ABSTRACT
On 14 September 2000 the Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee (TWBC) hosted ‘2000 Pussies’, its fourth women’s ‘Pussy Palace’ event at Club Toronto, a gay male bathhouse just south of the ‘Gay Village’. From 6:00pm onwards, women lined up in the rain outside a converted Victorian redbrick house, some sheltering beneath a rainbow awning, to gain entrance to this queer women’s bathhouse event. Volunteer security guards regulated the queue and handed out sheets of paper listing rules, etiquette and legal rights. They checked identification and bags before letting women through the door to purchase tickets at the entrance kiosk. After sliding their tickets under a metal grill, women were buzzed into the bathhouse and handed a clean white towel and safer sex supplies. Music played loudly. In the steamy red glow of a glassed changing room, some women removed their clothes and stepped into the hot tub, sauna or shower. Inside, signs directed women to erotic activities such as porn, souvenir polaroids, lap dancing, S&M and massage. Up a flight of worn, grey-carpeted stairs chandeliers lit the way to the locker room where women who had brought outfits to change into swapped street clothes for combinations of leather, rubber, lace, mesh and cotton. A narrow mirrored hallway off of the locker room was lined with small rooms that each provided a narrow bed with a turquoise plastic mattress and a locker. Some of these rooms were available for rent, but many were left open on a first-come-first-serve basis. With each new floor, the lighting became dimmer and the hallways narrower. But everywhere the atmosphere was the same: sexy and playful, charged with sexual anticipation.
