How Do You Remember a Sex Party? Telling the History of the Pussy Palace

By Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown

Ange Beever, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral History Project, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. 2025.

“When they first came in, I was pissed off that they had crashed the party. […] like these stupid men tromping through this place. I’m just like, ‘You look like idiots. You’re stupid. These are just a bunch of women having a good time naked.’ […T]his is what you want to spend your resources on, really?”

-Ange Beever, Pussy Palace Patron

In September 2000, Toronto police raided the Pussy Palace, a queer women and trans bathhouse event held in a converted Victorian mansion just east of downtown. The raid quickly became a flashpoint in local LGBTQ+ history, sparking legal challenges, protests, and renewed debates about policing, privacy, and queer space. Ange Beever’s frustration captures something essential about the Pussy Palace—and about how this history needs to be told.

The police raid mattered. But so did the party it interrupted—and the worlds it briefly made possible. This project begins from that tension.

From 2021 to 2025, the University of Toronto’s LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, in partnership with The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, conducted the Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP). Led by Dr. Elspeth H. Brown, the project traces the rise, texture, and afterlife of the Pussy Palace (1998–2014) through 36 oral history interviews with organizers, volunteers, patrons, and community advocates.

While the September 2000 raid—the last major raid of a queer bathhouse in Canadian history—anchors the project, the PPOHP insists that this history cannot be reduced to police violence alone. For those who organized and attended these events, the Pussy Palace was also a site of pleasure, care, experimentation, and political possibility—an attempt to build something radically different within a city long shaped by police harassment of queer and marginalized communities.

The Pussy Palace in Context

Photograph of The Brunswick Four (1974), courtesy of The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives. From left: Adrienne Rosen, Pat Murphy, Sue Wells, and Lamar Van Dyke. Copyright Aaron Devor.

Long before the Palace opened in 1998, queer and trans communities faced persistent policing and harassment—from the Brunswick Four arrests in 1974, to the gay men’s bathhouse raids of the 1980s, to ongoing targeting of sex work and queer public space throughout the 1990s. The Pussy Palace emerged in conscious defiance of this history, offering a space organized by and for queer women and trans people that unapologetically centered sexual freedom and collective care.

Building the Palace, however, was never simple. The Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee, which organized the events, wrestled with practical and political challenges—securing venues, ensuring safety, and negotiating inclusion. Oral histories document efforts at trans and BIPOC inclusion alongside moments of tension, learning, and unresolved conflict. These accounts refuse a triumphalist narrative. Instead, they frame inclusion as a continuous, unfinished political practice—one that produced both solidarity and fracture.

The 2000 police raid marked a profound rupture. Conducted under the pretext of enforcing liquor laws, the raid involved undercover officers entering women-and-trans-only space and charging two volunteers. Narrators recall anger and shock, but also note that practices of care—check-ins, consent protocols, mutual support—were already embedded in the Palace and became even more visible in the aftermath, as the community mobilized through protests, legal action, and collective refusal.

Creative rendering of the Pussy Palace’s outdoor pool, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral History Project, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. 2025.

At this point, the limits of conventional historical documentation become unavoidable. How do you document a history whose most consequential dimensions—pleasure, care, vulnerability, collective presence—were designed to leave little trace? Telling the history of the Pussy Palace as anything other than a story of policing alone requires attending to forms of memory that exceed narrative and resist archival capture.

The Palace was an intensely sensorial space, defined by sound, proximity, touch, movement, and atmosphere, as well as by practices of discretion that have left little visual or material evidence. By design, there are no accessible photographs of what it felt like to be inside (though there was, famously, a souvenir Polaroid boudoir—more on that later), no footage of bodies moving through crowded rooms, and no records of the negotiated intimacies that structured the space.

Anticipating these archival absences, we experimented with ways of inviting narrators to return not only to what happened, but to how it was felt in the body. This approach—which we later named somatic elicitation—treated sensation, affect, and embodiment as forms of historical knowledge in their own right. While developed as an interviewing practice, somatic elicitation became both a methodological contribution to oral history and a conceptual foundation for the project’s public-facing work, shaping how interviews were interpreted and translated into digital and creative forms capable of holding pleasure, vulnerability, and embodied memory.

This blog series returns to three questions that emerged repeatedly across the interviews. First, how was the Pussy Palace built as a radical space—and where did that project strain, fracture, or fail? Second, how do narrators remember the raid not only as police violence, but also as an assault on a space organized around care, consent, and collective safety? And finally, what does it mean to remember queer history through the body—through movement, sound, texture, and atmosphere—and why did those memories push this project beyond scholarly writing and toward research-creation?

The posts that follow take up each of these questions in turn, drawing directly from narrators’ voices and from the creative outputs that grew out of the interviews.

How to Engage with this History

The arguments traced across this series are grounded in a much larger body of material. The PPOHP is anchored by a dedicated project website—the home of the project—which houses the open-access oral history collection, gathers our research-creation work, and connects users with the sources and communities that shaped the research. For readers who want to spend time with these histories, this is where the archive lives: a place to linger, listen, and follow threads that exceed any single narrative.

For those seeking a deeper, narrative-driven engagement, the project’s digital exhibit offers an immersive, multi-chapter experience. Visitors encounter sections on policing and queer resistance, feminist organizing, the raid and its aftermath, and the Palace’s evolving legacy. Digital patrons can also “step inside” the Palace through nine illustrated rooms activated by narrator soundbites, foregrounding presence and atmosphere over chronology.

Remembering the Pussy Palace means remembering not only what was taken by the raid, but what was built despite the certainty that it could never be fully preserved. We hope you will join us on the journey.

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).