About My Life

Life as some sort of professional photographer might have been a good choice had I not heeded some “inner voice” that pushed me into an activist role as a gay political organizer. The voice that I ‘heard’ and finally listened to was not some imagined ‘voice from heaven’. On the contrary, it was my brain putting ‘things’ together. Essentially assimilating what I had come to understand as my values, shaped by everything I had learned from both reading and my experience of the world thus far. In addition to this self-knowledge, at the end of my undergraduate days at Cornell, I lacked focus. Graduate school was not an option either financially or in matters related to academic enthusiasm or preparation. Basically I had managed to give myself a pretty eclectic transcript and despite being locked into the course parameters of a biological science major at the State Agricultural College, I still was able to explore a number of subjects offered by the privately run College of Arts & Sciences. Among them were German language and literature, Musicology, Paleontology, Chinese Art History, Cinema History, and Photography. All subjects I loved and wanted to learn more about. None of them led to any sort of career or employment, but in their way, all have contributed enormously to a life full of both science and culture.

Nature has always been my reference point, long before I even knew about science, everything I felt and thought was understood in relation to the natural world . If fact, I very consciously saw my own life not as some ‘soul’, who if he obeyed some rules laid out in a ‘holy book’, might, at the end, be transported to a vague but privileged eternal ‘afterlife’, but rather as a single individual with a humble ego and little interest in either power or material wealth. And like all individuals, as someone who might make their life count, having meaning in relation to the ongoing process of evolution.

Growing up in a cultural backwater like Niagara Falls for the most part did not help. There was the natural beauty of the area itself, especially around the two cascades and even more so the gorge on the border between Canada and the USA. I spent many hours alone, exploring all the pathways into the gorge on both sides of the border. And I have always held in great esteem the memory of many fine teachers who indirectly taught me to believe in myself.

Being from a lower middle class family has its potential advantages. Not slowly taking on a sense of entitlement the way young people from upper levels of class based society usually do. Not molded into obedient minions of the political and industrial state apparatus as seems the path of most middle class youth. As a lower middle class kid I was subjected to less programming and therefore was granted a larger window through which to potentially steer my own course.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about my parents during those formative years of my early adolescence, was that they basically let me be. No pressures to conform came directly from them! I must have seemed such an odd ball as a young teenager! Learning to bake, developing a vegetable garden, keeping caterpillars and cocoons in my bedroom, sitting for hours not just listening to, but often either singing along with or pretending to conduct performances of Wagner and Strauss operas. Not to say that I got off scott-free from heavy handed interference. Unrelenting bullying, more than tinged with physical violence emanated from my older brother, who likely felt that own status at school as some sort of ‘masculine’ front runner, was threatened by my very existence. Perhaps he felt cursed and intimidated to have had a younger sibling in the same school. A bookish brother who took education seriously, a kid whose interests and personality were so opposite to his own conforming efforts.

The downside of my parents indifference played out when it came time to go on to university. They were ‘true Americans’, dedicated to ‘getting ahead’, climbing the purely economic ladder that might lead to full middle class membership. At their stage in the great game, given their own origins, both lacked a serious understanding of the value of education. The few resources they allocated in that direction went to their first born son who needed ‘shoring up’ to make it through college. Fortunately, I had been an early morning paperboy since age 14 and “religiously” deposited every cent of my meager earnings into a savings account. The last year in high school I received a basic state scholarship that fit neatly into my successful application to the Agricultural College at Cornell. I had no idea how leaving Niagara Falls to be immersed in the life at an institution of the caliber of Cornell would impact my own evolving understanding of the world and my place in it.

The writers whose books helped shape a sense of self capable of transcending a social structure intentionally engineered to reinforce the status quo, initially were all directly or indirectly introduced by teachers, beginning in secondary school and greatly expanded at Cornell. I still have a copy of ‘Walden’ given to me upon request on my 14th birthday by a grandmother. The essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson constituted my first exposure to books of a philosophical nature. No doubt they both contributed much to a strong component of self reliance.

