Can I say this? Is it a betrayal?

I’ve found myself asking these questions a few times since fellow oral historian, Alisha Stranges, and I wrapped up the interviewing phase of the Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP).

Interviewing queer and trans elders, especially those that were part of such a radical chapter of Toronto’s LGBTQ+ history, was one of the most amazing experiences afforded me as both a scholar and a young queer person. I arrived at every interview earnestly and excited to learn from the narrators who were so graciously willing to share their stories with us. I hadn’t even completed my first interview when I realized how intimate and delicate the space between interviewer and narrator is. These people come to us with their memories, coated and coded in their beliefs, desires, traumas, and years of meaning-making done in community. Narrators gave us their vulnerability, heightened by the shared belief that recording these stories would combat the erasure of such an important part of our history. Our history.

Every oral historian shares the interview space, and the stories told within it, with the narrator, but something special happens when the interviewers and narrators share a community and a political imperative. The investment is deeper. Queer and trans oral historians doing this historical recovery work are looking for themselves in the past; for their ancestors. And so, in the same way that I might ask my grandmother about where my blood family comes from, I often felt as though I was asking my queer family about our origin stories. What a wonderful thing to share and to call ours.

But bearing witness to my queer and trans elders was not always easy and rewarding. There were moments when I didn’t want to confront the version of our shared history that they were relaying.

Can I say this? Is it a betrayal?

Does it matter if it feels like a narrator betrayed me first?

It was October of 2021 when I was tasked with transcribing the PPOHP interviews. There were a few interviews that Alisha and I conducted separately, and I always looked forward to transcribing the interviews that I didn’t get to be a part of. In one of the interviews, Alisha asked a standard opening question:

How would you describe your gender and sexual identity today, in 2021?

And then . . .

What about in 2000? How would you have described your gender and sexual identity around the time when the “Night of 2000 Pussies” event took place? 

The narrator responded:

. . . I’ve always identified as butch and as a butch female and a masculine butch female. So that’s where the use of masculine pronouns, but I never want to use masculine pronouns, even then (the year 2000), to eradicate the feminine nature of who I am or to promote misogyny.  

I wish I could say that this narrator’s words didn’t strike such a deep chord with me. I wish I could have chalked them up to a crumby, throw-away quote from an out-of-touch queer elder. But I’ve read about the border wars. Shit, I’ve fought in them myself. These were thoughts that I had before I came out, and ultimately some of the thoughts that kept me in the closet for so many years. If I transitioned, would I be condemning my favourite parts of me to death? Could I reduce my dysphoria to internalized misogyny? Am I a failed butch for wanting to be whole?

Sitting here now, it feels like a betrayal of the narrator’s trust and vulnerability to talk about how deeply this affected me. It also feels terrible to take umbrage with the way that another queer person makes sense of their own identity. But shit, here I am. I guess that’s what happens when the work you do involves the kind of intimacy fostered by oral history. For every time you feel so proud or moved by a narrator’s story, there’s another narrator waiting in the wings to make your heart sink.

I wonder if this narrator would have said this if I were in the room. Would she have chosen more delicate words? When I imagine how I might have reacted if I were a part of that interview, I’m certain that I wouldn’t have said anything. As an oral historian, it’s not my role to challenge a narrator’s belief system; I’m meant to hold space for the narrator to tell their story and feel supported and cared for in the process. Sometimes your feelings need to be put on the back burner, and that’s a part of being good at the job. It’s also easy to feel the way that I do towards this comment when I didn’t get to share the interview space with this person.

Earlier in the interviewing process, Alisha and I co-interviewed a narrator who, in all honesty, was one of my favourite people to talk to. In parsing apart her identity and talking about the version of the lesbian community that she came up in during the 1980s and 1990s, she said that,

Actually, the community I came out into, in 1981, was really pushing androgyny. They were moving away from the butch and femme . . . Like, you all do know the period of time where all the butches were really being pressured to cut their tits off and become boys?

I had not undergone top surgery at the time, and I remember wincing at the thought of someone cutting my tits off. It’s not as explicitly transphobic as the comment made by the first narrator, but talking about transness as social pressure and about trans-affirming medical care in such a violent way didn’t sit well for obvious reasons. I thought about this quote a lot more than the other one, even though the narrator didn’t reduce transmasculinity to misogyny, because I heard it in a conversation that I was involved in. I also thought about it more because I felt so much admiration for the narrator, and because talking to queer elders is a part of my life that I cherish so deeply.

Most queer and trans people my age don’t get to have the conversations that I’m so blessed to have with our elders. Queer and trans oral history is my greatest connection to my queer cultural ancestry, and I yearn for that to be a wholly positive and nourishing experience. Confronting the fact that conducting queer and trans oral histories can be hurtful is a part of what makes committing these words to paper feel like a betrayal. But I wouldn’t have written this if I truly thought that it was. It’s important to write about these conflicting and hurtful feelings because they communicate realities about both the queer and trans past and present — that cis queer women and transmasculine people used to and still do struggle with anti-transmasculinity in our shared histories and communities.

Elio Colavito is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto, specializing in Sexual Diversity Studies. As a trans non-binary researcher, Elio’s passion lies in archiving and re-telling queer histories in Canada. Currently, Elio serves as the Co-Oral Historian for the Collaboratory’s Pussy Palace Oral History Project.