In The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, Alessandro Portelli opens with, well, the death of Luigi Trastulli, a young steelworker who was allegedly killed by police during a public protest in Terni, Italy. As Portelli guides the reader through the inconsistencies riddled throughout oral histories that recount Trastulli’s death, he argues that oral histories “are not always fully reliable in point of fact. Rather than being a weakness, this is however, their strength: errors, inventions, and myths lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings” (2). It doesn’t matter if narrators inconsistently remember the day Trastulli was killed, where he was killed, or who killed him; what matters more is how the interviews illuminate “the ground upon which collective memory and imagination built a duster of tales, symbols, legends, and imaginary reconstructions . . . They allow us to recognize the interests of the tellers, and the dreams and desires beneath them” (Portelli 1-2). While conducting interviews for the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, we, like Portelli, were forced to grapple with the “errors, inventions, and myths” that surfaced among narrator accounts of the “Night of 2000 Pussies” — the fourth installment of the Pussy Palace, a queer women and trans bathhouse event that was raided by Toronto police in September of 2000.
Across our 36 interviews, only one narrator recalls seeing the plainclothes police officers in wigs. Patron and volunteer-body artist Terri Roberton was painting watermelons on another patron’s breasts when she felt someone standing close to her:
When I looked over, I saw a tangled mess of blonde wig, with bangs and a guy inside. A man. Like, cisgendered, het guy; not anybody who’s supposed to be there . . . “Why is this police officer in a uniform wearing a blonde wig?” That makes no sense . . . Just the stupid expression on that guy’s face. It was such a misfit, a mismatch of what was actually happening. [. . . T]here was no compassion. There was no empathy about . . . what they were part of, no recognition. I think I even remember there was no smile. It was blank affect, like zero. Just this pasty face under this fringe wig. It was very, very odd. (Roberton)
Odd indeed! When we heard this, we too were perplexed. Memory is wiggy, isn’t it? How could Roberton be the only person to recall an officer in a wig? Our field notes from Roberton’s interview document our shared doubt in the validity of this memory. Elio writes:
This seems like something that would have come up in another interview or in the literature, since it’s such a mockery of the event and the community. [. . .] I have a feeling we won’t be able to corroborate this one.
Alisha echoes Elio, insisting:
This can’t be true, and yet, [Roberton] remembers it so clearly.
In the days following, I (Elio) thought of Portelli and Trastulli. I didn’t care if Roberton’s tale was true, and turned instead to a new question: what does Roberton’s memory mean?
The Pussy Palace bathhouse raid prompted public outrage within Toronto’s queer community. In an October 2000 article for Siren magazine, Pussy Palace patron (and Roberton’s friend) Nancy Irwin summarizes the overarching critique of the police action that was circulating among her peers in the immediate aftermath of the raid. Simply put:
No one could figure out why a team of male police officers were sent to investigate an all-women’s bathhouse event — unless it was just for kicks. The term harassment comes quickly to mind. (Irwin 13)
This sentiment was echoed by attorney Frank Addario in defense of the two security volunteers tried for alleged violation of the Liquor License Act in Her Majesty the Queen v. Hornick and Aitcheson (OCJ, 2001). Specifically, Addario argued that the Toronto Police Service inappropriately assigned male officers to raid the women’s bathhouse event, likening the raid to an illegal strip search, unjustly conducted by men. Two decades later, this conceptualization of the police raid as an act of gendered violence remains firmly intact. That is, when asked to recall interactions with the police while the raid was in progress, many patrons describe the male officers as creepy oglers, using their police powers as their ticket to a self-made, nonconsensual peep show.
With these three points of reference in mind — Irwin’s article, Addario’s legal argument, and our collected oral histories — I (Elio) think it’s generative to view Roberton’s memory of the wig-clad officer as a culminating symbol in the collective meaning-making process for those impacted by the raid. Bound up in the figure of this cis-het man — unable to comprehend a sexual space for women and trans people that excluded cis-het men, supposedly wearing a wig to signal his disrespect for queer women and the safe space they created — lies the shared critique among many Palace-goers that the raid was nothing more than gendered police harassment. Roberton’s memory, real or invented, upholds the pervasive belief that the express purpose of the male officers who participated was to mock this exploratory sexual space.
