Toronto 2016: The Meaning of Pride

Staff from Toronto's Glad Day Bookshop circa 2000. L to R: Toshiya Kuwabara, Andrew Cecil, then store owner John Scythes, Alex Rowlson, Marcin Wisniewski, and Prodan Nedev. Photo Credit: Jearld Moldenhauer

"I hope we can keep finding new ways to be closer. There must be lots of joys of being closer that we haven't found yet. I hope you're hopeful and not discouraged about us." – Sam Wagstaff in a letter to Robert Mapplethorpe 

Just over a week from today Toronto will celebrate Pride weekend 2016. More than 40 years after the Gay Liberation movement came to Canada, Pride is now a city sanctioned month-long happening. It's a chance for events usually packed into 2 days to be spread across an entire month, which I'm all for.

I've always believed Pride does an important service for Toronto's gay community. It of course serves as a giant party where people can dance their asses off, and is a chance to see friends and acquaintances you wouldn't normally cross paths with. Secondly, Pride is a chance to connect in meaningful ways with friends and foes alike. It demands we answer an important question - which I'll get into later in this post. 

Pride allows us to celebrate our community's achievements and remember the people and institutions that made our victories possible. Two of those institutions are Pink Triangle Press and Glad Day Bookshop. Until 2015 Pink Triangle Press published print editions of the Xtra! newspaper in Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver. For decades the press has been vital to LGBT intellectual life and community building in these 3 cities. 

Glad Day Bookshop is North America's oldest gay and lesbian bookstore. It was founded in 1970 by Jearld Moldenhauer, who also founded the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA) and had a hand in the creation of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA). His website is an excellent resource for those who want to learn about Toronto's queer history. I was involved with Glad Day for several years as then owner John Scythes's personal assistant and sometime Cashier.

Though little known, Glad Day and Pink Triangle Press started out as two halves of a whole. The Body Politic movement for a time shared space with the bookstore at 65 Kendal Ave., and later at 139 Seaton St. Members of the Body Politic Collective shared living space as a sort of gay commune. Moldenhauer would later break from the Collective to make a full-time living as a bookseller - a smart business move in the movement's early years. Glad Day Bookshop would later have a Boston location as well.

Both the Boston and Toronto stores thrived for much of the 1980s' and 1990s'.

Fast forward to 2016 and the game has changed. Xtra!, the paper that succeeded The Body Politic after TBP folded in 1986, is now found only online. Glad Day Bookshop remains at 598A Yonge St., where it has been for several years. Though not for much longer. The collective that currently owns the store is fundraising to move to an undisclosed location on Church Street. Given the sums owner Michael Erickson mentions in interviews, the stakes are high.

“We’re hoping to crowdfund $50,000, we’ll probably borrow $120,000, and then we’ll raise $50,000 from the current owners and some new owners,” Erickson told Xtra's Jeremy Willard. Since they purchased the store in 2012 from John Scythes, collective members have faced the challenges every independent bookseller faces. They've done their best in the face of those challenges.

If Glad Day Bookshop closes, Toronto would lose one of the most vocal advocates for freedom of expression and freedom from censorship. Jearld Moldenhauer and John Scythes put their necks on the line many times to fight court battles with the Ontario government. The Joy of Gay Sex, Descent, and Bad Attitude are just a few of the titles that sparked these battles.

Pre-Internet Glad Day was a major gathering point for the community and an important stepping stone for many people. Both Glad Day Bookshop and the gay press have been there through the 1980s' bathhouse raids, the fight for gay marriage, and too many other important events to name here. 

As someone who helped out behind the counter and behind the scenes at Glad Day, I will always be proud of the work I did there. It's my hope that the proposed move to Church Street goes smoothly, and the new business model of a hybrid café / bookstore / event space proves profitable.

I've also worked with the gay press. For a brief time I interned at Xtra!, and I wrote several articles for fab magazine, Xtra's competitor from 1994 through 2013. As the, "gay scene magazine" it provided a counterpoint to the sometimes dry and serious tone Xtra! struck. It was at fab where I met Paul Bellini - who, as far as I'm concerned, is the best columnist Toronto's gay press ever had. 

