It’s a bookstore.
It’s a bar.
It’s wheelchair accessible and it’s most definitely glad to see you.
I tend to bring young queers who need cheering up to Glad Day’s current 499 Church Street location in Toronto’s Gay Village. The space is practically lab designed to emit the distilled ethos of optimistic gay pride. A front facade of glass under a jaunty awning, Glad Day’s interior can be lovingly described as a cross between a gay student union governed by the power of collective bargaining and a bar where no one has ever wanted to have sex in the bathroom. People do, of course, fuck in those washrooms, and Glad Day has actually been governed by a collective of 23 people since 2012.
There are posters on every surface, the daily specials are drawn on a chalkboard with surprisingly vivid artistic skill, and the central array of chairs and tables is ringed by display shelves for the most eye-catching books they have in stock. More books are kept in the back rooms, along with the kegs, extra overdose response kits, and the bushels of free condoms and period products they fling at customers. It’s a homey little living room with surprisingly good poutine, a well-intentioned bartender who forgets I’m there when he serves my partner, and the worst hot chocolate I’ve ever had. I love Glad Day the way a child loves animals; distraughtly.
65 Kendal Avenue
Photograph of 65 Kendal Ave. (2023), first physical location for Glad Day Bookshop. Atticus Hawk.
Glad Day Bookshop was founded in November 1970 by a disgruntled white gay man named Jearld Moldenhauer. Still smoldering about the University of Toronto firing him from his department of physiology RA-ship in 1970 (ostensibly for starting Canada’s first gay student organization, The University of Toronto Homophile Association), Jearld started selling post-Stonewall gay liberationist books. He began by hawking out of his backpack at parties and rallies while doing a little literary mail order work on the side. Expanding beyond his backpack, he formally set up the first physical Glad Day shop in his annex area apartment at 65 Kendal Avenue. A year later, Jearld and other members of the Toronto Gay Alliance formed a collective and began publishing the gay liberationist monthly magazine, The Body Politic, out of the same space.
A literary lover and dramatic queer to the core, Jearld named the shop as a reference to a print by William Blake (1757-1827), a poet and artist largely ignored by contemporaries of his time. Blake’s print “Albion Rose” (c.1774-76) depicts a naked white man standing on a hillside, opening his arms to the viewer, surrounded by radiant sunbeams, sporting a beatific smile. It was identified for ages as “Glad Day” by Blake biographer Alexander Gilchrist (1828-61) who thought it went with a Shakespear line from Romeo and Juliet about a “jocund” (i.e. glad) day. However, an engraving of the piece from 1800 was uncovered with an inscription referencing the figure as “Albion the Giant,” a character in Blake’s personal mythological world.
4 Kensington Avenue
Photograph of 4 Kensington Ave. (2023), second location for Glad Day Bookshop. Atticus Hawk.
In 1972ish, Jearld and Glad Day left 65 Kendal Avenue for 4 Kensington Avenue. Owned by Gay couple Amerigo Marras and Suber Donald Corley, the property housed The Centre for Experimental Art and Communication on the ground floor and included an unfortunately unheated shed in the back where The Body Politic (TBP) and Glad Day did their business. Accounts differ on what happened next. According to Jearld, he and his roommates were evicted from their Kensington digs as a response to a controversial article published in TBP by George Hannon in 1977, but other sources place the move from Kensington around 1973.
139 Seaton Street
In 1973ish (the more likely situation), Jearld and his friend John Scythes (remember this name, kids), purchased the relatively run down duplex at 139 Seaton Street. With Glad Day’s first sign (a quaint little board hand painted by Jearld himself) hanging out front, the house functioned as a gay men’s commune. Regular meetings of the Gay Alliance Towards Equality (GATE) and TBP took place in the front room. Glad Day’s literary offerings were displayed on shelves lining the first floor, and would-be customers entered by ringing the doorbell.
By 1974, things were getting a bit cramped in the commune, and TBP members wanted a separate office. However, in May 1974, TBP meeting minutes show that the members did not want Jearld running Glad Day out of their new 193 Carlton offices. A split had formed, and Jearld was on his own.
