Co-creating a “usable past” for LGBTQ+ people in the present.
Pussy Palace Oral History Project
231 Mutual St., former site of the Pussy Palace; Photograph by Alisha Stranges; Project logo designed by Ayo Tsalithaba
On September 15, 2000, five Toronto police raided the Pussy Palace,* an exclusive sex party and bathhouse event for queer women and trans people. Following reports from two undercover female police officers who were sent in to investigate the space, five male, plainclothes police officers entered the Palace and spent 90 minutes interrogating and surveilling upwards of 350 patrons who were in various states of undress. The police later charged two volunteer organizers with violating the Liquor License Act, resulting in a public trial.
The community responded with public protests and fundraising initiatives in support of those facing charges. In 2002, Justice Peter Hryn dismissed all charges, agreeing that the raid had violated the patrons’ constitutional rights. Subsequently, a human rights complaint and class-action lawsuit against the police was settled for $350,000. Funds were allocated to legal fees and select charitable initiatives.
There has never been an oral history project about this event, the last police raid of a queer bathhouse in Canadian history. In a SSHRC-funded collaboration with The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory had collected 36 interviews with community members who can speak directly to the history of the Palace events, the raid, and its emotional, legal, and political aftermath.
This research enables us to historicize the event within the longer history of Toronto police hostility towards non-normative sexuality, exemplified by the gay male-focused bathhouse raids of 1975-1984. Our interviews address not only the raid, but also queer joy and radical sex/gender cultures in turn-of-the-21st-century Toronto.
In 2022, we donated the oral histories to The ArQuives. Of our 36 narrators, 34 have agreed to have their interviews available online. To screen the oral history interview collection and explore a comprehensive showcase of our creative and scholarly research outcomes, visit our project website.
*The Pussy Palace was later renamed the Pleasure Palace to acknowledge the diversity of bodies and gender identities that made use of this space.
OUR TEAM
FOR THE COLLABORATORY
Elspeth Brown, Principal Investigator; Alisha Stranges, Project Manager & Co-Oral Historian; Elio Colavito, Co-Oral Historian; Emily Mastragostino, Interview Coder; Ayo Tsalithaba, Creative Producer; Chase Thomson, Ashley Gold, Katherine Zheng, Aisling Murphy, Andy Huynh, Social Media Managers
FOR THE ARQUIVES
Raegan Swanson, Executive Director; Lucie Handley-Girard, Archivist; Jordan Saroya, Administrative Assistant
PHASE 1: INTERVIEWING
JAN-AUG 2021
We began the interviewing process in mid-February of 2021 and have since collected 36 interviews with a variety of narrators: event organizers, bathhouse security volunteers and service providers, patrons, journalists, scholars, and community activists.
EARLY FINDINGS
As a collective, narrators remember the Pussy Palace as an electric, liberating, and carefully curated, subversive space where lesbians, queer women, and trans folk could explore sexuality in ways often reserved for cisgender gay men. Broadly speaking, interviewees have shared how the space influenced their relationships with sex, community, and the policing of transgressive sexualities and gender identities.
For many patrons, the Pussy Palace offered a rare opportunity to dance, to flirt, to feel sexy, to hook up, to swim naked outside in downtown Toronto, to claim physical and figurative space, and to investigate the limits of personal pleasure and shared desire without hesitation or apology. Interestingly, narrators remember the Pussy Palace as both a promise of freedom and a confrontation with state interruption. In addition, our questions have invited narrators to reflect on the impact that the Pussy Palace has left on their senses, aesthetic expression, emotional life, and personal politics, both at the time of the raid and in retrospect.
Check out some of the unexpected highlights from phase one of the project.
THE CARPET
Did you know that the Club Toronto bathhouse had carpeted floors? Listen to what a few patrons of the Pussy Palace have to say about the now infamous carpet!
NANCY’S OUTFIT
Did you know that latex dresses were perfect for a night at The Pussy Palace? Listen to Nancy Irwin (aka “Naughty Nancy”) describe her ideal bathhouse attire.
PHASE 2: ARCHIVING + CODING
MAY 2021-JUN 2022
In early spring of 2021, we began archiving our oral histories in preparation for donation to The ArQuives. This process involved drafting transcripts and interview summaries, seeking consent and approval from narrators on the content of their donations, generating closed captions for the interview access copies, and logging metadata for all files. A year later, in June 2022, we finally celebrated the transfer of the collection to The ArQuives.
INTERVIEW CODING
In May 2021, we began synchronous interview coding — a novel process for oral history research — using NVivo to code both transcripts and video footage simultaneously, in preparation for data analysis.
Our resident interview coder, Emily Mastragostino, identifies the two main goals of our coding process: “The first is to expand the topics coded within the realm of oral histories. The second is to use NVivo to code a relatively large data set, using transcripts with synced audio and video of the interviews. This is a big shift in the history of coding oral histories, which tends to be more limited in themes and restricted in topics. It’s also a shift in tools, moving from scissors and post-it notes to NVivo.
As with traditional coding, our primary data are the transcripts, but with these transcripts the audio and video from the interviews are synchronized and simultaneously coded with the transcripts to allow users to re-enter the interview while exploring the data. With that, each instance of coded text is just two clicks away from hearing and seeing the narrator speak it. The availability and ease of access to these videos is essential to protecting the integrity of the narrator’s contributions and creating an immersive experience.”
After combing through 36 interviews, 45 hours of footage, 690 pages of transcripts, and 64 themes over 14 months of work, Emily completed interview coding in June 2022.
Check out the 50 most-used words across interviews, courtesy of NVivo’s data visualization features.
PHASE 3: RESEARCH OUTCOMES
AUG 2021-PRESENT
Since completing interviewing and archiving, we’ve been pursuing a number of research outcomes, some scholarly (e.g. conference presentations, collaborative writing, and publication) and some public-facing. A desire to connect broader publics with this rich archive of oral testimony inspired us to experiment with digital research creation in the form of audio portraits, animated video shorts, and other new media methods.
Our capstone project (currently in development) is an immersive, digital exhibit, detailing the evolution of the Palace events, the raid, and the early histories that informed this moment of radical sexual culture. The exhibit’s focal point invites users to visit 9 digitally illustrated rooms within the Palace where clickable objects spark relevant interview soundbites, allowing users to engage with first-person accounts of the joys and tensions of patronizing these events. Once complete, the exhibit will live online, as a publicly accessible website. Coming soon to a web browser near you. Stay tuned!
Have a look at some of the digital research creation we’ve produced.