Bellini is known for being The Towel Guy from Kids in the Hall. This was a walk on role - he was primarily a writer for the CBC comedy series. We've been friends for years now, and have worked on several fun side projects together. 

Back to my main point - with the press gone from our newspaper boxes and Glad Day's future uncertain, it's more important than ever to be visible as a community and continue the fight they started. The dangers of being complacent and resting on our laurels are succinctly stated in Ken Popert's 2014 article While we weren't looking. The article is about Rob Ford, and more broadly the dangers of politicians who don't have our best interests at heart. 

Popert's article concludes: "I’m looking at Ford and looking at a possible future. That future does not look friendly. But it is just one possibility; if we start looking, the future can still be ours to make."

Coming Together for Pride

Which brings me to the key part of this entry: because we risk losing the gay press and bookstore - the voices of our community - this Pride is more important than ever. Jearld Moldenhauer would sometimes refer to Pride as, "Bury the Knives Week" with his uniquely dark sense of humour.

He meant that people forgive each other for slights both perceived and real. And that for one week we come together and treat each other well.

This touches on what I think is the heart of the matter. The heart of the question Pride asks us, even as we dance to the beat. "What kind of people should we be? How should we treat each other?" The question applies to friends and foes alike. The quote that leads off this entry is from a book about Sam Wagstaff.

For people who know me, it's no secret that Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe is one of my favourite books. In addition to being Robert Mapplethorpe's boyfriend, Sam Wagstaff was a friend to many and patron of some of America's most well-known Pop artists.

This excerpt is from a letter he mailed to Mapplethorpe when they lived mere blocks from each other in downtown Manhattan.

To the question, then: What kind of people should we be?

I think he gave us the answer.

The Imitation Game Reveals Broken Genius Who Cracked 'Unbreakable' Code

Alan Turing spat on social convention, pissed off colleagues and superiors alike, and masked his homosexuality in wartime Britain. Yet it was his team that solved an 'unbreakable' Nazi code and helped the Allied Forces win.

Ain't There One Damn Song That Can Make Me Break Down and Cry?

So sang David Bowie with a lovely feminine lilt in the title track for his 1975 album Young Americans. The lyric was before its time - suggesting a cynical society hardened to emotion and human suffering. Every so often a piece of popular culture, be it a movie or song, manages to pierce that hard carapace so the audience breaks down and bawls all over the theater floor.

After seeing The Imitation Game I'll have to include it in the short list of films that have made yours truly shed a tear. Probably because I identify on some level with the protagonist, Alan Turing, a British mathematician who constructed, with his team, a machine to crack the Nazi Enigma code, thereby allowing a steady stream of military intelligence, troop movements, and fleet locations to make it into Allied hands during the Second World War.

Turing was a mathematician by training, a child prodigy, and the man whose ideas presaged the modern computer as you and I know it. He was also socially awkward, not given to displays of human warmth, and someone who carried the memory of a boarding school crush killed by tuberculosis.

The Imitation Game's structure has the story jumping from early 1950s' England when Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) was arrested for having sex with a rent boy back to his wartime work at Bletchly Park, and even further back to his boarding school days. Each time period contains a key element of Turing's story - 1950s' England where his sexuality is revealed before the man is punished inhumanly by Her Majesty's Government, wartime to show his most significant career achievement, and Turing's schoolboy days to show us what makes this broken genius the man he becomes.

And broken he is. We get the picture early on - he can't maintain eye contact, has no sense of humour, and uses cold logic as the basis for all his decisions. Needless to say this doesn't endear Turing to the team of code breakers he's assigned to work with by Commander Denniston (Charles Dance). The team includes Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong), and John Cairncross (Allen Leech).

The bonding between Turing and Cross is meaningful as she is the only woman on the team and he is, presumably, the only fag.  He encourages her to develop her talents as a mathematician in spite of the era's conservative views that a woman's place was in the home. In return she stands by his side when he reveals his homosexuality - unconditionally accepting a fellow Outsider and supporting him when he needs her most.

