Join us on Wed, Apr 20 @ 6PM – 7:30PM for a virtual event, featuring both community narrators and members of the Collaboratory’s Pussy Palace Oral History Project team!

Event Description: On September 15, 2000, five Toronto police raided the Pussy Palace, an exclusive bathhouse event for queer women and trans folk, laying several charges against the organizers, accusing them of violating liquor laws. There has never been an oral history project about this event, the last police raid of a queer bathhouse in Canadian history. The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, in collaboration with The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, has collected 36 interviews with bathhouse patrons, event organizers, and community activists. Our interviews address not only the raid, but also radical sex/gender cultures in turn of the 21st century Toronto. Our 6-member team has been working to animate and activate these interviews through research creation in the form of audio portraits, video shorts, and other methods. 

We envision this event as a curated ‘listening party’ designed to engage both the narrators themselves and others interested in queer and trans public history. The presentation will have these parts: a brief overview of the project; a showcase of several of our digital research creation experiments; a discussion of our creative processes; reflections from our featured narrators; and an open conversation with attendees about creative ways that researchers are collaborating with artists, project narrators, and others around engaging broader publics in queer and trans history.​

All are welcome. Registration is free and ASL Interpretation will be provided.

This event is part of the Sex Salon speaker series hosted by UofT’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.