“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I muttered as I rocked up to the club entrance at 8pm on November 28, 2022. I’d been coming to Oasis Aqualounge at 231 Mutual Street once every few weeks for the past six months. I was in the heyday of my oh-so-cool stone top fuckboy phase and on pretty good terms with a rotating crew of fairly identical transmasc Oasis regulars. We’d descend on the place with gear and gay aggression and spend the night being productively violent with each other. We took a certain delight in recreating a little homage to The Catacombs while snubbing the naked cismen in waist-wrapped towels, single and drunk, hoping to catch a glimpse of something they could tell themselves later was pussy. But this party was different. It was Sapphic Aquatica 2.0, the re-revamped, post-lockdown pop-up bathhouse for women and trans folx; no cismen allowed.
This was the first time I’d ever seen a line for Oasis. It was a good hundred people long, snaking its way up north to Carlton and spilling out around the corner of the house. Cars slowed and ogled. Ubers crawled up in de facto teams, waving each other on like cabs. The line itself was just a shimmer of body glitter and TikTok fashion. After being assured by the very polite door person that no, I wasn’t the only person who’d pre-purchased their ticket and yes, I would have to wait in the line, I picked up my gear and walked my leather-decked butt to the back. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the sound of a bunch of newly out queers who’ve never seen a leatherdyke IRL swinging their necks around in synchronised choreography, but the crack haunts me to this day.
Exterior, Oasis Aqualounge, 231 Mutual Street. Photographs by Alisha Stranges and Ayo Tsalithaba.
I spent an hour in that line. A slow drip towards the reinforced door that had been carved into the side of the circa 1887 Victorian manor back in the 70s. On February 5, 1981, the club was one of the four gay bathhouses raided by the Toronto Police. The raids and the thousands of people who marched in the streets in the following days are largely considered the start of the Pride movement in Canada. But in that line, my 30-year-old bones were surrounded by giddy queers who’d hit the Ontario drinking age during the pandemic and cobbled together their Toronto queer history from social media posts and Tumblr blogs. They were drunk, high, and just happy to be there. The non-binary presence was heavy; the eyeliner was heavier.
Now, it’s not uncommon for there to be a bit of a salacious buzz around Toronto’s downtown “water themed” sex club. It used to be a bathhouse operating under the Club Baths chain catering to a generally gay cis-dude clientele. But, by the 2000s it had morphed into an all-gender, mostly cis-het swingers’ club for the Bay Street set and suburban 40+ “50 Shades of Grey” crowd. Like all bathhouses in Toronto, it gets around anti-sex vice laws by billing itself as a private members’ club and charging patrons to be members for a day. If you’re a cis dude or a couple with a cis dude involved, you pay between $100-$115. Depending on the day, women and all other genders get in for $15-$25. Sex workers aren’t allowed to solicit in the club, but that doesn’t preclude it from being a safe and clean place to bring clients when you’ve already got them on the books. For a place that makes its money on cis dudes and a bit of general consternation around entertaining their erections, almost every staff member is a card-carrying fruit of some description. From the most gorgeous trans femmes you’ve ever seen to butch dykes with perfect teeth and minor IG fame, Oasis employs dozens of out and proud queers, each with their pronouns slapped right on their nametags.
The OG Sapphic Aquatica (2012-2019): RIP
When I started frequenting the four-story Victorian manor with a heritage designation and bumpin’ 70s style fish-themed fresco in the basement, the Pussy Palace of the late 90s and early 2000s (and its history) wasn’t part of the general chatter (for more information on the Pussy Palace check out the Collaboratory’s extensive work on the subject here). But there were longing sighs exchanged in conversations about the pre-pandemic monthly Oasis party, Sapphic Aquatica — the fish theme continues. At an eye-watering 20 bucks a ticket (my kingdom for an affordable queer party in this economy), the OG Sapphic Aquatica started in 2012. It was a party for women and trans folx that explicitly barred cismen from attending. It was similar to the Pussy Palace minus the extensive planning committee, sex education workshops and dedicated feedback surveys. At its core, it was a relatively cheap party that offered up the only place in Ontario that allowed female and queer sexuality to take place without the engagement or presence of cismen.
