Thomas Waugh

Thomas Waugh is a Canadian critic, lecturer, author, actor, and activist,^[1][2][3] best known for his extensive work on documentary film and eroticism in the history of LGBT cinema and art.^[4] A professor emeritus at Concordia University,^[5] he taught 41 years in the film studies program of the School of Cinema and held a research chair in documentary film and sexual representation. He was also the director of the Concordia HIV/AIDS Project, 1993-2017, a program providing a platform for research and conversations involving HIV/AIDS in the Montréal area.^[6]

A graduate of Columbia University, Waugh wrote film criticism and history articles for publications such as Jump Cut and The Body Politic before publishing his first book, Show Us Life: Towards a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, in 1984.

His 1996 book, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall, took 13 years to research and write.^[7] Its release was delayed eight full months after its initial planned publication date, due to difficulty finding a printer willing to handle the book's sexually explicit homoerotic imagery.^[8]

He is a two-time Lambda Literary Award nominee, garnering nominations in the Visual Arts category at the 15th Lambda Literary Awards in 2003 for Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics From Before Stonewall,^[9] and at the 17th Lambda Literary Awards in 2005 for Lust Unearthed: Vintage Gay Graphics from the DuBek Collection.^[10] He is also the recipient of the SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award for The Conscience of Cinema: The Work of Joris Ivens, 1912-1989.

Waugh has also served on the board of Cinema Politica,^[11] has been active with the Quebec Gay Archives,^[12] and is coeditor with Matthew Hays of the Queer Film Classics series of 19 monographs on LGBT film, published by Arsenal Pulp Press.^[13] In 2013 Waugh, Ryan Conrad and Cinema Politica raised funds on Indiegogo to produce and distribute a documentary film about the Russian LGBT organization Children-404.^[14]

In 2010, Waugh and filmmaker Kim Simard launched the Queer Media Database Canada-Québec, an online database project to collect and publish information about LGBT films and videos made in Canada and the personalities involved in their creation.^[15] The project was based in part on his 2006 book The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas.

• Who Are We?, A Very Natural Thing, The Naked Civil Servant: Films By Gays For Gays (1977)
• Show Us Life: Towards a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (1984)
• Men's Pornography: Gay vs. Straight (1985)
• Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (1996)
• The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema (2000)
• Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics From Before Stonewall (2002)
• Lust Unearthed: Vintage Gay Graphics from the DuBek Collection (2004)
• The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (2006)
• Gay Art: A Historic Collection (2006)
• Comin' At Ya! The Homoerotic 3-D Photographs of Denny Denfield (2007, with David L. Chapman)
• Montreal Main (2010, with Jason Garrison)
• Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (2010, with Michael Baker and Ezra Winton)
• The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film (2011)
• The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (2013, with Brenda Longfellow and Scott MacKenzie)
• The Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens, 1912-1989 (2016)
• I Confess! Constructing the Sexual Self In the Internet Age (2019, edited with Brandon Arroyo)

• Thomas Waugh faculty biography at Concordia University