Photography as Radical Care: Queer World Making at the Pussy Palace

This talk emerges out of my work with the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, which documents the last police raid of a queer bathhouse in Canadian history, in September 2000. The Pussy Palace was a series of trans-inclusive queer women’s sex parties that took place in Toronto in the late 1990s and early 2000s and marks a period of radical sex organizing in Canadian queer history. Our team collected 36 interviews with bathhouse patrons, event organizers, and community activists, allowing us to historicize this event within the longer history of Toronto police hostility towards non-normative sexuality, exemplified by the gay male-focused bathhouse raids of 1975-1984.

The paper focuses on the Pussy Palace’s “photo pornography booth,” where patrons could have their photos taken via Polaroid technology, where images developed within 60 seconds after exposure. Photographer Chloe Brushwood-Rose hosted the space, making 50-100 images each night, for sessions of usually about five minutes, in shifts of four hours each. The immediacy of the Polaroid technology also helped create a form of queer care within the space, as patron(s) gathered around the developing print, waiting for the image to emerge; their privacy was ensured, as they walked away with the unique image, sometimes even without Brushwood-Rose having seen it. The paper will explore the photobooth as an instance of queer and trans care, an erotic/therapeutic space where Brushwood-Rose helped call new subjectivities into being while representing them at the same time. In analyzing the work of photography in this setting, the paper will draw on ideas stemming from photography as collaboration (Azoulay et al) and as a form of trans care (Malatino). The paper will also address the prosecution’s unsuccessful effort to use the photo booth as evidence of public indecency in the criminal trial that followed the police raid.