At Cornell, as I began to confront the psychological tortures related to my repressed homosexual feelings and desires, I sought out “the literature”, which meant both the scientific books on sexuality and the literary works with a homosexual theme. Except for the Kinsey studies, the academic literature I came across was consistently evil in intent. In retrospect, the statistics relating to “homosexual encounters” revealed by the Kinsey studies must have at least slightly shaken the foundations of the American agenda of a bullying, “god given”, perpetual heterosexual dictatorship. The frequency of male homosexual contacts revealed by employing scientific data collecting methodology, helped scuttle the mythology that contributed to the isolation and persecution of the gay population. And no doubt worked its way into the consciousness of the nation, helping to build momentum & trigger the possibilities for change.

In the body of ancient literature that has survived, Plato’s “Symposium” stands alone as a resonantly powerful, yet simply stated declaration on the nature & character of male homosexuality as it was experienced, understood and incorporated into the ethical framework of classical Greek society. Discovering it (however that happened) certainly was the needed “shot in the arm”, in my struggles to purge the self-oppressive nonsense about homosexuality that permeated my society and infected gay people with deep self-oppressive psychic wounds. Such was the power of the religiously based taboo on homosexuality that It wasn’t until 1924, more than two thousand three hundred years later, that the French writer Andre Gide challenged the accrued negativity that infected Western socieities’ attitude. Corydon, a treatise on homosexuality by Andre Gide’s, challenged the accrued negativity that infected the views of Western society. Corydon public edition of Andre Gide’s treatise on homosexuality, “Corydon” was published in France. In the form of a Socratic dialogue, it echoed and expanded upon the ideas set down by Plato.

Andre Gide, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown were the primary writers whose works transformed me during my undergraduate years. My usual approach to authors, composers and artists who enter my life in a very deep and intimate way, is to attempt an understanding of all their creative achievements, from beginning to end. Once I had absorbed a certain amount of knowledge and in some cases even an emotional/intellectual bonding, I would seek out a biography or in the case of a literary writer, their autobiography, journals, letters.

Marcuse & Brown both belonged to that extremely rare category of intellectual thinkers – visionary geniuses. They see the larger picture, making sense of the contradictions of ‘reality’, and from the despair of their insights into the evolution of civilization, not only make it clear that we are at the crossroads that will either lead us toward self annhiliation or ……. offering Brown, a classicist and social philosopher, Marcuse, a neo-Marxist philosopher & sociologist. Although their reference points constituted a somewhat different tangent on the evolution of human society, they shared the ability to look deeper into the psychological undercurrents that has brought civilization to the brink of self annihilation. Often expanding upon the insights into human psychology as theorized by Freud in his final years. Both men basically concluded that the manifestations of sexual repression were at the heart of the dangerous path based upon multiple brainwashing strategies. Sexual repression being an attempt to suppress much of our genetic instinctual evolutionary biological heritage, forcing us to conform to behaviors that separate body & mind ultimately precipitating both neurosis and psychosis on a national scale. Once one can grasp a basic understanding of the larger picture of human civilization, particularly the turning points such as the role self awareness played in our ego formation and the evolution of religion from several very early variations (each of which involved forms of “nature worship”, to the 3 Ibrahimic belief systems that elevated man into a state of megalomania ( giving him domain over the earth and all its creatures)

Now a days, the consequences of the enormous environmental destruction wrought by Homo sapiens is a major part of our daily news reportage. If we read a few media sources (not completely dedicated to maintaining the status quo), it’s abundantly clear that just about all countries, no matter what political system they claim to subscribe to, permit corporations to rape the earth for profits on a massive scale, often with little or no accountability. After all, exploiting them is “in our national interest” if a country’s political machine measures “success” by perpetual growth of the GNP. Our alienation from nature (and our humble place in it), are main preconditions that allowed us to turn our backs on these crimes. Back in the 1960’s when Brown & Marcuse were writing the books that laid out the path of self destruction, our awareness of “climate change” (call it what it is – increasing the earth’s temperature through human activity) and the science behind it was not even on the drawing board. Even over population wasn’t directly mentioned. The probability of nuclear war and the escalation of biological warfare term

had reached the conclusion that In 1968 Theodor Rozak wrote that “together they were the as major social theorists among the disaffiliated young of Western Europe and America.” Dennis Altman’s “Homosexual:Oppression& Liberation”1972greatly expanded upon

Andre Gide was a writer in a more literary sense of the word: a novelist, diarist, humanist. The majority of his writings are heavily focused on self. Offering his insights through introspective outpourings of personal truth. For his time ( ) he was by far the most honest and candid writer about homosexuality in the entire world. And to date, he is still the only openly homosexual writer to be given a Nobel Prize (1947). While Brown & Marcuse helped me understand the repercussions of sexual repression in relation to civilization, Gide provided the companion I needed in the absence of a friend capable of providing the positive reinforcement I needed as well as an example of an open self affirming life. Those were the ‘voices’ I refer to in my first paragraph.

