Little Sister's Book and Art Emporium, also known as Little Sister's Bookstore, but usually called "Little Sister's", is an independent bookstore in the Davie Village/West End neighbourhood of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The bookstore was opened in 1983 by Jim Deva and Bruce Smyth, and its current manager is Don Wilson.
The bookstore is famous for being embroiled in a legal battle with the Canada Border Services Agency over the importation of what the agency has labeled "obscene materials".[1] These materials, nearly all dealing with male-male or female-female sexuality, were routinely seized at the border. The same publications, when destined for mainstream booksellers in the country, had often been delivered without delay or question.[2]Glad Day Bookshop, an LGBT bookstore in Toronto, has faced similar difficulties.[1]
... [A]lternative culture and lifestyles, including manuals and handbooks on safe sex (?!) were proclaimed indecent by someone who has no right to judge them in his/her bias/bigotry, which violates the anti-discrimination protection of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteeing equality of all Canadians. Not to mention that five out of ten provinces (plus one of the two territories) explicitly forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation.
—Miodrag Kojadinović: "Trials and Tribulations", Angles magazine, Vancouver, October 1993
Little Sister's filed their claim against the federal government in 1990, but the case stalled and was not heard until October 1994.[3] The trial concluded in January 1996 with a judgment for the plaintiffs. The court found that Little Sister's shipments had been wrongly delayed or withheld due to the "systemic targeting of Little Sisters' importations in the Customs Mail Center."[4]
In 2000, the case was heard in the Supreme Court of Canada. The court found that the customs has targeted shipments to the bookstore and attempted to prevent them from getting in. Consequently, the government was found to have violated section 2 of the Charter. However, the violation was justified under section 1.[5] The case established that the onus of proving that expressive material is obscene lies with Canadian Customs.
The bookstore's travails were fictionalized as a subplot of the film Better Than Chocolate. A feature-length documentary film by Aerlyn Weissman, Little Sister's vs. Big Brother (2002), has also been released about the bookstore.[1] Former manager Janine Fuller was also a coauthor with Stuart Blackley of the book Restricted Entry: Censorship on Trial, a non-fiction account of the Little Sister's battle, and wrote an introduction for Forbidden Passages: Writings Banned in Canada, an anthology of excerpts from some of the impounded works which was edited by Patrick Califia.[6] Both books were published in 1995, and were awarded Lammys at the 8th Lambda Literary Awards ceremony in 1996. Additionally, the book What right?: Graphic interpretations against censorship addressed the court case in the form of a graphic novel, with proceed from sales of the book being donated to the Little Sister's Defense fund to assist with legal challenges with Canada Customs. The book features contributions from a number of comic artists including Alison Bechdel and Marc Bell.
The bookstore's co-owner, Jim Deva, died on September 21, 2014, at age 64.[7] On December 23, 2019, Bruce Smyth, co-founder of Little Sister's, died at St. John Hospice at age 66.[8]
Davie Village is a neighbourhood in the West End of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is the home of the city's LGBT subculture, and, as such, is often considered a gay village, or gaybourhood. Davie Village is centred on Davie Street and roughly includes the area between Burrard and Jervis streets. Davie Street—and, by extension, the Village—is named in honour of A.E.B. Davie, eighth Premier of British Columbia from 1887 to 1889; A.E.B's brother Theodore was also Premier, from 1892 to 1895.
Glad Day Bookshop is an independent bookstore and restaurant located in Toronto, Ontario, specializing in LGBT literature. Previously located above a storefront at 598A Yonge Street for much of its history, the store moved to its current location at 499 Church Street, in the heart of the city's Church and Wellesley neighbourhood, in 2016. The store's name and logo are based on a painting by William Blake.
R v Butler, [1992] 1 S.C.R. 452 is a leading Supreme Court of Canada decision on pornography and state censorship. In this case, the Court had to balance the right to freedom of expression under section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms with women's rights. The outcome has been described as a victory for anti-pornography feminism and the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund, but a loss for alternative sexualities.
Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v Canada (Minister of Justice) [2000] 2 S.C.R. 1120, 2000 SCC 69 is a leading Supreme Court of Canada decision on freedom of expression and equality rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It was held that the Customs Act, which gave broad powers to customs inspectors to exclude "obscene" materials, violated the right to freedom of expression under section 2 but was justifiable under section 1.
