By Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown 231 Mutual St., Toronto, former site of Club Toronto and the Pussy Palace bathhouse events. Illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba. LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown), 2023. When we began the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, we faced a familiar problem in queer oral history. Conventional interviews privilege chronology and plot. They… Read more »
2022 Banner drop by tenants organised with le Syndicat des locataires autonomes de Montréal, Montreal Autonomous Tenants’ Union, (SLAM) This series looks at the different housing crises tenants have experienced across Canada from the 1900s until the present and details how they responded, successfully and unsuccessfully, through tactics of community and/or class-based direct action and structures based in grassroots direct democracy…. Read more »
By Roberta Lexier For early twentieth-century Marxists, fascism was, explains Alberto Toscano in his 2023 book, Late Fascism, “intimately linked to the prerequisites of capitalist domination.” “The instrument of the big bourgeoisie,” Robert O. Paxton suggests in The Anatomy of Fascism, its purpose: “for fighting the proletariat when the legal means available to the state proved insufficient to subdue them.” “At times… Read more »
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… Read more »
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,… Read more »
By Jenni Makahnouk This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series The Indian Act is commonly treated as a governance structure: an object to be interpreted, amended, or dismantled through policy reform. This framing assumes neutrality where there is appetite. This article argues that the Indian Act functions less as a static legal instrument and more as a… Read more »
By Don Wright The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. – Antonio Gramsci What will future historians – say in 2150 – call this historical moment? The 100-Year Terror, perhaps, a century marked by wars, migrations, and civil breakdowns,… Read more »
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…. Read more »
By Andrew Nurse and Roberta Lexier A crisis, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote in response to the rise of fascism in the 1930s, occurs when: “The old order is dying and the new one is struggling to be born.” His point was that the crises societies experience have specific – if far from simple – historical causes. They also have… Read more »
By Bob Joseph This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series. This year, 2026, marks 150 years of the Consolidated Indian Act of 1876. This serves as a timely opportunity to discuss the dismantling of this destructive and restrictive piece of legislation. The Indian Act has constrained and controlled the lives of Status Indians for generations, and reconciliation… Read more »
