LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory

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 […]

Reposted from April 16, 2021. Did you know that the 2000 Pussy Palace had an instant photo room? On the fourth floor of the Palace, a sign reading “porn/photo room” directed patrons in two equally playful directions: towards a room for screening pornography and/or towards a room for having Polaroids taken to document one’s night at the bathhouse (Blair 163; Vogels paras. 10-13). In our most recent oral history interview, Carlyle Jansen, one of the founding members of the Toronto Women’s […]

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 […]