Twenty-five years after the Vancouver bookstore\u2019s win against Canada Customs, the struggle for the freedom to read isn\u2019t over<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Little Sister\u2019s Book & Art Emporium was the first place I went to in Vancouver to buy books after I came out in 2003. I was a 24-year-old femme just barely out of the closet, searching for stories to help me understand myself, my desires and the communities I hungered to be part of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before coming out, I haunted the stacks of my university library, where a small collection of books about queer lives\u2014only some of which had been written by actual queer people\u2014were housed on tall, beige, metal shelves in a dimly lit corner. Walking into Little Sister\u2019s was like crossing the threshold into a world where the vibrancy of queer self-expression was in view everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had never been to a queer bookstore before. If my university library\u2019s collection of queer books was a morsel, Little Sister\u2019s was a feast. The store had warm brown wooden shelves filled with row after row of books on every subject I could imagine, from self-help books to biographies to sex how-to guides, and many I hadn\u2019t even thought of, like queer horror anthologies, lesbian mystery novels and gay science fiction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Little Sister\u2019s didn\u2019t just sell books. They sold a colourful mix of T-shirts, hats, greeting cards, dildos, jock straps, safer-sex supplies and enough rainbow-themed accessories to outfit a whole Pride parade. I bought a tiny rainbow enamel pin shaped like a high heel\u2014my way of flagging femme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Little Sister\u2019s also sold magazines. Some, like Curve<\/em> or The Advocate<\/em>, covered queer lives, culture and politics. Others, like On Our Backs<\/em> and Drummer<\/em>, featured explicit depictions of queer sex and BDSM. I was too shy to flip through them in the store but my eyes were drawn like magnets to their covers. It would be a few years before I felt daring enough to look at them, and longer still before I was proudly reading my copy of Patrick Califia\u2019s Macho Sluts<\/em> on the bus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a newcomer to Vancouver\u2019s queer community in the early aughts, I had the vague idea that Little Sister\u2019s had played a pivotal role in fighting for my right to read queer books. But I knew next to nothing about their lengthy battle over censorship with Canada Customs (renamed Canada Border Services Agency in 2003)\u2014a battle the bookstore took all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada and won in 2000. This December marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of their victory. Defending queer books against censorship is as important today as it was twenty-five years ago, as the battle is far from over, even if some of the battlegrounds have changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I came to Little Sister\u2019s as many people did, drawn to the Davie Street store by its welcoming atmosphere and reputation as a beloved community institution. I took for granted the presence of all those queer books on the shelves, not realizing how tenaciously the store\u2019s co-founders, Jim Deva and Bruce Smyth, and Janine Fuller, who managed Little Sister\u2019s from 1990 to 2015, had fought to keep them there, or what they had weathered in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their journey to the Supreme Court took 15 years, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and made targets of the store and its staff. Little Sister\u2019s was bombed in 1987, 1988 and again in 1992. Fuller told of receiving hate mail and death threats in Little Sister\u2019s vs. Big Brother<\/em><\/a>, filmmaker Aerlyn Weissman\u2019s 2002 documentary about the Supreme Court case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Little Sister\u2019s had its first clash with Customs in 1985 over a seizure of lesbian magazines, just two years after opening in its original location, a second-storey walk-up on Vancouver\u2019s Thurlow Street. There, Smyth and Deva slept in a tiny back room behind the bookstore, where customers could browse books, drink coffee, play pinball and buy cigarettes, poppers and lube.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Customs raised the stakes in December 1986 by seizing a shipment of more than 600 books and magazines destined for Little Sister\u2019s, claiming they violated Canada\u2019s obscenity laws. The loss of so much stock put the cash-strapped store\u2019s finances on the line. \u201cThat\u2019s when we figured out they had the power to put us out of business,\u201d Deva told Xtra<\/em><\/a> <\/em>in 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Determined to fight back, Little Sister\u2019s launched their first legal challenge against Canada Customs in May 1987, in partnership with the BC Civil Liberties Association. Three years later, in 1990, they launched a constitutional challenge, arguing that Customs discriminated against queer people by violating the freedom of expression guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms<\/a>. At the heart of their case was the argument that queer sexual expression and imagery had real importance and value, entitling it to the highest protection in law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Little Sister\u2019s sought to hold Customs accountable for targeting queer bookstores and<\/em> queer books. Customs had a pattern of systematically detaining shipments destined for queer bookstores while other bookstores in Canada were able to order the same titles without interference. Meanwhile, Little Sister\u2019s and Toronto\u2019s Glad Day Bookshop<\/a>, Canada\u2019s first queer bookstore, founded in 1970, were \u201csubjected to delays and detentions every month, often weekly, for years,\u201d wrote Janine Fuller and co-author Stuart