Building a Radical Space: Inclusion, Fracture, and the Limits of Utopia

By Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown

T’Hayla Ferguson, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral History Project, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. 2025.

“I think the intention was to make women’s sexuality and women’s play just normal. Not such a sideshow. We want to have a place to go and get naked and fuck and play, and it not be unusual.”

-T’Hayla Ferguson, Pussy Palace Patron

The Pussy Palace was built by naming things that were not supposed to be said out loud. From its earliest moments, the project challenged dominant ideas about women’s sexuality, public sex, and who bathhouse culture was for. But the Palace did not emerge fully formed as a radical, inclusive utopia. It was assembled through improvisation, disagreement, and ongoing negotiation. Inclusion was not a settled principle, but an aspiration—one that required constant work, generated conflict, and exposed the limits of what a single space could hold.

From HIV Prevention to Erotic Experiment

The Pussy Palace began in 1998 as a pragmatic intervention. Organizer Janet Rowe, then working at the AIDS Committee of Toronto, needed a venue to launch a safer-sex campaign for queer women. The solution—a public queer women’s bathhouse night—was inventive, risky, and largely untested.

What started as public health outreach quickly transformed into something else. Sexual expression, pleasure, and collective eroticism moved from the margins to the centre of the project. When Carlyle Jansen joined Rowe to co-organize the event, drawing on her experiences at sex-positive bathhouses like Seattle’s Octopussy Galore, the Pussy Palace took shape as a distinctly pro-sex, pro-pleasure experiment.

Securing a venue revealed early fault lines. Gay men’s bathhouse owners doubted women would show up—or ‘behave.’ When Club Toronto finally agreed to rent its space, the decision reflected both opportunity and constraint: the building was imperfect, inaccessible, and layered with assumptions about who belonged there.

Watch “Blood & Cat Fights”

“Blood & Cat Fights.” Narrated by Carlyle Jansen and Janet Rowe. 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.

Care, Access, and Imperfect Solutions

From the outset, organizers tried to create a culture of care. Volunteers oriented newcomers, explained etiquette, monitored safety, and emphasized consent. Rules were explicit: discrimination would not be tolerated; trans women and trans men were welcome.

Yet accessibility posed challenges the organizers could not fully resolve. The building itself—an old Victorian with narrow staircases and no elevator—excluded some bodies by design. Organizers improvised where they could, carrying a wheelchair user between floors, adapting rituals, donating funds to disability-focused sex events. Still, the decision to proceed in an inaccessible space lingered as an ethical compromise.

Watch “Smelled Like Hamster”

“Smelled Like Hamster.” Narrated by JP Hornick. 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.

Rather than presenting these moments as failures redeemed by good intentions, the oral histories insist on their ambiguity. Inclusion was never simply declared; it was negotiated in real time, under imperfect conditions.

Trans Inclusion as Evolving Practice

The Pussy Palace was unusually trans-inclusive for its moment—but this inclusivity was not automatic. It emerged through dialogue, critique, and revision.

In the 1990s, Palace organizers were operating within a queer women’s community already shaped by butch/femme cultures, sex-radical politics, and the exclusions of other feminist spaces. They wanted to create a women-specific event that was also trans-affirming—an aspiration that required new language, new practices, and sustained conversation with trans patrons.

Trans women like Trish Salah describe a “running conversation” with organizers: offering feedback, pointing out harmful assumptions, and recognizing when inclusion was more than symbolic. Posters, door scripts, volunteer teams, and promotional imagery all became sites of intervention.

Still, inclusion had limits. Trans men experienced both pointed erotic interest and suspicion from the majority cis queer female patrons. Even with explicit policies, trans women encountered transmisogyny from other patrons. And as Salah reflects, a bathhouse organized around “women and trans people” could never fully account for the desires and partners that shaped trans women’s sexual lives. The Palace made space—but not without discomfort.

Watch “Inclusion Redefined”

“Inclusion Redefined.” Narrated by Trish Salah. 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. 

Race, Racism, and the Labour of Accountability

If trans inclusion exposed the conceptual limits of a women’s bathhouse, racial justice exposed the structural limits of a predominantly white organizing culture.

The Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee worked actively to attract racially diverse patrons: inclusive imagery, targeted outreach, ticketing strategies, ally statements, and volunteer training. These efforts were significant—and, in the late 1990s, highly unusual in queer women’s spaces.

But organizers of colour also named the costs of this work. Anti-racist labour fell disproportionately on BIPOC volunteers, who were asked to educate white patrons, mediate conflict, and carry the emotional weight of inclusion.

The creation of the Sugar Shack—BIPOC-focused bathhouse events organized by a subcommittee—marked both a breakthrough and a fracture. For many, it was the first time a sex-positive space felt fully affirming.

Watch “The Sugar Shack”

“The Sugar Shack.” Narrated by Deb Singh. 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.

Yet the very success of these events sharpened tensions: Who were they for? Who could enter? Who bore responsibility for explaining why such spaces were necessary at all?

Refusing a Clean Ending

Several organizers of colour eventually stepped away, not because the project lacked political value, but because the burden of sustaining it became untenable.

Watch “I Needed to Do This”

“I Needed to Do This.” Narrated by Karen B. K. Chan. 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.

Although Chan doesn’t speak directly about racism in this interview excerpt, they do address the challenges of diversifying the Pussy Palace.

It would be tempting to narrate the Pussy Palace as a story of progress: from tentative beginnings to ever-greater inclusion. The oral histories resist that arc. Instead, they offer a record of unfinished work—of organizers grappling honestly with mistakes, missed opportunities, and structural inequities, while still believing deeply in the experiment they were building.

These interviews do not celebrate purity or consensus. They document accountability without erasure, care without innocence, and pleasure without denial of harm.

In the next post, we turn to the moment when this fragile, hard-won space collided with the state: the 2000 police raid, its uneven impacts, and the forms of activism it made necessary. What the organizing history makes clear, however, is that the raid did not interrupt a perfect project—it struck a space already shaped by tension, ambition, and radical desire.

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.