When I began planning this blog series in January 2022, I started by imagining the kinds of people I hoped might contribute to the series. From the infancy of this project, I knew that I wanted to talk to Mardi. Mardi Pieronek, known as @mardipantz on TikTok, the social media and video hosting platform, began her “teen transsexual experience” in 1977 at 15 years old. Novel, I know. People often say that all of our […]
While I was in San Francisco for the Queer History Conference last week, the conference organizers planned a social event in The Castro District, the city’s epicenter of LGBTQ+ life. As I was putting on my slacks and the dress shirt I packed, looking professional but still very queer, I had a change of heart. Instead, I opted for baggy jeans, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap. I wasn’t going to the event. I ventured […]
I had been on testosterone for one month when I did my first Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP) interview. I remember Alisha Stranges, the co-oral historian, hitting record on the Zoom interview and thinking to myself, “that’s it. This version of you, one that will eventually be unrecognizable to you, is going to be archived.” At the beginning of every interview, I would think a different version of that thought; this went on for […]
In The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, Alessandro Portelli opens with, well, the death of Luigi Trastulli, a young steelworker who was allegedly killed by police during a public protest in Terni, Italy. As Portelli guides the reader through the inconsistencies riddled throughout oral histories that recount Trastulli’s death, he argues that oral histories “are not always fully reliable in point of fact. Rather than being a […]
By the time we reached Tera Mallette’s (she/they) Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP) interview at the end of May 2021, Alisha Stranges and I had conducted 20 interviews. Prior to Mallette’s interview, we had spoken to mostly cisgender narrators; the trans narrators had transitioned in the years following the scope of our interview. Mallette’s interview was one of two conducted with people that identified as trans at the Pussy Palace event in 2000; both […]
On the night of September 14, 2000, Robin Woodward and her partner Ange Beever got dressed in their classic lace and leather. They knew exactly what they were in for when they climbed up the steps of Club Toronto for their fourth time as patrons of the Pussy Palace — a radical bathhouse event for queer women and trans people that ran from 1998 to the early 2010s. With rumours of a police raid floating […]