Jearld Moldenhauer

Jearld Frederick Moldenhauer (born August 9, 1946) is a Canadian gay activist and businessperson who is the founder of the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA), the Cornell Student Homophile League and The Body Politic gay liberation journal. He is also a founding member of Toronto Gay Action (TGA), and the Toronto Gay Alliance toward Equality (GATE). Glad Day Bookshop Toronto is considered the oldest gay/lesbian bookshop in the world.

Biography Moldenhauer was born in Niagara Falls, New York on August 9, 1946. He graduated from Cornell University in 1969.

In May 1968 he founded the Cornell Student Homophile League, which was only the second such homophile group established at an American university. In 1969 he moved to Canada and worked as a research assistant in the Physiology Department at the University of Toronto. There he founded the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA) which held its first meeting on October 24, 1969.

The University of Toronto fired him for founding the gay student organization in January, 1970. Moldenhauer was photographer and demonstrator at the We Demand Rally on August 28, 1971. Significant edits to an article about the rally in the magazine Guerilla led to Moldenhauer founding The Body Politic (magazine).

Moldenhauer founded the Glad Day Bookshop in November, 1970, after noticing that gay literature that was emerging after Stonewall was not available in Canada. In its early days, Glad Day Bookshop operated out of Moldenhauer's 4 Kendal Avenue apartment, located in The Annex. This apartment also served as The Body Politic's office. The bookstore became the first significant target of censorship of gay & lesbian literature by the Canadian government. This escalated in 1986 when the government of PM Brian Mulroney created an internal memorandum D-9-1-1 which was distributed to all Canada Customs agents. The memorandum essentially encouraged border agents to declare almost all incoming gay & lesbian literature to be “obscene” and therefore inadmissible. In the decade that followed Glad Day Bookshop Toronto endured four separate court cases challenging censorship. The most famous of these was the 1987 court decision that overturned the banning of The Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein and Edmund White.

On February 13, 1972, he became the first gay liberation representative to address a political party conference in Canada when he addressed a session of the New Democratic Party Waffle convention.