Simultaneously, as I attained a better sense of my own intellectual bearings, I selectively welcomed new waves of mankind’s surviving and present day intellectual achievments – through all the arts. For me that meant classical music etc ancient civilizations and their world view as reflected in their art and writings.

It’s all a bit hard to believe that because of the internet I can access actual film clips of those who lived during the first half of the 20th Century. How wonderful it would be to see film footage of Plato (and every other Greek writer!). At lea or even Ralph Waldo Emerson & Henry David Thoreau

Given the prejudices of the time, as well as the dynamics of my class and family background, together with what seemed to me to be the obvious need to initiate various projects related to creating a gay liberation movement, the path seemed a logical one. My camera gave me a way of recording the history of the Movement that I was part of, even though those efforts were never really appreciated at the time. At least I had the foresight to keep taking pictures! Ironically, most observers seem to reduce my life to someone taking a lot of photos of gay liberation events. But, if fact, I was often at the center of organizing the events, and had even been the founder, or one of the founders of the group initiating the event. That is the way it was during the first 6-7 years of the Canadian gay movement, and of course as well, with anything related to my Glad Day Bookshops, especially during the decade when we fought against censorship in Canada.

Eventually, my activism evolved into my livelihood, a career as a gay bookseller.

Gradually photography provided me with a way of responding to my lifelong fascination with nature, archeology, as well as the many cultures I explored over the decades. Alas, for so many years, my life was simply far too busy to spend the time necessary to print most of the images that I’ve taken. The days of photographic darkrooms are not missed when you consider the amount of labour involved in producing decent prints.

Now that I am retired from my 30 years in the book business, I have a bit more time to examine the massive number of negatives taken since I first pushed the shutter button of a camera. I only wish I had either taken my photographic inclinations more seriously, or had had more encouragement to hone in, both my skills and philosophy of photography.

My photographic endeavors began at around age 12 with a basic wind up motorized Brownie 8^mm. In 1967, while attending Cornell University, I took a course in Black & White still photography and created a short photo essay on Toronto for my final project. Our class was supplied with Rolli twin-reflex cameras, which took 120 film rolls. Upon graduation, and as a present to myself, I bought a medium format Bronica camera before moving to Canada where I had been hired as a Research Assistant in the Medical Sciences division of the University of Toronto. During my first year in Canada, I mostly took photos around my Kensington Market neighborhood.

In early 1970, after the University of Toronto fired me for my role in founding the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA), I took off on my first trip abroad. It lasted nearly nine months, during which time I managed to hitchhike from Luxembourg to Sicily, on through Greece and over into Southwest Turkey (which initiated my lifelong fascination with the Muslim world).

On the return journey, I spent nearly three months in the then Communist countries of Eastern Europe. ( I even managed to visit Czechoslovakia the year after the Prague Spring invasion by the Soviet army). A selection of these early photos is gradually being scanned, worked with in Photoshop, and uploaded to this website.

I think many of these photos could not have been taken by anybody other than myself. Certainly even some of the more National Geographic type shots have the ‘stamp’ of my eye, and would likely never pass the editorial cleansing process to which National Geographic photos are invariably subjected. Of course, their self censoring tendencies, reflect the dominant concepts of ‘political correctness’ in observance during any particular decade, whereas my eye was, and still is free to see – with my camera to record – what I personally find interesting and of aesthetic value.

Bottom Photo: Taken at Allegheny State Park, New York, by Heidi E. Mueller. 1964 or 1965

Author’s Biography

Born on August 9, 1946, in Niagara Falls, New York, I studied biological sciences at Cornell University, graduating in January, 1969.

