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 […]
Beginning in January 2022, the Collaboratory invited UVic undergraduate Amanda Thomson to participate in a 4-week volunteer internship with the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, supporting the team in preparing oral history interviews for coding in NVivo and experimenting with the software by coding a few interviews herself. Here are her reflections on the experience. I have been volunteering with the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory’s Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP) since early January […]
Beginning in January 2022, the Collaboratory invited UVic undergraduates Faith Lapointe and Ellis Martiskainen to participate in a 4-week volunteer internship with the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, supporting the team in transcribing the oral history interviews in preparation for donation to The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives. We are pleased to share that Faith and Ellis are continuing their work with us on the project. Here are their reflections on the experience so far… If […]
WHAT IS INTERVIEW CODING? Coding is the process of organizing data in preparation for analysis. Through coding we identify common themes that allow us to compare and contrast experiences, perspectives, and descriptions from our data. Fundamentally, coding helps us figure out what is salient across stories and most important to the narrators. It’s a fairly straightforward process! Coding involves identifying, creating, and updating themes, as well as sorting data into those themes. Among the Pussy Palace oral histories, common themes can be as simple as descriptions of the carpet or more complex like individuals’ experience of care at […]
For the first time in-person since the Pussy Palace Oral History Project began in early 2021, the project team met to explore the grounds of Club Toronto (now Oasis Aqualounge), the former gay men’s bathhouse that once hosted the Pussy Palace — a series of exclusive bathhouse events for queer women and trans people. Alisha Stranges and Elio Colavito (Co-Oral Historians), Ayo Tsalithaba (Creative Producer), and I (Aisling Murphy, the PPOHP’s Social Media Assistant) met, coffees and cameras in hand, to explore the grounds of […]
Pussy Palace Oral History Project narrator, Renee Racine, was a security volunteer at the September 14, 2000, bathhouse — the night the event was raided by Toronto police. She later testified in court in defense of two fellow security volunteers charged with contravening the Liquor License Act in Her Majesty the Queen v. Hornick and Aitcheson (OCJ, 2001). Both on the stand in 2001 and on the record 20 years later, Racine recalls vividly a troubling encounter between police […]