collective life. I attempt to do justice to the intergenerational bond between a parent and child and my own commitments to de-colonial solidarity through reflecting on the connections between anti-homosexual regulation and colonial power. I hope this writing can open up what is often unfathomable in the lives that go before us, on the assumption that we can only reach for future worlds when we take seriously the fragmentary signs from the past.