As Alan Turing, Benedict Cumberbatch does a convincing job as the loner genius who is racing against time to make his 100,000 pound (British currency) code breaking machine 'Christopher' succeed at the job it's supposed to do. Namely, run coding variations faster than human beings can. Every day at the stroke of midnight the Nazis change their encryption protocols, forcing the slaving code breakers to begin at square one.

Why name the machine Christopher? Turns out the machine's namesake is an old school buddy of Turing's - his only friend from early childhood if the narrative is to be believed. Christopher Morcom and Alan Turing found common ground in math. According to the biography The Imitation Game is based on, he was Turing's first love. Long since dead, Christopher is now a footnote in a life of incredible achievement that was matched measure for measure by suffering.

Alan Turing: The Enigma, written by Andrew Hodges, is widely considered the definitive account of the man's life and is the movie's primary source material. Glad Day Bookshop was initially the book's North American distributor. Glad Day founder Jearld Moldenhauer and Hodges became close personal friends during the book's research and writing. They spent time together in Toronto, London, Boston, Syracuse, and New York.

If you visit the 'Writers, Composers, and Academics' gallery on Jearld's website you will find a picture of Hodges on the gallery's first page.

Now go and do yourself a favour if you love smartly told, true stories. The Imitation Game is well worth your time. Maybe you, too, will find there are still a few works of art that can slip under our thick skins to make us break down and cry.

Guest Post by Jearld Moldenhauer Part 2: Glad Day Bookshop Toronto Origins

Glad Day by William Blake

Author's Note: Today I'm sharing Part 2 of my friend Jearld Moldenhauer's statement. This part, titled 'Glad Day Origins', is about the founding of the original Glad Day Bookshop located in Toronto, Ontario. Jearld ran the store from its founding until 1991, when he sold the store to John Scythes. John in turn ran Glad Day until 2012, when he sold it to a group of community investors. You can visit Glad Day at 598A Yonge St. in Toronto, just north of the Yonge and Wellesley intersection.

As for Jearld, he also founded the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, and several activist organizations that formed the core of Canada's gay liberation movement. These days he runs a photography gallery, Dar Balmira, in Fes, Morocco. 

Jearld has a website (which this statement can also be found on) that showcases his photography. You can Visit Jearld's Website Here. 

Comments and feedback on this special 2 part guest series are encouraged and welcome!

Glad Day Bookshop: Origins

After coming out in 1965, my sophomore year at Cornell University, the world as it had been up until that moment began to turn upside down. It took some time to develop an understanding of this new world I was entering, but natural curiosity drove me toward an ever greater investigation of the gay world and, ultimately, of my place within it. I reached a point where my attractions to other males my own age and a few years younger became irrepressible, while the realization of my own hypocrisy and repression became more and more intolerable. 

I had allowed a heterosexual relationship to develop, driven more by the young woman’s interest in me than my interest in her. She and her family had immigrated to the United States from Germany after the war, and in retrospect I realize that I was fascinated by their cultural differences more than anything else. For years I had been studying German and this represented my first genuine exposure to this world. 

The social pressures of that time pushed many into heterosexual relationships, as if this involvement might help me overcome what I had been unconsciously brainwashed into thinking, that homosexuality was everything that could possibly be bad. At the time it was criminal, sinful, considered a psychological abnormality, and of course was totally taboo socially and almost guaranteed career failure were it to become public. The very definition of a modern day taboo! As I later came to realize this also made homosexuality both quite challenging and very exciting.

For a short time I even sought out psychological counseling at the University Health clinic. A crusty old shrink was assigned to me and I suppose if anything, my experience with him pushed me down the path of activism with a radical analysis of what was wrong with the attitude towards homosexuality in my society. 

The shrink just sat there, saying almost nothing at a time when I needed someone to engage with intellectually. His strategy worked, although I’ll never be sure if the results were what he anticipated. After only a month or so I abruptly stopped my sessions with the psychiatrist as well as my heterosexual involvement, and finally took control of my own life.

