Baby Face / de bebe

Constructed with the tools of poetic and documentary convention—fragmentation, oral history, rhythmic and imagistic leaps—Baby Face / Face de bébé weaves a portrait of Denise Cassidy, known as Baby Face, the first woman to own a lesbian bar in Montréal. Iconoclastic and authoritative, revered and feared, Baby Face's story remains nevertheless largely undocumented. Yet for those in the know, the Montréal queer scene is nearly impossible to recount without her. The story of Baby Face is, too, the story of a formative time and place in North American lesbian culture and a testament to those who have worked to preserve her history. Blending photographs by Baby Face’s personal photographer Suzanne Girard with archival clippings, spliced interviews, audio from independent films, and other marginalia, the book offers a window into a particular moment in queer life—and a nod to the DIY methods often used to preserve histories relegated to the margins.