By Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown
Ange Beever, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral Historical past Venture, LGBTQ Oral Historical past Digital Collaboratory. 2025.
“After they first got here in, I used to be pissed off that they’d crashed the social gathering. […] like these silly males tromping by means of this place. I’m identical to, ‘You seem like idiots. You’re silly. These are only a bunch of girls having a superb time bare.’ […T]his is what you wish to spend your assets on, actually?”
-Ange Beever, Pussy Palace Patron
In September 2000, Toronto police raided the Pussy Palace, a queer ladies and trans bathhouse occasion held in a transformed Victorian mansion simply east of downtown. The raid shortly turned a flashpoint in native LGBTQ+ historical past, sparking authorized challenges, protests, and renewed debates about policing, privateness, and queer house. Ange Beever’s frustration captures one thing important concerning the Pussy Palace—and about how this historical past must be informed.
The police raid mattered. However so did the social gathering it interrupted—and the worlds it briefly made potential. This venture begins from that pressure.
From 2021 to 2025, the College of Toronto’s LGBTQ Oral Historical past Digital Collaboratory, in partnership with The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, carried out the Pussy Palace Oral Historical past Venture (PPOHP). Led by Dr. Elspeth H. Brown, the venture traces the rise, texture, and afterlife of the Pussy Palace (1998–2014) by means of 36 oral historical past interviews with organizers, volunteers, patrons, and neighborhood advocates.
Whereas the September 2000 raid—the final main raid of a queer bathhouse in Canadian historical past—anchors the venture, the PPOHP insists that this historical past can’t be lowered to police violence alone. For many who organized and attended these occasions, the Pussy Palace was additionally a website of enjoyment, care, experimentation, and political risk—an try to construct one thing radically totally different inside a metropolis lengthy formed by police harassment of queer and marginalized communities.
The Pussy Palace in Context
{Photograph} of The Brunswick 4 (1974), courtesy of The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives. From left: Adrienne Rosen, Pat Murphy, Sue Wells, and Lamar Van Dyke. Copyright Aaron Devor.
Lengthy earlier than the Palace opened in 1998, queer and trans communities confronted persistent policing and harassment—from the Brunswick 4 arrests in 1974, to the homosexual males’s bathhouse raids of the Eighties, to ongoing focusing on of intercourse work and queer public house all through the Nineties. The Pussy Palace emerged in acutely aware defiance of this historical past, providing an area organized by and for queer ladies and trans those that unapologetically centered sexual freedom and collective care.
Constructing the Palace, nonetheless, was by no means easy. The Toronto Ladies’s Bathhouse Committee, which organized the occasions, wrestled with sensible and political challenges—securing venues, guaranteeing security, and negotiating inclusion. Oral histories doc efforts at trans and BIPOC inclusion alongside moments of pressure, studying, and unresolved battle. These accounts refuse a triumphalist narrative. As a substitute, they body inclusion as a steady, unfinished political apply—one which produced each solidarity and fracture.
The 2000 police raid marked a profound rupture. Performed beneath the pretext of imposing liquor legal guidelines, the raid concerned undercover officers coming into women-and-trans-only house and charging two volunteers. Narrators recall anger and shock, but in addition word that practices of care—check-ins, consent protocols, mutual assist—have been already embedded within the Palace and have become much more seen within the aftermath, because the neighborhood mobilized by means of protests, authorized motion, and collective refusal.
Inventive rendering of the Pussy Palace’s out of doors pool, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral Historical past Venture, LGBTQ Oral Historical past Digital Collaboratory. 2025.
At this level, the boundaries of typical historic documentation turn out to be unavoidable. How do you doc a historical past whose most consequential dimensions—pleasure, care, vulnerability, collective presence—have been designed to go away little hint? Telling the historical past of the Pussy Palace as something aside from a narrative of policing alone requires attending to types of reminiscence that exceed narrative and resist archival seize.
The Palace was an intensely sensorial house, outlined by sound, proximity, contact, motion, and ambiance, in addition to by practices of discretion which have left little visible or materials proof. By design, there are not any accessible pictures of what it felt wish to be inside (although there was, famously, a memento Polaroid boudoir—extra on that later), no footage of our bodies transferring by means of crowded rooms, and no data of the negotiated intimacies that structured the house.
Anticipating these archival absences, we experimented with methods of inviting narrators to return not solely to what occurred, however to the way it was felt within the physique. This method—which we later named somatic elicitation—handled sensation, have an effect on, and embodiment as types of historic data in their very own proper. Whereas developed as an interviewing apply, somatic elicitation turned each a methodological contribution to oral historical past and a conceptual basis for the venture’s public-facing work, shaping how interviews have been interpreted and translated into digital and inventive kinds able to holding pleasure, vulnerability, and embodied reminiscence.
This weblog collection returns to a few questions that emerged repeatedly throughout the interviews. First, how was the Pussy Palace constructed as a radical house—and the place did that venture pressure, fracture, or fail? Second, how do narrators keep in mind the raid not solely as police violence, but in addition as an assault on an area organized round care, consent, and collective security? And eventually, what does it imply to recollect queer historical past by means of the physique—by means of motion, sound, texture, and ambiance—and why did these recollections push this venture past scholarly writing and towards research-creation?
The posts that observe take up every of those questions in flip, drawing straight from narrators’ voices and from the inventive outputs that grew out of the interviews.
The best way to Interact with this Historical past
The arguments traced throughout this collection are grounded in a a lot bigger physique of fabric. The PPOHP is anchored by a devoted venture web site—the house of the venture—which homes the open-access oral historical past assortment, gathers our research-creation work, and connects customers with the sources and communities that formed the analysis. For readers who wish to spend time with these histories, that is the place the archive lives: a spot to linger, hear, and observe threads that exceed any single narrative.
For these searching for a deeper, narrative-driven engagement, the venture’s digital exhibit affords an immersive, multi-chapter expertise. Guests encounter sections on policing and queer resistance, feminist organizing, the raid and its aftermath, and the Palace’s evolving legacy. Digital patrons may also “step inside” the Palace by means of 9 illustrated rooms activated by narrator soundbites, foregrounding presence and ambiance over chronology.
Remembering the Pussy Palace means remembering not solely what was taken by the raid, however what was constructed regardless of the understanding that it may by no means be totally preserved. We hope you’ll be part of us on the journey.
Alisha Stranges is a public humanities scholar primarily based on the College of Toronto. She serves as Analysis Supervisor and Venture Oral Historian for the LGBTQ Oral Historical past Digital Collaboratory, the place her work bridges oral historical past, efficiency, and digital analysis creation.
Elspeth Brown is Professor of Historical past on the College of Toronto and Director of the LGBTQ Oral Historical past Digital Collaboratory. A scholar of queer and trans historical past, oral historical past, and archives, she is the writer of Work! A Queer Historical past of Modeling (Duke College Press).
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