A gem of Toronto’s LGBTQIA2S+ community has been saved from immediate eviction, but Glad Day Bookshop is still raising funds for its future.
After receiving an ultimatum from the bookshop’s landlord about $100,000 in rent arrears, staff launched the “Save Glad Day” fundraiser last Wednesday. By Friday night, according to a post from the bookshop’s Instagram account, more than 1,900 individual donors had collectively contributed more than $112,000 — enough to cover the rent owing.
“It’s really indicative of how resilient our community has always been,” said events coordinator Tianna Henry on Thursday. In just the first 24 hours, more than 1,000 people made donations totalling about $58,000.
“There’s a lot of $5 donations,” said Michael Erickson, the shop’s co-owner, also speaking on Thursday. He works as a high-school English teacher and doesn’t make any money from Glad Day.
But the fundraiser is ongoing: Glad Day is fundraising for a total of $300,000 to create some breathing room for the 55-year-old bookstore and event space to figure out what it’s going to be next for the Toronto institution.
Tianna Henry is events coordinator for Glad Day. (Kat Eschner)
The timing of Glad Day’s appeal coincided with the beginning of Pride Month, but that wasn’t deliberate, says Erickson: “The landlord has been patient. He’s understood that it would take time after the pandemic for his businesses to stabilize. But after so many months have passed, we have to recognize that … people’s spending habits have changed.”
Glad Day’s rent is about $18,000 per month, according to the fundraiser documents. The bookshop spends a further $6,000 a month on insurance and utilities. “That’s $24,000 a month before we have paid for an hour of staff time, paid for one book or paid for coffee beans,” the fundraiser page reads.
To survive the past few years, the business has cut staff and hours and dramatically reduced its book collection. In 2023, it sold off several of its custom-made bookshelves online.
Erickson attributes the spending-habits change to inflation, as well as to pandemic shifts. He declined to name his landlord. “He could have kicked us out so long ago, you know what I mean?”
“I think we’re seeing the real financial pressure on Torontonians affecting their ability to have spending money,” says Erickson. “Yet people still want to leave their house and have experiences. So I think Toronto has to figure out what city it wants to be.”
Michael Erickson photographed at Glad Day on April 12, 2013. (Fred Lum/Globe and Mail/CP)
Henry was hired at Glad Day as a bartender eight years ago — not long after the bookshop moved from an upstairs space on nearby Yonge Street and a few years after the business was bought from its previous owner by a group of 22 spearheaded by Erickson.
“I came to Glad Day after working in very heteronormative environments. My patrons were predominantly white, cis, heterosexual men,” says Henry, who identifies as a biracial queer femme. “I can’t tell you what a privilege it is to be surrounded by queer people every day of my life.”
The bookshop crowdfunded its move, expanded to serve coffee and drinks, and began hosting a popular drag brunch and other events in its new space. In the years since, it has become a community fixture. And, as Henry notes, it’s one of few spaces in the Village that doesn’t charge for occupancy.
“We try to keep the cost of our offerings as low as possible,” she says. “We also don’t force folks to spend money to take up space here. As the events coordinator, I’ve tried to keep the space free for some community groups that don’t have funding and try to toe the line between paying our rent but also being … a home for the more marginalized among us. We know that our community is not homogeneous, and we want our events and our shelves to reflect that.”
“I did see this day coming,” says Selena Vyle, a Lebanese-Mexican drag queen who hosts Glad Day’s weekend drag brunch alongside a revolving cast of guest stars. “It is Toronto. Things do close — it is so hard to stay open — and I know that Glad Day hasn’t been doing super-well financially.”
Vyle worked primarily in comedy spaces before taking over the brunch from previous host Erin Brockobic about two years ago. She says Glad Day’s brunch, the longest-running in Canada, has international impact: “People come to the city and then just Google ‘drag brunch,’ find Glad Day, and just show up.”
As a result, the performer says, her network has ballooned around the world. She also appreciates how safe the space is for marginalized people.
“It is a family for me,” she says. “It is staffed by trans people, people of colour, people who are activists, people who really care about the community and the world at large and the marginalized people in it.”
Selena Vyle hosts Glad Day’s weekend drag brunch. (Left: Charlie Baze; Right: Courtesy of Selena Vye)
Doing the brunch has made her more political, she says: she hosted then-mayoral candidate Chloe Brown last year, encourages people to vote, and speaks out on the alleged genocide by Israel in Gaza.
Glad Day is “a place where I meet like-minded people and am able to be a heightened version of myself and step into a role of leadership,” Vyle says. “On Church Street, it is one of the only spaces for alternative drag performers, people whose characters are a bit less mainstream and a little bit more creature. Even drag kings don’t get booked a lot on Church Street, so Glad Day is a really great space for them.”
According to Glad Day’s fundraising page, an extra $200,000 from fundraising would give it the space to hire fundraisers, build new infrastructure, conduct repairs, and consult the community about its needs and desires.
“I wouldn’t say Glad Day Bookshop has ever thrived under capitalism in its 55-year history,” says Henry. “But certainly we’re at a stage where it’s do or die at the moment.”
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