Was your non-committal New Year’s Resolution to “read more”?

Did you join a queer book club and silently sob at the price of the newest gay paperbacks?

Are your internal organs begging you to take up a hobby with a somewhat lower stroke risk?

Fear no more!

The Toronto Public Library has a dedicated Pride Collection for you. Gone are the days of wondering if Moira Fowley’s Eyes Guts Throat Bones is too viscerally skin peeling for circulation, Jason Purcell’s Swollening is too turgid for the stacks or Black on Black by Daniel Black is too, well, you get the idea.

While all 100 branches of the Toronto Public Library have some queer material (beyond just the gloriously fruity profession of shushing people for money) the Yorkville Branch at 22 Yorkville Ave. houses the largest collection of 2SLGBTQIA+ items in one physical location. Originally built as one of Toronto’s many Carnegie Libraries in 1907, the branch houses everything from Robin Gow’s searingly trans middle-grade novel Dear Mothman and Jenny Frame’s lesbian vampire romp Hunger For You to Juno Roche’s quenchingly informative Queer Sex: A Trans and Non-binary Guide to Intimacy, Pleasure and Relationships and Daniel Kibblesmith’s delightfully festive Santa’s Husband. You can spend months on end languishing in the luxurious cornucopia of effete articles, editorials, encyclopedias, dissertations, poetry, prose, pulp and, of course, DVD box sets of more Buffy IP than anyone can shake a stake at.

Now, the TPL Pride Collection has a bit of a mysterious past. We don’t have any records of when it officially started becoming a thing. Previously known as the LGBT Collection, it gently grew in the Yorkville branch from at least the 80s onward. Perhaps it was a coincidence that several of Glad Day Bookshop’s historical locations were within walking distance (one was even right down the street at 4 Collier Street from 1974-1982) but it seems highly likely that this was more than a “they were just roommates” situation.

As the Pride Collection expanded, the branch librarians took it to Toronto Pride to get the good gay word out. According to longtime Toronto Public Library typepad blog contributor and for sure real TPL librarian “Bill V.” in a 2016 Pride celebration post:

For many years in the 1990s and early 2000s the Library had a table at Pride where myself and many others gamely, albeit somewhat naively, tried to give out book lists and promote the collection. But, as more than one person said …“Do you see pockets on this outfit?”

Following that impeccable logic, Bill and his fellow lavender librarians grabbed one of the TPL’s two bookmobiles and marched it in the Pride parade proper along with the TPL staff Pride Alliance and their union Local CUPE 4948. The gloriously retrofitted book bearing bus delighted parade-goers while they chuckled along with the pun-tastic signs the marchers trotted with them.

TPL Pride Alliance members march with Bookmobile at 2013 Toronto Pride, TPL Pride Alliance. 

Formally established in 2012 but clearly active in one form or another before that, the TPL Pride Alliance is an important part of servicing the employed library gays who make that sweet gay agenda a literary affair. Mutually supported by the TPL and the 4948 union, the employee-run committee of queer and allied TPL staff advocates for an inclusive, respectful and diverse workspace and environment for all. In addition to hosting the annual Pride all-staff rager every June, the Pride Alliance was a heavy hitter in the room booking controversy that played out when the TPL’s top librarian (known as the City Librarian) decided to play the “we must protect free speech” card when questioned about letting an anti-trans organization host a well-known twitter-banned TERF (who shall remain nameless in this post for the sake of our SEO) for a public talk in a library room in October 2019. Simply put, the Toronto queers rioted.

To make a long story short and spare us all the retelling (click here for Xtra’s thorough explainer on the situation), let’s go over just some of the immediate backlash the Toronto Public Library experienced when the queers got wind of what was going down:

– Pride Toronto threatened to sever all ties with the TPL, stop hosting events at library branches and ban them from the Pride Parade all together

– A group of Toronto and Ontario authors and members of the literary community boycotted the TPL

– A change.org petition to stop the talk gained nearly 10,000 signatures

– The 519, the longstanding Toronto-based 2SLGBTQIA+ community resource centre released an open letter imploring the TPL to reconsider platforming anti-trans rhetoric

– Well-known Drag Storytime queens announced they would be pulling out of TPL hosted events

– Even the conservative Mayor of Toronto, John Tory, released a statement expressing his “disappointment” that the TPL had refused to cancel the event

Despite all this, the City Librarian doubled down, and the talk went ahead on October 29th, 2019 at the Palmerston branch. Hundreds protested peacefully. They held “read-ins” of trans and Two-Spirit authors and chanted for trans rights. Near the end, a few small jeers were shouted at talk attendees as they left the branch. And of course, the police presence panicked. Cops locked the library doors an hour before the branch was supposed to close, trapping some protesters inside. The Toronto Police Service claims trapped protesters were allowed to leave via the back door but given that the trapped protesters weren’t able to leave at all until after the library officially closed at 8:30pm, this claim seems a touch incongruent.

On the same day as the event, Toronto city councillors Kristyn Wong-Tam and Mike Layton put forward motion 11.14 to review the TPL’s space renting methods. The motion passed. On November 14, the City Librarian reported that the TPL board had met and would be working with the city to review their room renting policies. On February 16, 2020 the City Librarian released a carefully crafted statement addressing the “room booking controversy” claiming the TPL would be working towards “rebuilding bridges” with the queer community and begging any organizations or individuals to submit program proposals for the library. As emphasized by the furious commenters, the post lacked accountability, an actual apology, or any concrete measures and was produced without consulting the affected queer community. However, the post repeatedly thanks the TPL staff Pride Alliance for coming on in an advisory role to presumably do the leg work of “rebuilding” the gay library bridges in question.

And then the pandemic hit. Pride Toronto’s threats of banning the TPL held no weight. Advocates and protesters turned towards the immediate crisis and focused on staying in, staying safe, and keeping each other alive.

Over a year later, the city retained the services of a queer consulting firm to conduct a series of stakeholder focus groups, discussions and surveys. On March 3, 2021 the report was produced. It directly states that queer, and specifically trans and Two-Spirit, members of the library community are exceedingly vulnerable and that they feel silenced, disregarded and unsafe in the Toronto Public Library. The report called for the implementation of mandatory queer inclusivity training for all city facility staff, but the meat of the text is devoted to a standardized and comprehensive set of procedures for identifying and handling city facility/space requests from hate and/or discriminatory groups. Simply put, it is now much harder to play the free speech card to host your anti-trans chat in the Toronto Public Library.

Of course, life is not always so simple. The City Librarian is a single person who has remained in power to this day. She has regularly refused to apologize, step down or acknowledge the contents of the March 2021 report. In fact, a 2022 letter pushing back on the Toronto Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (2SLGBTQ+) Advisory Committee’s request for cooperation reiterates the City Librarian as the final and sole authority on all room booking at the TPL. Now, that’s a bit too much power for a single person, especially someone making over 250K a year. The City Librarian is hired, fired and overseen by the Board of the Toronto Public Library, which, shockingly, is something you can just apply to. While vacancies for public members won’t be available until 2026, each of the members of the TPL Board can be emailed, phoned or snail mailed. And if you happen to find yourself in the Toronto Reference Library at 789 Yonge Street at 6pm on the fourth Monday of each month, heck, you might be able to chat with these representatives of your public library service in person.

Because reading is what?

A Fundamental Human Right.

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.