A Brief History of «GAY»: Canada's First Gay Tabloid, 1964–1966

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario.

Canada’s gay history is an ever-more-popular subject for
investigation. Donald McLeod is among those independent scholars who
regularly provide readers with the latest findings from the field. This
monograph holds a special place: it is the first to investigate an
individual title from Canada’s gay press history.

Established in Toronto in March 1964, GAY was a tabloid testing the
environment. Although it was launched almost as a joke and lasted only
two years, McLeod’s reading of the periodical reveals the interests of
the gay community during the early 1960s. This period is important in
Canada’s gay history, for it is during these years that Canadian
attitudes toward sex and homosexuality as well as the gay community’s
attitude toward itself began to shift, culminating in the August 1969
legislation decriminalizing homosexual acts.

Drawing on widely disparate materials found primarily at the Canadian
Lesbian and Gay Archives, at Cornell University, and in Philadelphia,
McLeod has meticulously woven the complicated tale of this short-lived
but groundbreaking periodical. Although GAY’s original audience was
found among an increasingly large Toronto gay population, its bold title
soon excited the interest of an American investor who sought to give the
publication a broad North American circulation. At its height, GAY had a
print run of 20,000 copies—equal to that of the top nine U.S. gay
periodicals at the time! (No gay press periodical in Canada was to
attain this figure again until Xtra! in 1990.)

A Brief History of GAY is an essential source not only for Canada’s
gay past but also for the history of its press.