LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

Do you know any classical history?" asks John Scythes, owner of Toronto's Glad Day Bookshop. "Have you ever heard of general Pyrrhus, a Roman general? This general Pyrrhus, P-Y-R-R-H-U-S, you can look him up on the Internet, he won a battle, a quite important battle, but he basically lost the war. Do you understand?"

Scythes is talking about his recent battles with the Ontario Film Review Board but this pedagogical detour is not entirely unexpected. An advocate of alternative theories of AIDS, he's known for his stern professorial air.

"So it's a Pyrrhic victory?" I venture.

"Now that's a smart young man.

No use putting that in a journal for young fags because they won't understand."

No, probably not. For one thing, Pyrrhus wasn't a Roman. He was a king of Epirus who fought the Romans. Still, as Scythes says, "it's a good old phrase for exactly all this crap" he's been through over the past several years.  

Five years ago, Glad Day was charged with selling a gay porn video (Descent) that had not been reviewed by the Ontario Film Review Board (OFRB). The store appealed the ruling and four years later it won. Sort of. The judge whacked the very idea of prior restraint -- the idea that any film, book or artwork might be yanked before it's been judged in the courts of legal or public opinion -- and at the time everyone from Xtra to The Globe And Mail proclaimed the end of censorship in Ontario.

But the Liberal government basically ignored the spirit of the ruling and introduced new legislation eliminating most formal censorship but insisting films still be classified. The fees charged for classification are minimal but sufficient to deter a small business like Glad Day from stocking marginal product and the penalties for noncompliance are onerous.          Anyone caught selling "unstickered" product is subject to huge fines.

What really burns Scythes is the injustice of it all. He spent six figures fighting the censor board and he's no further ahead financially. Sales are down and it's partly because he no longer carries much porn on video or DVD. Most if it was pulled during the court case, says former store manager Toshiya Kuwabara, and while it represented less than two percent of store inventory it accounted for almost 20 percent of sales. Now, even if he had more adult product, says Scythes, he couldn't sell it. There are too many cheap, illegal copies.

***

This should be a banner time for gay bookstores. Certainly gay lit has never had a higher profile. Alan Hollinghurst's The Line Of Beauty won the Man Booker Prize in 2004 and another gay book, Colm Tóibín's The Master, made the short list. Here in Canada, openly gay authors like Shyam Selvadurai and Wayson Choy are widely reviewed and often acclaimed. Michael Cunningham's The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and morphed into a big budget Hollywood film starring Ed Harris and Meryl Streep.

So why are gay bookstores in such a bad state, unable to attend even to such basics as freedom of expression?

Glad Day has already thrown in the towel. Last January, Canada's oldest known gay bookstore announced it was dropping the battle against censorship. It just couldn't afford it any longer.

"At a political level of course we're against it [censorship]," said Kuwabara, the store's longtime manager, shortly before leaving for Japan last year, "but we just don't have the money anymore. Frankly, we never had the money to start with." The last court case cost $150,000, says Scythes, and he's still paying for it.

At the moment, Vancouver's Little Sister's is still in the thick of the battle. After winning a mixed victory against Canada Customs (now called the Canada Border Services Agency or CBSA) at the Supreme Court Of Canada in 2000, it's back in court fighting a case that hinges on Customs' seizure of materials in 2001 and 2002. Despite the court's clear injunction to consider artistic merit, Customs seized some books edited by noted leather/SM writer Larry Townsend and a couple of anthologies of gay adult comics illustrated by well-known artists.

But the store has made it perfectly clear that it needs money to continue. No money, no case.

The community has always been very supportive, says co-owner Jim Deva, but it doesn't have the kind of money needed to back this kind of case. The government is playing hardball, bringing in all kinds of expensive expert witnesses.

The bookstore's first trip to the Supreme Court took 10 years and cost close to $300,000. The newest one is expected to take another 10 years and cost $1 million.

So the current case hinges on access to government funding. Arguing that their battle against the CBSA is in the interest of all Canadians, the store has asked the courts for money to finance the case. It's a relatively new idea. A BC native band won advance costs in 2003 but the Little Sister's case represents the first time the precedent has been applied to a nonaboriginal case. A BC judge awarded the store advance costs in July 2004. A second judge reversed the decision less than a year later. Now it's up to the Supreme Court Of Canada to decide. The high court will hear the case in April.

The early court date is considered propitious but a win would only put the store back where it started, in the Supreme Court Of British Columbia, where a win would almost certainly mean an appeal and a trip right back up the chain of command to the Supreme Court Of Canada.

Compared to most gay bookstores, both Glad Day and Little Sister's are in good shape. At least they're still standing. Many haven't been as lucky. New York City's A Different Light closed in 2001 (though it still has outlets in San Francisco and West Hollywood) and Montreal's L'Androgyne closed, after almost 30 years of service, in 2002. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York, which calls itself the world's oldest queer bookstore, came close to closing last year.

Like all small independents, queer bookstores have been battered by competition from big box stores and the Internet. In Canada, where Indigo Chapters enjoys a near monopoly on the retail book trade, the situation is particularly dire. Faced with a market dominated by one player, the major publishers have scant incentive to serve small retailers.

Even long-established players like Toronto's This Ain't The Rosedale Library, which carries a substantial selection of queer books, are having trouble getting reasonable credit and delivery. Co-owner Charlie Huisken says he can't even get stock from some major publishers. If he doesn't order enough copies, they won't send him the title. "It's not an easy business," says Huisken. "Kudos to anybody -- whether it's Little Sister's or Glad Day or [other Toronto independents like] A Different Booklist or Another Story -- anybody who can have the courage to open the door in the morning." After 26 years in business, Huisken and his partner are thinking of selling.

But at least he doesn't have to deal with the CBSA. (The store did have some problems but those disappeared when the Liberals came to power in 1993 and local MP Bill Graham intervened on the store's behalf. Huisken doesn't know why his colleagues at Glad Day and Little Sister's weren't so lucky.)

Dedicated queer stores have two strikes against them. Not only are they fighting economic inequities, sometimes it seems as if the political power structure is also rigged against them.

Both Glad Day and Little Sister's have been fighting censorship for decades and their victories have been several and significant (see chronology on page 23). But for every step forward there's been one or two steps back. The CBSA allows depictions of anal sex, but keeps out fisting, bondage and watersports. Ontario refrains from formal censorship but charges classification fees that make it prohibitive to sell oddball queer erotica with a marginal market ($4.20 per minute of film or about $500 for a two-hour adult sex film -- a drop in the bucket for a major distributor; a huge burden for a small retailer like Glad Day).

In short, both stores have reason to be discouraged. And neither one is getting rich. Little Sister's hopes to post a profit this year but hasn't seen one in several years. Scythes says his overall dollar sales are down 40 percent since 1999. "I do the same amount of paperwork for half the business."

So why then does Deva sound almost ebullient while Scythes sounds more than a trifle discouraged?

More of A tale of two bookstores @ Xtra.ca, Canada -