It’s unlikely that the officer was wearing a wig. After all, Roberton is the only narrator who can recall this detail. However, this inconsistency is more telling than some of the dozens of details that we verified across several interviews. It serves as a representation of the community’s understanding of what the Pussy Palace bathhouse raid was all about.
Whereas Elio turns to Portelli and oral history theory, I (Alisha) turn to Georgis, queer theory, and psychoanalysis to understand Roberton’s anomalous account. In The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East, Dina Georgis draws attention to the psychic investments we make in our stories in order to survive and to make sense of histories of pain, injury, and trauma. For Georgis, stories always have a complicated relationship to “truth.” That is, stories have their own truth, which is not a factual truth. Rather, our stories relay the affective or emotional truths that otherwise might be left out of “factual” accounts of history.
However unlikely it may be that Roberton encountered a wig-clad officer at the bathhouse, her confident assertion in what she saw and, perhaps more importantly, how she felt as she peered into that compassionless, pasty white face beneath a tangled, blonde fringe, suggests that she was, as Georgis might argue, in search of a “better” story. We live by our stories and there is always an alternate version of events that enables us to survive better. As Roberton recounts her seemingly impossible rendezvous, her story leads us “through and beyond facts” (Portelli 2) and towards the teller’s “emotional and psychic landscape” (Georgis xi), which communicates a distinctly queer affect.
Historically, queer has characterized a collection of “impossible” sexual practices, desires, and orientations that society deems excessive, unintelligible, and outside social sanction. But, in redeploying “queer” as a modifier of a particular kind of affect, we can uncover in Roberton’s oral testimony the effort to translate an “impossible” knowledge to the listener. For Georgis, queer affect attends to the unnameable and embraces messier, more primal modes of communication. In Georgis’ view, queer affect enters a story in an attempt to unsettle us and defamiliarize expected scripts. As we have hopefully, by now, made clear, Roberton’s encounter with police at the bathhouse unsettled us, as it deviated so outrageously from the expected script that we had become accustomed to hearing. As interviewers, the image of the wigged police officer sits at the edge of intelligibility, at the edge of what we know, or what we can tolerate knowing. In such cases, Georgis makes a plea for a certain tolerance of ambivalence, a tolerance for that which doesn’t quite fit. In psychoanalytic theory, the capacity to tolerate ambivalence is a difficult psychic posture to inhabit, as it requires that you remain open to the potential disruptiveness of encounters with that which you cannot quite figure out.
As Roberton herself admits, the presence of the blonde-wigged police officer “makes no sense,” and we would have to agree. But this version of events does make legible the unique way in which Roberton’s psyche has attempted to comprehend the incomprehensible reality that police had invaded the Palace — a psychic process, particular to Roberton, that otherwise goes untold in the factual accounts of this historic event.
Works Cited
1. Alessandro Portelli. The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. SUNY, 1991.
2. Terri Roberton interview by Alisha Stranges and Elio Colavito for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, April 28, 2021, Zoom video recording, The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, Toronto ON.
3. — interview by Alisha Stranges and Elio Colavito for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, April 28, 2021, Interviewer Field Notes, The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, Toronto ON.
4. Nancy Irwin. “Police Raid Women’s Bathhouse Party,” Siren 15, no. 4: (2000).
5. Her Majesty the Queen v. Hornick and Aitcheson [2001] Ontario Court of Justice.
6. Dina Georgis. The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East. SUNY, 2014.
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.
Alisha Stranges is a queer, community-based, public humanities scholar, theatre creator, and performer. She holds an MA in Women & Gender Studies + Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto. At present, she serves as the Collaboratory’s Research Manager, and as the Project Manager and Co-Oral Historian for the Pussy Palace Oral History Project.