Sensing the Palace: Somatic Elicitation in Queer Oral History

This article explores how oral historians might more fully engage the sensory and affective dimensions of queer memory by centering the body as an archival site within the interview encounter. Drawing on the Pussy Palace Oral History Project-a public history initiative documenting Toronto's trans-inclusive lesbian bathhouse events and the 2000 police raid that followed-we introduce somatic elicitation, a contemplative interview technique designed to surface embodied memory. Rooted in arts-based facilitation and developed to access what Paula Hamilton calls "subliminal histories," the method relies on breathwork, inward attention, and five-sense cueing to interrupt narrative flow and prompt body-based recollection. We argue that somatic elicitation invites narrators to remember not only what happened but how it felt-producing interview material that is sensorily dense, emotionally layered, and grounded in first-person perception. The article situates this technique within queer and radical public history, the history of the senses, and existing practices of sensory elicitation, reflecting on its implications for archival theory, affect studies, and the politics of embodied recordmaking. Through three analytical frames-Attunements, Atmosphere, and Asynchrony-we examine how narrators responded to the technique and what it made newly perceptible about Toronto's queer erotic life at the turn of the millennium. Ultimately, we propose somatic elicitation as a method for listening queerly: one that honors ephemeral experience, amplifies embodied knowledge, and expands what can be surfaced, recorded, and remembered within queer oral history.