Glad Day Bookshop Toronto 1970-1991-2000
Introduction for Glad Day Bookshop Toronto Gallery
These are photos either taken inside or outside the store at its three Yonge Street locations. A few pictures in ‘The Body Politic Gallery’ were taken in the unheated shed at 4 Kensington Ave. The store began as a combined mail order service (with a small catalog) and as a bookseller’s table at various gay meetings. I simply carried the books around from one meeting space to the next in a knapsack.
Glad Day’s Toronto first location was 65 Kendal Ave. which also served as the address for The Body Politic. From there, we moved to 4 Kensington Ave., where The Body Politic and Glad Day shared the shed connected to the back of the house. GATE also had its first meetings at this address. Following the media uproar over Gerald Hannon’s first article on intergenerational gay male relationships our (gay) landlords ejected us (along with the gay movement). John Scythes and I responded by purchasing an old house at 139 Seaton St. in Cabbagetown, south of Dundas.
The Seaton Street house was a unique phenomena: it was run as a gay male commune, a meeting space, office and layout area for The Body Politic and the next incarnation of Glad Day Bookshop. Display shelves were built in the long narrow hallways on the main floor and customers rang the doorbell to get in. In the basement, we built a work room for the newspaper. It was here we also began collecting the seed materials that gradually evolved into the Canadian and Lesbian Gay Archives. Things took a major turn when I left The Body Politic and made the decision to become a professional bookseller. There was still a long road ahead before the two Glad Day Bookshops (Toronto and Boston) could lay claim to being the serious literary institutions they evolved into during the 1980s and 90s.
Some writers and artists whose presence graced Glad Day Toronto: Edward Albee, William S. Burroughs, Quentin Crisp, John Rechy, Sir John Gielgud, Alan Hollinghurst, Christopher Isherwood, Yves Navarre, Jane Rule, David Sweetman, Colm Toibin, Michel Tremblay, Jeffrey Weeks, Edmund White, and Jeannette Winterson.
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Glad Day Bookshop: Origins
After coming out during my sophomore year at Cornell University (1965), the world as it had been up until that decision, began to turn upside down. It took some time to develop an understanding of the new world I was entering, but natural curiosity drove me toward an ever greater investigation of the gay world and, ultimately, of my place in 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.
While still in high school, 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 the German language, 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 believing, 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. In most spheres of American society it also almost guaranteed career failure were it to become public. As I later came to realize, this also made homosexuality both quite challenging and exciting.
For a short time I even sought out psychological counseling at the University Health clinic. I was assigned to a crusty old shrink and I suppose if anything, my experience with him pushed me down the path of activism as I slowly pieced together a radical analysis of what was wrong with the way my society saw homosexuality.
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 him, 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 certain writers, 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 of his time. As well, Gide actually received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947, probably the only known queer to have been so recognized, before or since.
I read his novels and then found my way to his journals and autobiographical writings. For me, he was an inspiration, my 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, the subtitle of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History grabbed my attention while browsing in a bookshop. In turn, Brown’s work led me to Herbert Marcuse (especially important is his Eros & Civilization) and both gave me a deep analysis of sexual repression and insights into the path to liberation that I had been searching for.
As my ‘gay consciousness’ developed, I naturally became interested in the larger picture, in trying to understand 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 homosexuality 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. Those visits obviously helped plant the seeds of what became 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 began emerging – initially from New York, soon followed by publications from major cities in North America, Europe and Australia. New York activists, some of whom were experienced journalists, began writing accounts of the previous year. This phenomenon quickly snowballed in a publishing hub 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 a decision to leave Germany and be present at his funeral. In retrospect I came to see my decision as a mistake. 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 an apartment.
In the year I was absent not only had the new gay lit started to appear, but also gay organizations began to multiply exponentially all over North America as well as in many European countries and in Australia. In Toronto meetings of the UTHA had become overcrowded, mostly with townies anxious to plug into the new social movement. Soon after I returned George Hislop, a Toronto resident who regularly attended UTHA meetings, made the decision to form a general community gay organization he named 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 four.
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 my reading habits were still more linked to New York, 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 these 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 the publishing world in Canada. Large American and British publishers either had their own operations in Toronto, or were represented by Canadian publishers.
All the gay titles were therefore theoretically 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’ 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 create my own book service. After a few phone calls I realized it wouldn’t take much capital 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 before paying the bills. With the exchange rate between U.S. & Canadian dollars almost always placing Canadian currency measurably below U.S. currency, hardcover books were very expensive items in Canada, so initially I could only afford very few.
My own knowledge of gay history, culture & 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 were announced, those were added to my little inventory. Without an actual retail space, how did I sell the books?
In the beginning it was out of a knapsack that 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 scandal/sex newspaper, Tab. It was essentially heterosexual in character and very much a cheap exploitative 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 uptight Toronto Star and 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.
William Blake’s “Glad Day” and his impact on me
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. It depicts a naked man dancing in the spectral light of a rainbow, with the colours spread out behind him, almost as if the 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 prints 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 enthralled by the opportunity to hear his presentations. Blake loomed large in his own inspiration and philosophy, & the week deepened my appreciation of both men. My German professor at the time, Jack Goldman, was heavily involved in the movement against the Vietnam war and worked at a small Ithaca based press that published anti-war literature. It was named the Glad Day Press.
I have read that Blake’s painting may have been inspired by a prison break, making the image 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, many of the original copies of Blake’s books.
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 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.
