All posts filed under: Traversing Temporalities

When Memory Gets Wiggy

May 13, 2022
by Elio Colavito
Pussy Palace Project / Traversing Temporalities

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 […]

How to Find Self-Love + Community While Getting a Lap Dance: BIPOC Adventures in Queer and Trans Bathhouse Organizing

April 29, 2022
by Deb Singh
Traversing Temporalities

Love is such a powerful force. It’s there for everyone to embrace-that kind of unconditional love for all of humankind. That is the kind of love that impels people to go into the community and try to change conditions for others, to take risks for what they believe in. – Coretta Scott King I want to talk about love. And bathhouses You could say, I fell in love at the bathhouse, which some might consider […]

Gender-Based Violence: Testimonies from Trans* Athletes in North America

April 15, 2022
by Raiya Taha-Thomure
Traversing Temporalities

In the biophysical research community, trans* bodies have existed to be prodded and poked at, dissected and disposed of. In the sports world, an identity prefixed by “trans” is to be removed at all costs. In the midst of these violations, I feel a need to stop and ask, where is empathy when it comes to the treatment of trans* athletes? With the increase in both anti-trans* athletic policies as well as anti-trans* sentiment in sport […]

A Piece of a Trans Guy

April 1, 2022
by Elio Colavito
Pussy Palace Project / Traversing Temporalities

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 […]

A History on College Street: Learning from Oral History in Enunciating Latina and Trans Identities

March 18, 2022
by Sam Sanchinel
Traversing Temporalities

No te encierres, sal, habla, haz experiencias con la gente, ayuda a la gente que va llegando. El punto principal es ayudar a otros que vienen, para aquellos que no tienen a nadie . . . [Don’t be closed in, go out, talk, make experiences with people, help people that are arriving. The main point is helping others that come, for those who have no one . . .]  – Ena Sanchinel (qtd in Sanchinel, […]

Hindsight is 2020

March 4, 2022
by Elio Colavito
Pussy Palace Project / Traversing Temporalities

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 […]