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 the Palace and draw inspiration for our work. We captured video footage for our Audiogram series, studied textures, listened to the traffic, and tried, unsuccessfully, to tune out the nearby sounds of construction. Together, we noted how downtown the building is — right in the middle of everything, a bustling intersection just steps away! — and began our search.
Something that struck me was the diversity of visual textures on the building itself — the worn ruggedness of the brick, the pride flags just beyond the wrought-iron gate, the wood paneling and shingles. In 2021, this is a building with decades of stories to tell. The Pussy Palace Oral History Project uncovers but a sliver of that history — a layered, vast sliver of identity and calamity — but visiting the Palace reminded me just how much else must have occurred here beyond the scope of this project.
For the patrons of the Pussy Palace, this 4-story Victorian home held space for a generation of identities, pleasures, and radical sexual culture — getting to visit as a team and reflect in-person was such a treat.