The Percy Foundation has been proud to support independent scholars without access to institutional funds so they can travel to important archival collections in furtherance of their research aims. In 2024, we funded Australian historian Peter Jordaan, author of the important three volume account of the Lord Battersea scandal, A Secret Between Gentlemen, as he travelled to the UK and Europe to do further work on various figures related to this and other gay affairs of the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
We are currently supporting Jelena Vermilion of the Sex Workers Action Project of Hamilton, Ontario, to study the history of sex work in Ontario. Among the issues she will be documenting through her work in provincial archives are municipal licensing and zoning laws being weaponized to control sex work, shifting enforcement practices from visible street-based policing toward more covert surveillance of online activity, legislative patterns that increasingly conflate consensual sex work with trafficking, violence, and crime, and harm resulting from enforcement strategies, including displacement, reduced access to health and social services, and increased vulnerability to violence and stigma from neighbors.