231 Mutual St., Toronto, ON. Former site of Club Toronto Bathhouse where multiple Pussy Palace events were held, current site of Oasis Aqualounge. Photograph by Alisha Stranges, 2021.
Project Overview
Launched in 2021 and concluding in 2025, the Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP) documents the rise, culture, and legacy of Toronto’s preeminent queer women’s and trans bathhouse. Central to this history is the September 2000 police raid on the Palace—the last major police raid of a queer bathhouse in Canadian history.
As the first sustained oral history project dedicated to the Pussy Palace, the PPOHP fills a major gap in Canadian queer and feminist historiography. Led by the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory in partnership with The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives and 36 community narrators, the project combines oral history, research creation, and public programming to preserve and activate queer and trans cultural memory.
Historical & Community Context
The Pussy Palace emerged in 1998 as a rare, pro-sex space organized by and for queer women and trans communities. Organized by the Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee, events took place once or twice annually until 2014. Rooted in a feminist ethics of care, consent, and inclusion, the Pussy Palace bathhouse nights unfolded amid longstanding police surveillance of queer sexual spaces in Toronto. The 2000 raid transformed the Palace into a flashpoint for struggles over sexuality, policing, and public space.
Project Goals & Methodology
The PPOHP was designed as a narrator-centered intervention into archival erasure. Grounded in radical public history principles, the project prioritized pleasure, affect, and embodied memory as forms of historical knowledge. Rather than treating oral histories solely as documentary records, the project translates testimony into multimodal public forms—including audiograms, animated shorts, Instagram stories, and both analogue and digital exhibits—that invite audiences to encounter queer history both emotionally and intellectually.
Central to this intervention was the project’s development of somatic elicitation as an oral history methodology. Interviews were structured to elicit not only narrative recollections of events, but also sensory, affective, and embodied memory—what it felt like to be inside the Pussy Palace, and how pleasure, care, and vulnerability were experienced in the body. By foregrounding embodied sensation and desire, somatic elicitation reframes pleasure as historically meaningful and expands the evidentiary possibilities of oral history practice.
Research Scope
Between February and August 2021, the team conducted 36 in-depth interviews with organizers, volunteers, patrons, and community advocates, focusing on those who were involved with the Pussy Palace bathhouse events between 1998 and 2005.
Emergent Themes
- Sexual freedom and pleasure
- Care work and community support
- Trauma, policing, and collective action
- Building inclusive spaces across race, gender, and class
- The sensory and affective experience of queer erotic space
- Photography and fashion as tools for queer and trans worldmaking
Project Outputs
The Pussy Palace Oral History Project produced a multi-format suite of public history outputs, including:
- An oral history collection of 36 video interviews and transcripts
- A dedicated project website and immersive digital exhibit
- Numerous digital research creation experiments for web and social platforms
- In-person exhibitions and public events
- Scholarly publications and classroom presentations
Together, these outputs reach academic, activist, and public audiences across digital, artistic, and physical spaces.
Impact & Significance
The Pussy Palace Oral History Project preserves and amplifies the histories of Toronto’s queer women and trans communities by documenting the rise, raid, and enduring legacy of one of Canada’s most significant bathhouse events. Through oral history interviews, exhibitions, research-creation, and public programming, the project creates a lasting record of sexual agency, community care, and resistance to policing.
The project intervenes at a moment of renewed relevance. The September 2000 police raid on the Pussy Palace—the last major raid on a queer bathhouse in Canadian history and one of the only raids targeting queer women’s and trans public sex spaces—offers a historically grounded account of collective organizing and sexual freedom amid ongoing struggles over policing and public space. Preserved at The ArQuives and shared through digital and analogue storytelling, the collection forms a living, accessible archive grounded in pleasure, struggle, and collective survival.
Project Team
For the Collaboratory