This final push toward genuine individuality likely wouldn’t have happened if I had not discovered various authors and was in the midst of carefully reading and thinking about their books. I was fortunate enough to have a friend who taught French; she led me to the works of Andre Gide, someone who had been far more open about his own coming out and take on human sexuality than anyone else in his time. As well, old Gide finally received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947, probably the only known queer to have been so recognized, before or since. 

I devoured his novels and found my way to Gide’s journals and autobiographical writings. I considered him something of an inspiration and a sort of gay father figure. At about the same time I read Donald Webster Cory’s (a pseudonym for Edward Sagarin) The Homosexual in America and other compilations, all of which gave me a better cultural context to understand the world I was entering.

As I recall it was the title and subtitle of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History that grabbed my attention while browsing in a bookshop. Brown’s work led me to Herbert Marcuse and both gave me the deep analysis of sexual repression and insights into the path to liberation that I had been searching for.

As my ‘gay consciousness’ developed I was interested in the larger picture, in understanding how things had come to be the way they are. Without that understanding any meaningful change is impossible. The more I read the more I appreciated the critical edge that being homosexual gave so many creative people throughout history. While gay rights seemed one logical strategy, I saw it primarily as a way of making more people comfortable with their own repressed homosexuality.

During the two decades from just before Stonewall (about 1967) until the full impact of AIDS (1987) there was a spirit of spontaneity and experimentation in the air that made gay life an exciting adventure. In the aftermath of the epidemic, the dullness that accompanied what I’ll call quasi-assimilation robbed gay life of almost everything that gave it promise.  

Like so many young gay males I was drawn to New York City’s Village with its thriving gay culture. In 1966, three years before Stonewall, I began making trips down to Manhattan whenever there was a school break. In 1967 I visited Craig Rodwell’s recently opened Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Mercer Street, the world’s first dedicated gay and lesbian bookshop. Of course these visits helped plant the seeds of my own career. In those pre-Stonewall days the offerings were pretty slim, but later, in tangent with Stonewall and the enormous volume of literature that started to appear the very next year, Craig was certainly in the right place at the right time to make the most of it.

Unfortunately, the tiny spaces the store occupied (on Mercer Street and later on Christopher Street) and his shortness of vision failed to realize the potential that Glad Day, A Different Light, Giovanni’s Room, Lambda Rising, and Calamus Bookstore were to achieve.

The year after Stonewall an entirely new kind of literature about the experience of being gay emerged from New York. Gay activists, many of whom were experienced journalists, began writing accounts of the previous year. This phenomenon quickly snowballed in a place where there were sympathetic gay editors like Bill Whitehead and Michael Denneny. Novels, personal accounts, even the first pro gay psychological reinterpretations made it into print. In bookstores there was a new type of literature to display for customers hungry to keep abreast of the emerging culture. The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review and the Village Voice published reviews and ads for many new titles.

I had just returned to Toronto after a 9 month absence. After the University of Toronto fired me for starting the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA), I saw the bright side and embarked on my first trip abroad. It lasted nearly 8 months. My new life in Berlin was cut short when my father died suddenly and I made the mistake of leaving Germany to be present at his funeral. With no money to return to Europe, I instead returned to Toronto where I had friends I could stay with until I found a job and apartment. 

In the year I was absent not only had the new gay lit started to appear, but also meetings of the UTHA were overcrowded, mostly with townies anxious to plug into the new social movement. Soon after I returned George Hislop, one of the people who regularly attended UTHA meetings, made the decision to form a general community gay organization he called the Community Homophile Association of Toronto (CHAT). Almost at the same time a smaller group of young gay male activists formed the Toronto Gay Action (TGA). At York University Roger Wilkes organized a campus gay organization. Within a few short months where before Toronto had a single gay group there were now 4.

I needed to get back into the movement so I started by attending both UTHA and CHAT meetings, as well as becoming a founding member of TGA. Because of my reading habits I paid close attention to both the Village Voice and The New York Times, and therefore read reviews and saw ads for the first Post-Stonewall books.

