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 in the crowd, Woodward and Beever shook off any concern they may have had; after all, they didn’t have any reason to be afraid of police. At 12:45 a.m., five plainclothes police officers raided the event, inspecting every crevice of the old Victorian home, floor by floor. Attempting to distract Beever from her daring attempt to confront the officers, Woodward coaxed Beever into Club Toronto’s sling room. After some time taking advantage of the room, there was a heavy knock on the door. Several officers quarantined the couple in the room; Woodward, seated in the sling, felt a mixture of fear and defiance, sure that she was justified in doing exactly what she was doing. Beever confronted the officers at the door, teasing them about their confusion with the sex sling. “You’ve never seen one before,” mused Beever. “Have you never looked at Madonna’s sex book? There’s tons of those pictures in there.” She proceeded to sing “Music” by Madonna to diffuse the situation. Unable to confirm Woodward and Beever as the presumed “suspects” of their dubious search, the police left the couple in the room and, eventually, the Pussy Palace altogether (1). 

In the weeks following the raid, police charged two volunteer organizers with allegedly violating the Special Occasions Permit that prohibited them from selling alcohol after 1:00 a.m. Pussy Palace patrons and the broader LGBTQ+ community rallied behind the pair by raising legal fees and attending the court proceedings for Her Majesty the Queen v. Hornick and Aitcheson in October of 2001. Woodward and Beever, independent artists and small-business owners with control of their schedules, showed support by attending each day of the trial. In her oral history interview for the Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP) in 2021, Woodward recalled feeling enraged after hearing police officers lie on the stand:

I had grown up thinking that the police were on my side and they were a place to turn when I needed help, and it was that moment that I realized…that they may also do harm, and I’m really fortunate that I was in my late twenties before I felt that knowledge, that I was part of a community that I could not absolutely count on the police helping me instead of harming me. (2)

Woodward is not alone. Many of our narrators expressed this sobering realization. Our narrator pool, which consisted of a mostly white, queer demographic, repeated this dissonance between the ways they were raised to think and their adult understandings of the function of policing. The rhetoric surrounding their growing understandings of policing has changed markedly over the 21 years since the Pussy Palace bathhouse raid, reconstructing the ways that former patrons and the broader LGBTQ+ community make meaning of the police action. The narrators’ critiques of police reveal two underlying themes: one that underscores the historic police violence in (white) queer community in Toronto, and one that incorporates anti-racist rhetoric and reflections on white privilege to make sense of the Pussy Palace bathhouse raid in 2000. The latter is my focus, given the mainstream prevalence of the police and prison abolition movements in public discourse (and queer community) since the summer of 2020.

I cannot be sure when, exactly, PPOHP narrators came to connect policing and race. The literature suggests that Pussy Palace patrons immediately problematized the bathhouse raid as a function of historic police violence against the LGBTQ+ community in Toronto. In particular, patrons’ understandings of the historic police violence in their communities appear to revolve around the experiences of (primarily white) gay men. For example, Nancy Irwin, a white, rebel femme and activist, has been thinking about policing and the queer community since (at least) 2000. Her 2000 Siren article, “Police Raid Women’s Bathhouse Party,” written in the immediate aftermath of the raid, locates the Pussy Palace bathhouse raid in the tradition of police violence against gay men’s bathhouses since 1981, calling attention to the surge in policing of gay bathhouses since June of 1999 (3). Subsequently, Irwin’s 2007 article for Xtra, “Cherry Beach’s Conflicted History,” chronicles the police brutality perpetrated by Toronto Police against gay and lesbian people at Cherry Beach in Toronto (4). These articles, while critical of policing, refer exclusively to the significance of policing in LGBTQ+ communities; race and historic connections of policing to white supremacy are not yet analytics for Irwin.

In the legal case that followed the 2000 Pussy Palace bathhouse raid, police actions were further problematized by the mobilization of plainclothes male officers in a “women-only” setting. While this was likely considered the most effective legal strategy, and was therefore foregrounded to win the case, it gestures towards the two original ways that patrons and the broader LGBTQ+ community made meaning of the Pussy Palace bathhouse raid: through the centering of gendered and queer police violence. Nowhere in the initial literature review, from post-raid to 2016, do authors connect race and policing to understand police violence at the Pussy Palace.

