Baby Face / Face de bébé

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.

Sallie Fullerton is a writer living in Hudson, New York. Their work has appeared in Bennington Review, Prairie Schooner, Literary Hub, Pioneer Works Broadcast, Frontier Poetry, among other publications, and was anthologized in Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles. Their work has been supported by a Fulbright Arts/Research Grant and a fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Baby Face/Face de bébé is their first book.

Suzanne Girard is a Montreal-based photographer who began amidst the social photography movement of the 1970s. Co-founder of the photography atelier Plessisgraphe with Marik Boudreau, they documented the emerging second wave feminist movement and a burgeoning lesbian cultural and political scene in Montreal in 1970s and 1980s. Her photographs have been published and exhibited in Canada, Europe, and South America. Some of her documentary photos are part of the National Archives of Canada collection. Suzanne also worked in the festival and events industry for over 30 years (Image & Nation and other various film festivals, the 5th International Feminist Bookfair and she directed Divers/Cité for 21 years). She also taught photography in the Media Arts department of John Abbott College for 25 years.

“I love the thing – of this Baby Face. The sparse faded type, the gallant photos leaning in door ways, in her leisure suit, kind of Mark Wahlberg working class swagger, plus the poetry made from these shavings scraped from interview and conversations, the brief pages of crazy romantic elven portraits – the dykes memorialized under lights flash outside for a few weeks. I think of what such bars were like in the seventies, already a faded glamour from an earlier time, Baby Face / Face de bébé is a helluva aesthetic toast to human lesbian magic and ancestor worship, daggers, womyn and queers.”—Eileen Myles

“Baby Face / Face de bébé, Sallie Fullerton’s lush, polyvocal documentary-collage-poem, animates the lived queer imaginary of late 20th-century Montreal club life with a brilliant curatorial eye. Centering the pleasures and risks of self-determination, exposure, entrepreneurship, and survival, Fullerton builds a fascinating collective portrait of dynamic worldmaking, inviting us to witness the rich life evolving around a singular star whose audacity and magnetism made new ways of being possible.”—Elizabeth Willis, author of Liontaming in America