Toronto being a serious book town, I scoured many shops looking for the new titles.  Alas, no one had any of them in stock! This was hard to believe since Toronto is the equivalent of New York when it comes to Canada’s publishing world. Most American and British publishers had offices in Toronto, or were represented by Canadian publishers.

The new titles were therefore easily available to booksellers. Yet all I could find were the same dreadful anti-gay psychiatric tracts that littered shelves in the Pre-Stonewall days. Irving Bieber, Lawrence Hatterer, Charles Socarides. Even old post Freudian writers like Stekel and Kraft-Ebbing with their ‘case studies’ to attract readers were still kicking around. It was frustrating and exposed a dimension of English Canadian mentality I came to despise. And exactly whose fault was this — the publishers and distributors? Or the booksellers? I suspect it was both. But unless one examined the publisher’s catalogs from that time it would be impossible to know which was more responsible.

My reaction, after a month or so of thinking about it, was to consider setting up my own book service. After a few phone calls I realized it wouldn’t take much money at all to start up. In those days publishers offered generous credit terms so one actually had 60 to 90 days to try and sell the books. As I’ve explained elsewhere, hardcover books were very expensive items in Canada, so initially I shied away from purchasing any. 

My own knowledge of gay literature both past and present was in its infancy, so I ordered many of the titles that had been important to my own coming out and philosophical development. When the new gay literature titles appeared in paperback editions those were added to my little inventory. And how did I sell the books?

In the very beginning it was out of a knapsack I carried from one gay meeting to another.  To build the business I put together a small mimeographed catalog that I advertised in the Toronto sex newspaper, Tab. Tab was essentially heterosexual in character and very much a cheap sensationalist rag with a ridiculous cover story (and sleazy photos) to help sell the thing. At least they accepted my little ads, something I later learned would not be the case with either the Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail. I’m pretty sure I also advertised in Guerilla when it appeared on the scene in June 1970. Guerilla would later show solidarity by allowing TGA and The Body Politic to hold meetings in their space.  If I remember correctly, Issue 1 of The Body Politic was designed on Guerilla’s layout boards.

I’d like to end this bit of history by talking about how and why I chose the name Glad Day. It’s a reference to the 1796 watercolour by British poet and painter William Blake. The watercolour depicts a naked man dancing in the spectral light of a rainbow with the colours spread out behind him, almost as if the naked man himself were the prism through which light passed.

I was introduced to Blake’s work in a number of ways, first through many visits to the Andrew White Art Museum at Cornell, which held an exhibition of many plates Blake himself created. Each is a unified work of art in watercolour, the poetic text surrounded by his imaginative artwork. I was so taken by the beauty of these creations that I returned to the Museum several times to take in both the artwork and poetry. 

A year or so later Allen Ginsberg gave a week of free lectures on campus and I was delighted by the opportunity to hear his presentations. Blake loomed large in his own inspiration and philosophy, so the week deepened my appreciation of both men. My German professor at the time (Mark Goldman?) was heavily involved in the anti-war movement and worked at a small Ithaca based press that was created to publish anti-war literature. That small Ithaca based press was named the Glad Day Press. 

I have read that Blake’s painting may have been inspired by a prison break, symbolic of liberation from the shackles of oppression and repression. In 1970, on my long backpacker’s trip hitchhiking around Europe, I stopped for several weeks in London where I rented a bed sitting room while exploring the great city. This ‘residence’ allowed me to apply for a card to the Reading Room of the British Museum. There I was able to sit in the Rare Book Room and be handed, one by one, any of the original copies of Blake’s books I wished to see. 

What I like about all of Blake’s work, including Glad Day, is the depth and breadth of his vision. He was not by any means a man of his time or of any time. I am always amazed that some of his work was not banned and the man destroyed by the Establishment forces of his time. How his radical perceptions of both religion and conformity failed to rile the Church and Monarchy to the point of denouncing his writings as heresy I have never quite understood. Perhaps his talent was so great and his ego so humble that he skirted the wrath of those who could have destroyed him.

When it came time to choose a name for my knapsack full of books, Glad Day struck all the right notes for the greater task at hand.

