Dalla Lana School of Public Health

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Presented by the Centre for Sexual and Gender Minority Health Research and the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.

Abstract:

On September 15, 2000, five Toronto police raided the Pussy Palace, an exclusive sex party and bathhouse event for 350 queer women and trans people. The police charged two security volunteers with violating liquor laws, resulting in a public trial. There has never been an oral history project about this event, the last major police raid of a queer bathhouse in Canadian history. The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory has collected 36 interviews with bathhouse patrons, event organizers, and community activists. Interviews address not only the raid but also queer joy and radical sex/gender cultures in turn-of-the-21st-century Toronto. This research enables us to historicize these events within the longer history of Toronto police hostility towards non-normative sexuality, exemplified by the gay male-focused bathhouse raids of 1975-1984 (Warner, 2002; Kinsman and Gentile, 2010; Hooper, 2016).

In this presentation, we will situate the origins of the Pussy Palace in relationship to the organizers’ commitment to HIV-prevention, safer sex, and healthy sexual communication. We will also showcase our work in digital research creation to reach broader audiences with our public history research.

Speaker Bios:

Elspeth H. Brown is Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Associate Vice-Principal, Research at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her research focuses on modern queer and trans history; the history and theory of photography; and the history of US capitalism. She is the author of Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke University, 2019); co-editor of “Queering Photography,” a special issue of Photography and Culture (2014); and Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014), among other books. Recent articles include “Trans Oral History as Trans Care” (with Myrl Beam); “Archival Activism, Symbolic Annihilation, and the LGBTQ+ Community Archive” (Archivaria 2020); and “It’s Raining Men: Physique Photography and Racial Capitalism,” in Brian Wallis, Tina Campt, Marianne Hirsch, and Gil Pasternak, eds., Imagining Everyday Life (Steidl, 2020). She has published in GLQ, TSQ; Gender and History; American Quarterly; Radical History Review; Photography and Culture; Feminist Studies; Aperture; No More Potlucks, and others). She is the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a multi-year, public and digital humanities research initiative focusing on gay, queer, and trans life stories, using new methodologies in digital history, collaborative research, and archival practice. At the University of Toronto, she is also to Faculty Lead for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative, a three-year Institutional Strategic Initiative. She is an active volunteer and former President of the Board for The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, the world’s largest and oldest queer community archive.

Alisha Stranges is a queer, community-based, public humanities scholar and multi-modal artist. In January 2021, she joined the Collaboratory as the Project Oral Historian for the Pussy Palace Oral History Project. Currently, she also serves as the Collaboratory’s Research Manager, supporting Director Elspeth Brown in the planning, development, and execution of concurrent projects. Stranges holds an MA in Women & Gender Studies from the University of Toronto, with a collaborative specialization in Sexual Diversity Studies. Before entering the academy, Stranges received a Diploma in Theatre Performance from Humber College (2006) and spent a decade devising original plays within Toronto’s queer, independent theatre community. From 2010 to 2015, she returned annually to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre as a teaching-artist and co-facilitator for PrideCab, an intensive training program in collective creation and performance for queer, trans, and gender variant youth. In 2019, she launched the Qu(e)erying Religion anti-Archive Project, which blends elements of oral history with the art of whiteboard animation to document 10+ years of supportive programming for life-giving, queer spirituality at the University of Toronto.