United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, 5 F. Supp. 182, is a landmark decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in a case dealing with freedom of expression. At issue was whether James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses was obscene. In deciding it was not, Judge John M. Woolsey opened the door to importation and publication of serious works of literature that used coarse language or involved sexual subjects.
Little Sister may refer to:
The BC Book & Yukon Prizes, established in 1985, celebrate the achievements of British Columbia and Yukon writers and publishers.
The Toronto Women's Bookstore was the largest nonprofit, feminist bookstore in Canada, before its closure in November 2012. It was run and staffed primarily by women of color, and sold fiction, poetry and non-fiction by women writers to promote feminist and anti-oppression politics.
United States v. Thirty-seven Photographs, 402 U.S. 363 (1971), is a United States Supreme Court decision in an in rem case on procedures following the seizure of imported obscene material. A 6–3 court held that the federal statute governing the seizures was not in violation of the First Amendment as long as the government began forfeiture proceedings within 14 days of the seizure.
United States v. 12 200-ft. Reels of Film, 413 U.S. 123 (1973), was an in rem case decided by the United States Supreme Court that considered the question of whether the First Amendment required that citizens be allowed to import obscene material for their personal and private use at home, which was already held to be protected several years earlier. By a 5–4 margin, the Court held that it did not.
The Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund (CLLDF) is a Canadian nonprofit organization, created in 1987 to protect the free speech rights of comics creators, publishers, retailers, and readers, by helping to cover legal expenses in the defense of cases where its directors feel those issues are at stake.
Joseph James Arvay, was a Canadian lawyer who argued numerous landmark cases involving civil liberties and constitutional rights.
Book Censorship in Canada is primarily limited to the control of which books may be imported. Canada Border Services Agency is able to block materials considered to be inappropriate from entering the country, although this practice has become less frequent since the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was put into place.
Aerlyn Weissman is a two-time Genie Award-winning Canadian documentary filmmaker and political activist on behalf of the lesbian community.
Janine Fuller is a Canadian businessperson and writer. She was the manager of Little Sister's Book and Art Emporium in Vancouver, British Columbia, and is best known for her role as an anti-censorship activist in the bookstore's battles with Canada Customs, which culminated in the Supreme Court of Canada case Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v. Canada in 2004.
Forbidden Passages: Writings Banned in Canada is a compilation book about censorship edited by Patrick Califia with an introduction by Janine Fuller. It was published in 1995 by Cleis Press. Most of the works in the book involve topics relating to LGBT and specifically gay and lesbian homosexuality issues.
Meatmen: An Anthology of Gay Male Comics is a series of paperback books collecting short comics featuring gay and bisexual male characters. The comics included a mixture of explicit erotica and humor. Between 1986 and 2004, 26 black-and-white volumes of the series were published by Leyland Publications, making it the longest-running anthology of gay male pornographic comics.
Nights of Horror is an American series of fetish comic books, created in 1954 by publisher Malcla, drawn by comic artist Joe Shuster, who is also one of the original creators of Superman. The comic stories were written by an author under the pseudonym Clancy, who also used other pseudonyms for different issues of the books. The stories are based on situations of BDSM, bondage, torture, and sexual slavery, featuring both men and women as the tormentors and victims. The series was important in the conviction of Jack Koslow in 1954, during the trial of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers. The books themselves were seized and banned first by New York City, then by the State of New York for violating obscenity laws, and the case went to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court determined that the ban was not in violation of First Amendment rights, and upheld New York's request for destroying copies of Nights of Horror. Shuster was never named as the illustrator until Gerard Jones published the information in 2004.
Jearld Frederick Moldenhauer was born in Niagara Falls, New York on August 9, 1946. He has been a gay activist from his college years onward, and was the founder of the Cornell Student Homophile League, the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA), and The Body Politic gay liberation journal, Canada's most significant gay periodical. He was a founding member of Toronto Gay Action (TGA), and the Toronto Gay Alliance toward Equality (GATE). 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. In 1973 he began collecting the books, newspapers and ephemera that seeded and grew into the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives. He opened Glad Day Bookshop, the first gay and lesbian bookstore in Canada, in 1970 and operated it until 1991 when he sold the store John Scythes. In 1979 he opened a second Glad Day Bookshop in Boston, Mass. Glad Day Bookshop Toronto is now considered the oldest gay/lesbian bookshop in the world. Glad Day Bookshop Boston closed its doors in the summer of 2000, when its lease expired and its building was sold.
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