My vision of sexual liberation goes beyond the gay rights movement and Blake’s writings resonate far more in my imagination than a mainstream queer agenda that time has shown to be one of increasing conformity. The critical power that once came with Outsider status seems to have been traded for a dull mirror through which spectral light no longer shines.

Guest Post by Jearld Moldenhauer: History and Motivation

Author's Note: Today I'm sharing a special guest post written by my close friend Jearld Moldenhauer. It's a Background Statement on his motivations for opening Glad Day Boston, a gay bookshop that was a cornerstone of queer cultural life in that city for many years. Jearld also founded the original Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, and several activist organizations that formed the core of Canada's gay liberation movement. These days he runs a photography gallery, Dar Balmira, in Fes, Morocco.

Jearld has a website showcasing his photography, which you can Visit Here. You can also find the statement below on his website. 

Special Guest Post: Jearld Moldenhauer on Creating Glad Day Boston and Standing Up to the Canadian Government

In 1978 I made the decision to go on a trip around the contiguous 48 states with the idea of scouting out a possible location for a second Glad Day Bookshop. When I moved to Toronto my knowledge of American cities was limited to New York, and to a far lesser degree, Los Angeles. I tend to tire of my surroundings rather easily, and this usually triggers the need for change. 

As well, within my chosen field I had come to realize the pricing of new books, especially cloth or hardcover editions, was calculated to be just below the perceived point of resistance for the American book buying public. During much of my career the differential between the U.S. and Canadian currencies was such that new hardcover books were priced so high that only the wealthiest or most determined customers would give in to the temptation to buy a new book while ads and reviews were in full swing. 

Adding to this was the constant threat of arbitrary censorship by the Canadian government. Back in the 1970s, long before former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney introduced the notorious Memorandum D9-1-1, the occasional parcel coming from the States was seized, destroyed, or sometimes returned to sender. It cast a chill over any illusion of freedom of expression, but nowhere near the life threatening level it later assumed.

That summer I bought a cross country Greyhound bus ticket and headed south to explore the country I was born into. In those days I was still living something of a subsistence life and never even thought about staying in a hotel. Rather, those were the days when gay saunas were everywhere, offering shelter, security, and if one was lucky, the pleasures of companionship. Otherwise I would seek out local activists and usually be invited to stay with them. Such was the spirit of the times. In this manner I visited Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, Key West, Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston. Typical of all of my travels I didn’t rush things, returning to Toronto after two months or so on the road.

It was in Boston that I bonded best with other gay male activists. The members of Fag Rag, the American east coast counterpart of The Body Politic, received me with a degree of brotherhood I had never experienced before, and have never experienced since. In those days Boston was much more of a gritty town than it is now, but this can be said for all cities everywhere in both North America and Europe. 

A volatile mix of classes, races, and ethnic concentrations in a general stew of both corruption and occasional enlightenment appealed to me. Boston was also home to innumerable bookstores (especially used and antiquarian shops), several large publishing houses, and of course many of the largest and most famous universities in North America. 

The gay scene offered lots of possibilities, ranging from political organizations and an active gay press, to a fun cruising scene. Gay men were beginning to move into the South End in large numbers. There was also a concentration of lesbians in a part of Cambridge near the highly regarded women’s bookstore, New Words, as well as gay and lesbian footholds in several other neighbourhoods. 

What seemed obviously missing was a serious gay and lesbian bookstore. By the time I visited in 1978 an earlier effort at creating such a shop had already failed. It seemed many of the locals I spoke with really didn’t have much of an idea about what might actually be possible. In the back of my mind was also the fact that having a base in the U.S. book world would no doubt benefit the variety of literature sold in the Canadian operation.

Few, if any people in the Canadian movement seemed to grasp the reality and depth of my dual American-Canadian identity, let alone the internationalism that put those aspects of my worldview into relief. Almost the same could be said for the American movement’s interest in things Canadian, but within its’ own separate dynamic.

