Jearld Moldenhauer

Early Life and Education

Jearld Moldenhauer was a sophomore at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, when, as he recalled, he “began to confront the psychological tortures related to my repressed homosexual feelings and desires.” He turned to various authors who, as he described it, “played a critical role in forming my own radical analysis of sexuality.”

Moldenhauer has singled out writer André Gide and his treatise on homosexuality, Corydon (1920), for providing him with an example of “an open self-affirming life.” He has also cited Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown for helping him understand “the repercussions of sexual repression in relation to civilization.” He has credited all three with making him a gay political organizer. Given the prejudices of the time, as well as “the obvious need to initiate various projects related to creating a gay liberation movement,” he said, “the path seemed a logical one.”

University Activist

At Cornell, Jearld Moldenhauer founded the Student Homophile League (SHL) in May 1968. It was only the second gay rights group at an American college campus.

After graduating in 1969, Moldenhauer moved to Canada. He was hired as a research assistant at the University of Toronto. On 15 October 1969, he placed a four-line advertisement in the Varsity, the university’s student newspaper. It asked people interested in starting a student homophile group to call him. Moldenhauer's ad was the spark for the first formal meeting of the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA) on 24 October 1969. It was the first post-Stonewall gay organization in Canada as well as the first at a Canadian university.

However, after Moldenhauer founded the UTHA, he was fired from his job at the university. “My response,” he said, “was to embark upon my first trip abroad, an event that would create in me a lifelong wanderlust to see the world.”

Pioneering Gay Organizations

Returning to Toronto after his travels, Jearld Moldenhauer was instrumental in the creation of several other pioneering gay organizations. In 1970, he founded Glad Day Bookshop, Canada's first bookstore targeted to the gay community. Moldenhauer was a founding member of both Toronto Gay Action in 1971, which played a central role in We Demand and therefore the launch of the movement, and the Gay Alliance Toward Equality in 1973. He also spearheaded the 1971 founding of the Body Politic, the leading publication of Canada’s gay liberation movement, as well as the Canadian Gay Liberation Movement Archives (now called the ArQuives). It was established in 1973 to aid in the recovery and preservation of 2SLGBTQ+ histories.

Writing about the We Demand rally in Ottawa on 28 August 1971, Moldenhauer stated that the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements he helped launch represented a “Freedom to Love, to communicate your love in all ways, physically and intellectually, without fear crushing the spontaneity of your expression.”

On 13 February 1972, in Hamilton, Ontario, Moldenhauer addressed a session of the New Democratic Party Waffle convention. This was the first time a gay liberation representative had formally addressed a political party conference in Canada. In his address, he stated:

“The Canadian homosexual population… will no longer tolerate the denial of our basic civil liberties. Through education and political activism, we seek to change the sexist nature of Canadian society — including eliminating all legal inequalities and negative social attitudes. Because we are still in the process of uniting our minority, we have not represented a strong voting block in political elections… With ever increasing strength, the Canadian gay community will make its opinions felt through the support of politicians and political parties which show their solidarity with our democratic struggle.”

In 1974, Moldenhauer undertook a cross-country tour to consolidate and coordinate the activities of the National Gay Election Coalition (NGEC). It was formed in 1972 to intervene in Canada’s federal election held that year. It also sought to spark the formation of gay liberation groups in centres where there were none.

Moldenhauer also founded a second Glad Day Bookshop in Boston in 1979. The store in Toronto was subjected to repeated censorship and seizures by Canada Customs, and Moldenhauer hoped that a US store would have better access to gay literature. The Boston store, which shared space with two gay newspapers, was destroyed by arson in July 1982. But the bookstore reopened and was an important part of Boston’s queer community until closing in 2000. The Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto remains the oldest surviving queer bookstore in the world.

Photography

A keen photographer, Jearld Moldenhauer recorded many of the earliest events associated with the gay liberation movement. “My camera gave me a way of recording the history of the Movement that I was part of,” he has said. “Gradually, photography provided me with a way of responding to my lifelong fascination with nature, archeology, as well as the many cultures I explored over the decades.”

(See also Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights in Canada; Queer Culture.)