Glad Day, 1974-2016
The timeline is a bit slippery, but it would seem that Glad Day Bookshop set up its first commercial space sometime after 1974 just north of the Toronto Reference Library at 4 Collier Street. In 1979, Jearld opened a Glad Day Bookshop store in Boston, Massachusetts with dreams of expanding the brand. However, the story of the Boston Glad Day and its casual arson situation is an escapade reserved for another time. By 1982, Glad Day Toronto had moved down to 648A Yonge Street. In 1985, it inched its way down the block to 598A Yonge Street. And there the shop stayed for the tumultuous decades to come. In 1991, Jearld sold the shop to his friend and former commune roommate, John Scythes — an instrumental support worker during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic with an oddly encyclopedic knowledge of syphilis and an absolutely real plumber’s license.
By the late 2000s, Glad Day, like many independent and queer bookstores, felt the pinch of the recession, book sales shifting to online retailers like Amazon, and a general shift of gay consumer purchasing habits. Large mainstream retailers also began carrying LGBTQ+ titles and offering them at prices that just couldn’t be matched. Montreal’s L’Androgyne closed in 2002. Toronto’s This Ain’t the Rosedale Library left The Village in 2008 and closed in 2010. New York’s Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, previously the oldest gay bookstore in North America, closed in 2009. In early 2012, John put the store up for sale; he’d been averaging about eight sales a day and couldn’t afford to keep it.
Within a month, a group of 23 local queers had banded together and purchased the shop. Brought together by English teacher Michael Erikson, the collective quickly decided to position Glad Day as a vital piece of queer community space. In 2016, with sales at the shop on the up but still not enough to cover payroll and rent, the Glad Day collective began scouting out new locations with new revenue possibilities. With the goal of a community hub in the form of a coffee shop/bar that also sold books, the collective knew they needed an accessible space. Every iteration of Glad Day since the 1970s required customers to climb a set of stairs. But accessibility is not just about having a book delivered to your house; just as Glad Day is not just about buying a book. It’s about hanging out in the store and swapping in-jokes next to the pornos. Queer businesses aren’t about what they’re selling but the connection that comes from being in a queer space where that selling happens. If you can’t get in the door of a business, you sure as heck can’t participate in anything that happens inside.
499 Church Street
When the ground floor coffee shop and bar on 499 Church Street came up for rent, the Glad Day owners raised $50K in crowdfunding support, borrowed thousands more, and all chipped in again to cover the rest. The new space was three times larger, already licensed, and already outfitted with an accessible front door and washroom. By fall 2016, renovations were complete, and the owners, their friends, and their friends’ friends dragged the entire stock of the 598A location to Church Street.
When New York’s Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop (est. 1967) closed in 2009, Glad Day Bookshop became the oldest still operating queer bookstore in the world. I don’t know about you, but that little factoid strikes more fear in me than pride. While I do enjoy the sensation of stepping onto hallowed gay literary soil when I sashay my tush through the accessible glass plates of Glad Day’s Church Street facade, I feel a lurch of anxiety deep in my gut. I can’t help but think of the store as a whole, with its queer game nights, weekly Drag Race watch parties, and gender-neutral pronoun merch as something of a fever dream of wishful thinking. A happy world of queer connection, liberationist political urges, and the fantasy of people reading fruity IRL books often enough to support an entire business. A place where everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts. But is that really so wrong? Social isolation among queers is a serious issue. We can feel simultaneously too queer and not queer enough, afraid to take up space or demand access to the ones we supposedly already have. Glad Day Bookshop is a center of social connection for queers in Toronto. It’s not being misgendered (for once) and watching a BIPOC drag show on a casual Tuesday night. It’s not everything, but it’s something; emotional, connective, a very Glad Day.
Atticus Hawk (they/he) is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research looks at the role of Leatherdykes in the creation of medical knowledge and harm-reduction practices for fat, trans and disabled bodies in kink.