The PPOHP interviews were recorded within a year and a half of the 2020 George Floyd and Breonna Taylor police murders that prompted an uptick in Black Lives Matter protesting and recognition. In addition to protesting and media coverage, white allies were confronted by calls to educate themselves about the systems of power that perpetuate racism. All of a sudden, it seemed like every white queer was reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility or Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Fresh in the public consciousness and the minds of PPOHP narrators, these discourses emerged frequently in our interviews, as former patrons attempted to make sense of the Pussy Palace bathhouse raid. In this excerpt from Irwin’s interview, we hear an undeniable shift towards an analytic of race and the abolition of policing (5).

Irwin’s account of the raid, steeped in a larger narrative about anti-queer policing in Toronto, aligns with her writing in the 2000s. However, Irwin’s foregrounding of race is new to the way that she has publicly made meaning of the Pussy Palace bathhouse raid and historic police violence in LGBTQ+ communities. It is only in the last decade or so that most white queers have started to frame their critique of police around race. Beginning with police negligence around the missing and murdered, majority Brown, men in Toronto’s gay village in the 2010s, anti-policing rhetoric in white queer community expanded to incorporate white supremacy. These ideas proliferated in white queer circles through the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, exacerbated by the growing popularity of the movement in the 2020s.

Other narrators point more subtly than Irwin to developments in white critique of police, offering reflections on the Pussy Palace bathhouse raid that incorporate understandings of racial privilege. One narrator recalled her initial awareness of police in the Pussy Palace, saying:

I was confused. I didn’t understand why police were there. I haven’t personally had bad encounters with police, I’ve been very privileged, but I knew lots of people who had, but I think that naïve privilege… Like, I was standing there going, “Did someone get hurt? Maybe they called an ambulance.” I was coming up with excuses in my head of why the police were there because I didn’t understand. It didn’t click until the next day for me. I kept thinking, “We’re not doing anything illegal.” Like, why would they be here? I just couldn’t figure it out. And people, some people are like, “fucking cops” and all this stuff. And we’re talking and, in my mind, I was making excuses for them. There must be a reason. Something must have happened. We don’t know. I’m really embarrassed. I would never think those things now. I have a much more critical view of police and the history of policing in the community. But at the time, I didn’t have as much perspective. (6)

Another narrator, T’Hayla Ferguson, also spoke about white privilege in a police interaction, saying:

Up until the moment that the cops arrived, it was a rocking, fabulous night. The cops arrived, and there’s a bit of a deflation, but it also galvanized people because there’s always people, even in an aware group, who don’t understand the privilege they hold or the challenges other people have. (7)

For Ferguson, the galvanization of some patrons in the face of police interaction as a symptom of an unnamed privilege, while positioning the LGBTQ+ community as an otherwise “aware group” due to experiences of historic police violence, locates the source of their privilege in their whiteness. Thinking back to Beever’s defiant stand against police in the sling room, it becomes clear that her ability to mock and engage casually with police was a result of her white privilege. Ferguson’s perspective also marks a shift in white queer conceptions of the effects of policing on white queers; one that acknowledges the privilege maintained in any white person’s interaction with police, regardless of sexual orientation.

As an interviewer, I was struck by these sentiments. Would these same narrators articulate their realizations about race, white privilege, and the policing of queer community if we had conducted these interviews a decade earlier? The proliferation of anti-racist education in mainstream culture has added nuance to the ways that white queers speak about the history of police violence in queer communities. This nuance takes the form of critical reflections on whiteness and white privilege in personal accounts of anti-queer policing, which have changed the ways that white queers make meaning of the Pussy Palace bathhouse raid. Hindsight is 20/20.

Works Cited

1. Ange Beever interview by Alisha Stranges and Elio Colavito for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, May 11, 2021, Zoom video recording, The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, Toronto ON.
2. Robin Woodward interview by Alisha Stranges and Elio Colavito for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, May 13, 2021, Zoom video recording, The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, Toronto ON.
3. Nancy Irwin. “Police Raid Women’s Bathhouse Party,” Siren 15, no. 4: (2000).
4. Nancy Irwin. “Cherry Beach’s Conflicted History,” Xtra: (2007).
5. Nancy Irwin interview by Alisha Stranges and Elio Colavito for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, April 29, 2021, Zoom video recording, The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, Toronto ON.
6. Anonymous interview by Alisha Stranges and Elio Colavito for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, June 2, 2021, Zoom video recording, The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, Toronto ON.
7. T’Hayla Ferguson interview by Alisha Stranges and Elio Colavito for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, June 23, 2021, Zoom video recording, The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, Toronto ON.

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.