In these cherished memories of pre-covid era Oasis patrons, price was a constant feature. Oasis itself was free to enter every Tuesday and Wednesday for women and trans folx. While it might just sound like a ploy to get significantly prettier people to populate the less frequented nights of the week, these free days did so much more. Gay cismen have always had bars without cover fees for patrons to hook up, with several offering dedicated dark rooms for various anonymous activities. While these bars are required to serve women and genderqueer folx, they have historically been extremely hostile and regularly quite dangerous to anyone outside the cis gay community. Oasis’s free entry on two full days of the week provided sexual self-expression access to women and genderqueer people who quite literally had no other option in either price or location.
Interior, Oasis Aqualounge, 231 Mutual Street. Photographs by Ayo Tsalithaba. Floorplan courtesy of Oasis Aqualounge.
And then the lockdowns happened. Even though Oasis scrubs itself raw every night at 3am and closes for a major 24 hour deep clean once a week, the club was deemed non-essential and prevented from operating for the better part of a year and a half. When phased re-openings happened in 2021, the clean freaks of the manor were more than ready but the damage had already been done. The pre-covid version of Sapphic Aquatica didn’t return when the club itself re-opened to guests. What’s more, regular Tuesday and Wednesday club tickets were no longer free for women and trans folx. With this pricing change, women and trans folx are once again unable to access any safe indoor sexual experience unless they can afford the upfront cost. This severely limits the kinds of women and trans folx who can use Oasis and the uncensored expression of their sexuality as a pillar of community building. The poor rural queers who used to carpool down don’t show up anymore.
Sapphic Aquatica 2.0: 2022-?
To be completely honest, I wasn’t expecting that much of a turnout for that first Sapphic Aquatica party of the post-lockdown age. The incredibly overburdened staff running the check-in certainly didn’t either. But that’s what I get for my pernicious nihilism around the social engagement of queer young people. When you think about it, it makes sense. Bathhouses, public cruising, and gay bars with dark rooms and booths for anonymous sexual encounters are and always have been exclusively aimed at the cis-male gay or MSM (men who have sex with men) community. While Oasis is incredibly queer and trans friendly, and women are a required component of the heterosexual swingers’ club experience, it is incredibly difficult to feel like your queerness is not for the consumption of cis-het men when you are trying to get your rocks off surrounded by cis-het men wearing nothing but a towel and their erection. They inch closer in silence, masturbating, hoping to catch a nervous smile that can be interpreted as the right to insert themselves into the situation (pun intended). While non-consensual touch will get a guy booted and banned faster than he can call me a faggot, I’m no stranger to the force it takes to get a man’s attention when his hands seem to be wandering in the direction of my boy.
And then there’s the matter of price. While the accessible pricing differential between cismen and the rest of us, even post-lockdown, is absolutely vital to secure any queer access to the space at all, it underscores a very real social stratification of economic purchasing power. On any given Wednesday in 2023, a cis man forks over 100 bucks to walk into the club and a non-binary person shells out $15. While the staff subject any new patron to a mandatory house tour and rules rundown of acceptable behaviour, this significant price difference underscores a very simple thing; a cis-man’s money is always worth more to the house. Taken together with cis-male entitlement (i.e. he paid the big bucks for a sex club so he’d better get laid) and the heavy devaluation of sex workers’ labour as a skilled trade (i.e. paying for it means you can’t get it on your own merit), you have a very tense environment for a sex positive 20-something with a vulva who just wants to screw other queers in a queer space.
Despite starting the post-lockdown 2022 version of Sapphic Aquatica at 30 bucks a person and now charging a full $40, Oasis and the Sapphic Aquatica organizers don’t make money on the event. It’s difficult to justify dropping the price when even having these shreds of access is demonstrably precarious. Sapphic Aquatica, like its pre-lockdown version and The Pussy Palace before it, provides a rare thing; a space to explore queer sexuality without the constant presence of cismen. These queer and trans bathhouses are not permanent things but transient time-shares of privacy. However, the queer community is not an economic monolith. We are not all in the same position of privilege and marginalisation. There will always be white queers at the front of the line for the rights to pleasure and privacy. But ask yourself, who can’t afford to be in the line at all?
Atticus Hawk (they/he) is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research looks at the role of Leatherdykes in the creation of medical knowledge and harm-reduction practices for fat, trans and disabled bodies in kink.