When I was a sophomore in university, I finally confronted my homosexuality after years of denial. At the time, I was fortunate enough to read various authors who helped me gain a political and social perspective on the oppression of gay people in North American society. In essence, reading was my salvation and it played a critical role in forming my own radical analysis of sexuality. Just as importantly, it pointed me towards what would become my career … as a gay bookseller.

However, it wasn’t until the spring of 1968 that I took the formal step of acting on my new found convictions and create a gay student organization at Cornell. I had considerable angst, nevertheless, about what that would mean for my own future.

During the following decade, by using the positive reinforcement from that original activism, I went on – in Canada and again in the USA (in 1979) – to form a number of gay organizations and institutions that I knew were necessary to build an alternative political and social movement.

Upon graduation from Cornell I found work as a research assistant to a Physiologist at the University of Toronto. In the fall of 1969, after living in Canada for some 9 months, I decided to go ahead with plans to found a second gay student group at U of T. This resulted in my dismissal from the staff … at the bequest of the Chairman of the Department! The UTHA (University of Toronto Homophile Association), being new and not particularly political in its mandate, did nothing to protest this. My response was to embark upon my first trip abroad, an event that would create in me a lifelong wanderlust to see the world.

In November 1970, after an 8 month hitchhiking tour of Western and Eastern Europe, as well as the Western half of Anatolia, I returned to Toronto to find work. In late November or early December, I then took the first steps toward creating Glad Day Bookshop as my second project to help build Toronto’s fledgling Gay Movement. However, I was still a few years away (starting in 1974) from making the decision to become a serious, full-time gay bookseller. By 1979 the business was thriving such a way that I decided to open a second shop in Boston, Massachusetts.

In 1985, the Canadian government under then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney made it a priority to censor gay and lesbian materials entering Canada. The seizures of books, magazines, films, and even greeting cards escalated to the point where it became clear that the authorities were determined to put Glad Day out of business.

In 1986, Glad Day orchestrated a court challenge over the banning of The Joy of Gay Sex by Dr. Charles Silverstein and Edmund White. We won the case, but our success only further infuriated Canada Customs, which simply increased its assault on the bookstore using every trick in the book. By 1991, I had tired both of the unending harassment by the Canadian Government as well as the regular commutes between Toronto and Boston. I sold the Toronto operation to John Bruce Scythes that year.

John ran the store for the next 21 years. In 2012, he sold the Toronto Glad Day to a group of gay and lesbian investors. At 42 years of age, it may be the longest surviving gay institution in the world, let alone on that is a gay bookstore.

In the year 2000, the Boston shop lost its premises to developers and we were unable to find an affordable new location after many months of searching. At that point, I decided it was time to leave the book business and devote myself to other projects. John Mitzel, Glad Day Boston’s manager for more than 15 years, then went on to open his own gay and lesbian bookshop, Calamus Bookstore.

For the next few years, I continued to follow my wanderlust needs as well as devote myself to botanical and ornithological interests. Since 2005, I have been spending a fair amount of time in Morocco, where I am developing a photographic gallery, Dar Balmira, devoted to both my photographs of Morocco as well as the restoration of early photos documenting this Muslim country’s history.

This website’s initial purpose is to make available a large number of my own photographs, beginning with the early modern Gay Movement and moving on to images taken during my many travels abroad. However, this brief biography needs to be greatly expanded, and I hope it will grow to include more personal history … as well as my ideas about a multitude of subjects. With those intentions, this website begins as a visual statement of this Outsider’s photographic odyssey.

everything I felt and thought is understood in relation to the natural world . If fact I very consciously saw my own life not as some ‘soul’, who if he obeyed some rules laid out in a ‘holy book’, might, at the end, be transported to a vague but privileged eternal ‘afterlife’, but rather as a single individual with a humble ego and little interest in either power or material wealth. And like all individuals, as someone who might make their life count, having meaning in relation to the ongoing process of evolution.

Growing up in a cultural backwater like Niagara Falls for the most part did not help. There was the natural beauty of the area itself, especially around the two cascades and even more so the gorge on the border between Canada and the USA. As well, in retrospect it does seem amazing to me is how many fine teachers I encountered at every level of my ordinary secondary school education.

Being from a lower middle class family has its potential advantages. Not slowly taking on a sense of entitlement the way young people from upper levels of class based society usually do. Not molded into obedient minions of the political and industrial state apparatus as seemed the path of most middle class youth. As a lower middle class kid I was subjected to less programming and therefore was granted a larger window through which to potentially steer my own course.

