Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown
Leanne Powers, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral History Project, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. 2025.
“Suddenly, I heard nothing outside, and that was when the police were walking through that area. I heard a knock at the door, and I put myself in front of the person who was in the temple with me and stood up to just [maintain] as much control of the situation as I could.”
—Leanne Powers, Temple Priestess
Around 12:45 a.m. on September 15, 2000, five plainclothes male police officers entered the Pussy Palace under the pretense of a liquor licence inspection. They walked through the pool and sauna. They knocked on closed doors. They recorded names and addresses.
For many patrons, the violation was immediate and visceral. But to understand why the raid felt so profound, we have to understand what the police were interrupting.
The Pussy Palace was not simply a party. It was a space deliberately structured around consent, orientation, and collective care. Volunteers greeted newcomers and explained etiquette. Security circulated not to police pleasure but to support it.
On the fourth floor, a small attic room housed two of the Palace’s most distinctive interventions. The Temple—overseen by designated Temple Priestess Leanne Powers—offered grounding rituals, spiritual care, and a quiet place to recalibrate. Brief one-on-one check-ins were available to anyone feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or simply in need of pause. In a bathhouse organized around experimentation and exposure, the Temple formalized something rare: the recognition that desire and vulnerability travel together.
In the same space, artist Chloë Brushwood Rose’s Polaroid photo booth allowed patrons to document themselves on their own terms. Unlike digital images, Polaroids could not be copied or circulated; what was captured remained in the hands of those photographed. In a moment when queer sexual cultures were routinely surveilled and sensationalized, the booth offered a form of controlled visibility—pleasure could be seen without being seized.
The raid was not just an act of policing. It was an intrusion into a carefully constructed experiment in queer safety.
The Invasion
Watch “Raid on the Palace: Narrators Reflect”
“Raid on the Palace: Narrator’s Reflect.” Illustrated, animated, and edited by Ayo Tsalithaba. Produced by LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown). 2022.
Patrons recall male officers moving through semi-dressed bodies, staring, questioning, demanding identification. The choice to send men into a women-and-trans-only erotic space was not incidental. It transformed what police described as routine inspection into something closer to a strip search.
Media coverage—unexpectedly sympathetic—focused heavily on this gendered violation. Mainstream editorials condemned the presence of male officers.[i] Queer press went further, refusing to downplay the Palace’s eroticism even while denouncing the raid.
But narrators also remember something else: how quickly care practices activated.
Care as Immediate Resistance
Temple Priestess, Leanne Powers, had spent the evening helping patrons orient themselves to the night—smudging the room, calling the directions, offering brief rituals of grounding and affirmation. Her role was not decorative. She functioned as both spiritual anchor and emotional first responder.
Earlier in the evening, she recalls an interaction with a patron who, she later suspected, was one of two undercover female officers sent in ahead of the raid. The patron twice attempted to entrap her by asking whether she accepted money for her services. She did not. When the police returned in force, Powers heard footsteps in the corridor. She positioned herself between the patron she was with and the door.
This gesture—simple, embodied—captures something essential. Care at the Palace was not abstract. It was practiced in real time.
Powers shielded her client, redirected her to an alternate exit, then moved through the building checking on others who might be triggered or overwhelmed. She later organized a circle upstairs so people could process what had happened.
Security volunteers formed protective barriers. Organizers had already distributed “know your rights” flyers at the door in case of a raid. A reporter had been invited in anticipation of police action. Law professor Brenda Cossman identified herself during the raid to monitor officer conduct.
These actions were not improvised heroics. They were extensions of the Palace’s existing care infrastructure. The police did not encounter chaos. They encountered a community practiced in looking after itself.
Watch “Care at the Palace: Narrators Reflect”
“Care at the Palace: Narrators Reflect.” Illustrated, animated, and edited by Ayo Tsalithaba. Produced by LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown). 2022.
From Violation to Mobilization
Two weeks later, security volunteers JP Hornick and R. Atkins—both signatories on the event’s Special Occasion Permit—were charged with six counts each (all bogus) of violating the Liquor Licence Act. What followed was not retreat but mobilization.