Blackley in their 1995 book Restricted Entry: Censorship on Trial<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Customs\/Border Services Agency has had the power to stop printed materials from entering Canada on the grounds of immorality or indecency since before Confederation, power that was enshrined into law in 1867 at the first session of the Canadian Parliament. By the early 1980s, Customs was using this power to systematically target queer bookstores and queer books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They weaponized the label of obscenity against materials destined for queer bookstores. One of my favourite short-story collections, Dorothy Allison<\/a>\u2019s Trash<\/em><\/a>, inspired by her experiences as a working-class Southern queer femme survivor, was once detained because Customs mistook it for another previously banned book of the same name. Rather than double-check for errors, they simply didn\u2019t allow it into Canada. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Many books and magazines were seized, and in some cases their entry into Canada was prohibited for their depictions of anal sex, prompting Glad Day Bookshop to sue Customs in 1986 over its seizure of The Joy of Gay Sex<\/em>, a book that had been widely available in Canada since it was first published in 1977. In his decision, an Ontario District Court judge wrote<\/a>, \u201cTo write about homosexual practices without dealing with anal intercourse would be equivalent to writing a history of music and omitting Mozart.\u201d Glad Day won their case against Customs, but that didn\u2019t stop the agency from continuing to target queer bookstores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The suppression of gay periodicals destined for bookstores like Little Sister\u2019s was particularly cruel during the AIDS crisis, when these titles were a reliable source of guidance on safer-sex practices and emerging community knowledge about the virus. In Little Sister\u2019s vs. Big Brother<\/em>, Smyth recounted phoning a gay bookstore in the U.S. to have a staff member read him an article called \u201c10 Safe Ways to Have Sex\u201d after a 1985 issue of the gay porn magazine Blueboy<\/em> was barred from entry into Canada.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAs a younger queer person coming of age soon after Little Sister\u2019s won its Supreme Court victory against Canada Customs, effectively stemming the tide of book seizures, I took for granted my freedom to read queer books\u2014including the BDSM erotica that still holds pride of place on my bookshelves today\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n \u201cNothing seemed to bother Customs as much as gay and lesbian S\/M,\u201d wrote Fuller and Blackley in Restricted Entry<\/em>. My beloved Macho Sluts<\/em>, Patrick Califia\u2019s 1988 collection of queer BDSM stories, was particularly controversial. Little Sister\u2019s former buyer Mark Macdonald wrote in his preface to the 2009 reissue of the book that an entire shipment would be detained if Macho Sluts<\/em> was included in an order from Little Sister\u2019s U.S. distributor. The title was detained, prohibited, reviewed and released by Customs on multiple occasions, yet the bookstore kept ordering it, prompting author Califia to speak in Little Sister\u2019s defence during the trial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCensorship is never about whether anyone should be able to read or see something. It\u2019s about who can read or see it,\u201d wrote author and lawyer Marcus McCann in a 2019 essay<\/a> on defending queer expression. As a younger queer person coming of age soon after Little Sister\u2019s won its Supreme Court victory against Canada Customs, effectively stemming the tide of book seizures, I took for granted my freedom to read queer books\u2014including the BDSM erotica that still holds pride of place on my bookshelves today, as well as the dozens of other queer books lining my shelves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2025, we are again facing a wave of censorship of queer books in which labels like \u201cobscene,\u201d \u201cinappropriate\u201d and \u201cpornographic\u201d are being weaponized against us. While Little Sister\u2019s battleground was the border, today\u2019s would-be censors have their sights on schools and public libraries. I\u2019m reminded of something filmmaker Aerlyn Weissman, who is quoted in Restricted Entry<\/em>, said at a 1994 fundraiser for Little Sister\u2019s: \u201cWe are all talking about \u2018when this trial is over,\u2019 but this struggle will never be over.\u201d Weissman\u2019s words seem especially prescient today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Librarian Michael Nyby has documented<\/a> the persistent targeting of books with LGBTQ2S+ themes in challenges in Canadian libraries, with the Alberta government borrowing<\/a> tactics directly from the far-right playbook. In the U.S., \u201cpersistent attacks conflate LGBTQ+ identities as \u2018sexually explicit\u2019 and erase LGBTQ+ representation from schools,\u201d wrote PEN America in its October 2025 report, The Normalization of Book Banning<\/em><\/a>. Incarcerated people also face censorship<\/a>, with bans on \u201chomosexual literature\u201d in states including Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina preventing them from accessing queer books through prison libraries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A book can be a mirror, reflecting back to us who we are, or a window that opens us to whole new vistas of possibility. The first time I walked into Little Sister\u2019s, I was a young woman searching for community and learning to imagine a queer future for myself. The people I met behind the counter there had fought fiercely to defend my right to read the books that helped me understand myself as a queer femme\u2014the histories I needed to feel part of a lineage, the stories I needed to know I wasn\u2019t alone and the sex writing that unleashed my desires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n