Glad Day Bookshop

Glad Day Bookshop opened in Toronto in 1970, at a time when homosexuality had only just been partially decriminalized in Canada and openly stocking gay and lesbian literature could draw police attention, customs seizures and obscenity charges. It is widely cited as one of the first, and longest continuously operating, LGBTQ bookstores in the world, predating better-known counterparts in other cities and serving for decades as one of the few places in Toronto where queer readers could reliably find books that reflected their own lives.

Censorship fights and survival

The store spent much of its early history fighting Canada Customs, which routinely seized shipments of gay and lesbian books and magazines at the border under obscenity provisions, forcing Glad Day and similar stores into repeated legal battles simply to stock their shelves. Glad Day moved several times over the decades before settling on Church Street in the heart of the Church-Wellesley Village, and in more recent years expanded into a bar and event space alongside its bookselling, outlasting most of the independent bookstores, queer or otherwise, that opened around the same era.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Glad Day Bookshop
• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Gay and Lesbian Literature in Canada

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