Watch “Give Til It Hurts”
“Give Til It Hurts.” Narrated by Chanelle Gallant, Hanlon Uafás-Álainn, Janet Rowe, Robin Woodward, Olivia Chow, and Pam Johnson. Edited by Alisha Stranges. Illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba. Produced by LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown). The History of the Pussy Palace: A Digital Exhibit. 2024.
Hundreds packed the 519 Community Centre for a defence fundraiser. Activists marched to 52 Division chanting “pussies bite back.” Fundraisers followed: bar nights, oyster dinners, Pride toonie drives. Gay men who had experienced the 1981 bathhouse raids showed up in solidarity. Hornick recalls the shift from shock to resolve: the raid had galvanized the community. Yet the legal strategy that ultimately succeeded required a difficult compromise.
Defence lawyer Frank Addario argued that the male officers’ presence violated patrons’ reasonable expectation of privacy. To win, the case had to emphasize women’s vulnerability in the presence of male police. This pragmatic approach helped secure victory in 2002, when the judge excluded police testimony and dismissed all charges.
But it also risked flattening the Palace’s trans-inclusive politics into a more essentialist narrative about “women’s privacy.”
Watch “Queer Justice Dilemma”
“Queer Justice Dilemma.” Narrated by Mariana Valverde and Brenda Cossman. Edited by Alisha Stranges. Illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba. Produced by LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown). The History of the Pussy Palace: A Digital Exhibit. 2024.
As law professor Brenda Cossman and activist Mariana Valverde reflect, the case raises a perennial question: is it better to win narrowly, or to argue radically and risk losing? The defence succeeded—but at the cost of sidelining some of the Palace’s more expansive visions of gender and sexuality.
Care, here, took the form of strategic restraint.
Beyond Reform
The legal victory laid the groundwork for a human rights complaint and class-action lawsuit. In 2005, a settlement awarded $350,000, mandated LGBTQ sensitivity training, and required new guidelines for the treatment of trans people during searches and detention.
Community members facilitated that training, sitting across from officers in tense workshops that exposed deep ignorance—and, occasionally, small shifts.
Watch “Bridging the Gap”
“Bridging the Gap.” Narrated by Anthony Mohamed. Edited by Alisha Stranges. Illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba. Produced by LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown). The History of the Pussy Palace: A Digital Exhibit. 2024.
For some, these reforms mattered. Incremental changes could mean safer treatment for a single trans person in custody.
For others, including longtime activist Anna Willats, the process underscored policing’s structural limits. The raid, she argues, was not an aberration but part of a broader pattern of targeting marginalized communities.
Watch “Arms of the State”
“Arms of the State.” Narrated by Anna Willats. Edited by Alisha Stranges. Illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba. Produced by LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown). The History of the Pussy Palace: A Digital Exhibit. 2024.
The Palace’s response thus unfolded along two tracks: working within legal frameworks to secure tangible protections, and recognizing that those frameworks might never fully deliver justice.
What the Raid Reveals
It would be easy to narrate the raid solely as state violence. It was that. But it was also something more specific: an assault on a space built around collective care, erotic autonomy, and mutual accountability.
What the oral histories make clear is that care did not disappear when the police arrived. It intensified. It moved from orientation tours and rope demos to legal defence funds, protest marches, and years of community consultation. It took the form of shielding bodies, distributing information, testifying in court, and sitting through hostile training rooms.
The raid exposed the fragility of queer space under policing. It also revealed the durability of queer care.
In the final post of this series, we shift to a different set of questions: how do we tell this history—of pleasure, violation, and resistance—in ways that honour not only what happened, but what it felt like? And why did those embodied memories push this project beyond text and into research-creation?
Alisha Stranges is a public humanities scholar based at the University of Toronto. She serves as Research Manager and Project Oral Historian for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, where her work bridges oral history, performance, and digital research creation.
Elspeth Brown is Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. A scholar of queer and trans history, oral history, and archives, she is the author of Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke University Press).
To learn more about this history, visit our project website or explore our immersive digital exhibit.
[i] Editorial. “Barging In.” Globe and Mail, Sep. 25, 2000.