The best thing I can say about my parents during those formative years of my early adolescence, was that they basically let me be. No pressures to conform from them! I must have seemed such an odd ball young teenager! Learning to bake, developing a vegetable garden, keeping caterpillars and cocoons in my bedroom, sitting for hours not just listening to, but often either singing along with or pretending to conduct performances of Wagner and Strauss operas. The unrelenting bullying, often tinged with physical violence emanated from my older brother who likely felt that own status at school as some sort of ‘masculine’ front runner, was threatened by me. He was cursed and intimidated to have a sibling two years younger, whose academic performance was in the top layer and whose interests and personality were so opposite to his own conforming efforts.

The downside of my parents indifference played out when it came time to go on to university. They were ‘true Americans’, dedicated to ‘getting ahead’, climbing the purely economic ladder that might lead to full middle class membership. At their stage in the great game, given their own origins, they really had no serious understanding of the value of education. The few resources they allocated in that direction went to their first born son who needed ‘shoring up’ to make it through college. Fortunately I had been an early morning paperboy since age 14 and almost religiously deposited every cent of my meager earnings into a savings account. The last year in high school I received a basic state scholarship that fit neatly into my successful application to the Agricultural College at Cornell. I had no idea how leaving Niagara Falls to be immersed in the life at an institution of the caliber of Cornell would impact my own evolving understanding of the world and my place in it.

The writers whose books helped shape a sense of self capable of transcending a social structure intentionally engineered to reinforce the status quo, were all directly or indirectly introduced by teachers, beginning in secondary school and greatly expanded at Cornell. I still have a copy of ‘Walden’ given to me upon request on my 14th birthday by a grandmother. The essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson constituted my first exposure to books of a philosophical nature. No doubt they both contributed much to my own sense of self with its strong component of self reliance. At Cornell as I began to confront my tortured repressed homosexual feelings and desires, I sought to read ‘the literature’, which meant both the scientific books on sexuality and the literary works on a homosexual theme. Except for the Kinsey studies, the academic literature I came across was, for the most part, firmly evil in its intent. Part of the predominantly American agenda of heterosexual dictatorship which the statistics of the Kinsey studies must have seemed to resonate the possibilities for change triggered by the challenges presented by scientific truth.

In the history of literature that has survived, Plato’s Symposium stands alone as a resonantly powerful, yet simply stated declaration on the nature & character of male homosexuality as it was incorporated into the ethical framework of classical Greek society. from the time it was written somewhere between 385-370 BC until Andre Gide published ‘Corydon’ his treatise on homosexuality (in the form of Socratic dialogues in honor of Plato’s ‘Symposium’) in a public edition in 1924. [Yes, in England John Addington Symonds published two essays now a days referred to as works ‘in defense of homosexuality’ but both were only privately published in very limited editions in 1883 and 1891. In recent decades endless reprints have become widely available, however their value in the arena of public opinion was almost nonexistent when first published.]

Andre Gide, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown were the writers whose works transformed me during my undergraduate years. My usual approach to authors, composers and artists who enter my life in a very deep and intimate way, is to attempt an understanding of all their creative achievements, from beginning to end. Once I had absorbed a certain amount of knowledge and in some cases even an emotional/intellectual bonding, I would often seek out a biography or in the case of a literary writer, their autobiography, journals, letters.

Marcuse & Brown were philosophers, Brown a classicist and social philosopher, Marcuse a neo-Marxist philosopher & sociologist. In 1968 Theodor Rozak wrote that “together they were the as major social theorists among the disaffiliated young of Western Europe and America.”

[Yes, in England John Addington Symonds published two essays, works referred to as ‘in defense of homosexuality’, but both were only privately published in very limited editions in 1883 and 1891. In recent decades endless reprints have become widely available, however their value in the arena of public opinion was almost nonexistent when first published.]

Eventually, my activism evolved into my livelihood, a career as a gay bookseller.

Bottom Photo: Taken at Allegheny State Park, New York, by Heidi E. Mueller. 1964 or 1965

Author’s Biography

Born on August 9, 1946, in Niagara Falls, New York, I studied biological sciences at Cornell University, graduating in January, 1969.