Beginning in January 2022, the Collaboratory invited UVic undergraduates Faith Lapointe and Ellis Martiskainen to participate in a 4-week volunteer internship with the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, supporting the team in transcribing the oral history interviews in preparation for donation to The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives. We are pleased to share that Faith and Ellis are continuing their work with us on the project. Here are their reflections on the experience so far…

If we hadn’t been introduced to the Pussy Palace Oral History Project through a university course, we would have been unlikely to ever hear about the Pussy Palace bathhouse events and the police raid of the September 2000 event. The raid and the public trial received wide media attention in the early 2000s. But 20 years later, Gen Z is left in the dark, never seeing media content that would educate a new generation of queers about the events of the Pussy Palace. This is partly due to the passage of time. But more importantly, the presence of homophobia and misogyny in Canadian culture impacts which stories we hear and which ones we don’t. Now that we’ve heard people’s first-hand accounts of that night, we better understand the history of queer women and trans folk in Canada. This will inform both the way we approach our university studies and how we navigate our lives.   

During our internship, we each transcribed an interview, Faith with a key Palace organizer and Ellis with one of the security volunteers who was later charged for allegedly violating the Liquor Licence Act. Ellis was surprised to see that even though nothing illegal took place at the 2000 Pussy Palace event, the police had the audacity to search the whole space, invading the patrons’ privacy. He couldn’t believe how they interrogated the organizers, as if the police were just searching for something to blame the organizers for. Similarly, Faith was also shocked by the violating actions of the police. But also, she was interested and delighted to hear about the process, motives, and intentions behind running the Pussy Palace events. Of course, not everything was perfect, but the conversations regarding creating safe spaces for queer women and trans folks were illuminating.  

After spending some time handling direct accounts of the patrons and volunteers of the Pussy Palace bathhouse, we’ve learned more about how the police greatly violated the community’s trust. The police didn’t just cross a boundary that night, they demolished it entirely. The police didn’t understand the enormity of what they did. They couldn’t. As white, straight, cisgender men in a position of power, these officers were used to the world being organized around their comfort, their rights, their authority, their safety, and their pleasure. But for queer people, and in this case, queer ciswomen and trans folks in particular, the Pussy Palace bathhouse events were one of the very few places where they could be themselves. The police raid abruptly altered the atmosphere of the event, as the police instilled feelings of distress and unsettlement in the patrons. For some, these feelings lingered for years. The impact of the raid spread out into the rest of the queer community, both traumatizing and galvanizing. People rallied around the loss of an opportunity to embrace their sexuality and feel connected with their community.  

Two organizers of the Pussy Palace event, Chanelle Gallant and Loralee Gillis (2001), expressed this sentiment after the raid, noting how “[Queer women] have become an object for increased legal and moral regulation. The police raid on the Pussy Palace adds another layer to how [they] think of [themselves] as sexual beings – [their] public expressions of sexual desire have been witnessed, monitored, and documented by the state. The fantasy of sexual freedom that prevailed at other events was shattered [by the police presence]” (pp. 153-154). In addition to having a general safe space for queer people, particularly queer ciswomen and trans folks, the Pussy Palace events were also intended to be a space for these people to have free expression of sexuality. This raid fueled the idea that free sexual expression could exist only as a fantasy, and overall was violating on multiple levels. There is so much depth to the harm done by the police during the raid, and it is important to recognize the ways in which harm was done, and how it was and is impacted by the social climate in which we live, so that we can collectively work to create a safer environment for people to exist.  

Learning about what happened the night of the raid felt like a weird sense of déjà vu. As people who have not personally been victims of police violence or harassment, it’s easy to feel a sort of distance towards police violence and harassment, despite it being a threatening reality in many people’s lives. But hearing the stories of the raid, with the knowledge that this happened in Canada – which is often portrayed as a safe haven for queer people and minorities – closed some of that distance we previously felt. The interviews from this project were conducted only last year; however, this event did not feel like a thing of the past. We could see how it is still affecting people today. It felt very recent.  But it also felt very old. The details of the police action are horrible, but not surprising. As seen with other raided queer events, the police infringed on queer space and passed it off as checking liquor licences. The lack of accountability and the toxic social climate allowed and encouraged the police to continue in their predatory actions. 

Palace patrons, organizers, and allies protested against the police’s actions, and were able to win in court and in public opinion. But we could see something just like the Pussy Palace raid happening now, two decades later. A lot of deep-rooted biases still exist; organizations are slower to change than individual people. Homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny are still present and insidious.  

Before too much time passes and the generations who experienced it first-hand fade away, it is vital to capture the history of how police and other government institutions treated queer people. We cannot rely on large social institutions to educate us about their own mistakes. People’s personal stories are rich with details that round out the facts you can find in a news article or on Wikipedia. Listening to oral histories creates empathy, and this empathy is crucial. People might know about the disadvantages that the LGBTQ community faces. But unless the public actually cares about queer people and wants them to be safer, healthier, and happier, no progress will be made towards social equity. 

References

Gallant, C. & Gillis, L. (2001). Pussies bite back: The story of the women’s bathhouse raid. torquere: Journal of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Studies Association. 3, 152-167.