Most of my life in Canada I experienced a vacillating reaction between resentment, (sometimes almost hatred of America, often related to the absurd foreign war it had lately embarked upon) to adoration of all things American. These vastly different reactions had much to do with the ongoing struggle to arrive at a separate Canadian identity. Living among English Canadians forced me to think about and analyze the psychological differences between these two groups. This placed me firmly as an Outsider in both the U.S. and Canada, not that this status needed further enhancement.

The core American value of freedom of expression, grounded in the First Amendment to the Constitution (introduced to me in Grade 6 or 7 if I recall correctly) gave me the determination and fortitude to fight against Mulroney and his utterly antidemocratic Memorandum. It didn’t matter to his government that it went totally against the spirit and intent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Memorandum’s real purpose, hidden below obscenity jargon, was to stifle an open dialogue on gay subjects and destroy the fragile network of gay and lesbian bookshops in Canada. Most Canadians reacted to this heavy handed and blatant censorship with total passivity.

Difficult as it may be to understand for people reading this today, when Glad Day brought the banning of The Joy of Gay Sex before the courts, Mr. Serge Lavoix, then Executive Director of the Canadian Booksellers Association, outright refused to aid or support our action! Even the gay Canadian press seemed not to understand the seriousness of the war until it was nearing its final stages.

Throughout the decades as activists were able to influence and change policies and attitudes, there would never be any admission the government had ever been wrong. Never any public ‘truth and reconciliation’ forum addressing the suffering and injustices heaped upon thousands of lives while their prejudiced laws and regulations were in force.  

As I recall, in its 21 year history, the Toronto gay press (The Body Politic followed by Xtra) never once mentioned the Boston Glad Day. So except for those Canadians who visited Boston, there was little awareness of this other dimension to my activist life.

The fact that my constant wanderings sensitized me to variations found in the world’s cultures eluded most everyone, except those I met who had themselves grown up ‘over there.’ Too much is made out of the melting pot vs. the more quaint cultural mosaic. In most cases, it’s just a matter of a decade of a child’s life to shape the cultural base of identity. In my case things worked in reverse. Always intrigued by difference, my cultural identity kept absorbing the things I found admirable in foreign cultures. 

As related to my professional life as a gay and lesbian bookseller, my insatiable wanderlust and embrace of cultural differences as a way to both understand ourselves and the rest of the evolving gay world regularly led me to other countries in search of gay and lesbian authors. Both Glad Days included queer literature in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Greek, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Chinese. I personally traveled to European countries and to Mexico in order to attend book fairs, visit publishers, and the network of gay bookshops that emerged in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. In matters Chinese, in Boston Siong-Huat Chua and in Toronto Alan Li both helped seek out literature of Asian origin.

In my own intellectual evolution I first shed the brainwashing files pounded into me about religion. Once those were demolished I moved on to overwrite the brainwashing about sexuality. It was an easy next step to shed nationalism, a necessary component for the war mongering masses and their political bosses. I could never get on the bandwagon of the pre-packaged, ever more assimilationist values that seem ever present when many of our self appointed gay leadership start in. 

I saw the universality of homosexuality as one sure way to transcend all nonsense and reconnect with my primal male mammalian feelings that I correctly assume to be curious, but also offering the promise of universal empathy for humankind, and even more so with all life on Earth. 

In my youthful naivety I hoped that a restructuring of human sexuality with homosexuality as the primal instinct over which religion and repressive state ideologies had constructed a false heterosexual world could somehow change the way we lived our lives as well as the way we treat our fellow creatures. 

The goal of gay rights was certainly a necessary step and building a culturally aware and politically active community seemed a useful goal to devote myself to. However, I never saw this as an end unto itself, but rather as a beginning.

I would like to say that such a genuine liberation is in the cards for humanity, but I see little reason for optimism. The more I have learned about humanity, the more we seem to resemble a herd of ‘domesticated’ beasts, not unlike sheep or goats. The overpopulated herd is fast approaching a precipice.

This may seem a strange way to conclude a statement about a gay activist bookseller’s motivations. However, some of us weren’t motivated by capitalist interests, but instead had an analysis and a philosophy behind what we did with our lives.