, 2006

When it comes to defending books, we all must act.

I had been sitting in the Supreme Court of Canada for a full 15 minutes before the reality of the situation began to sink in. Here I was, with the owners and manager of Little Sister's Book & Art Emporium, watching the climactic final scenes unfold in a drama that has lasted 14 years.

I remembered the 1994 trial, when Little Sister's appeared in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, when I first became involved with the bookstore, the trial, and the people behind the scenes. I watched as Pierre Berton, Nino Ricci, Jane Rule, and scores of other prominent thinkers, artists, and academics came to the defense of the little Vancouver bookstore and the books chosen for its shelves. That trial took 40 days in court to complete.

This time, the Supreme Court of Canada was going to allow only one day for the arguments to be heard, both from our lawyer and six interveners, and the opposing side. Aside from our main lawyer, spoken submissions were made by lawyers representing PEN Canada, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian AIDS Society, the Canadian Council for the Arts, LEAF (Women's Legal Education and Action Fund), and EGALE (Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere). Their arguments were passionate and logical, and the judges seemed wholly engaged throughout the morning. By lunchtime, Janine Fuller, the manager of Little Sister's, was preoccupied with interviews and press conferences in the foyer of the courthouse. These interviews would continue until late into the night.

Dealing with the press has always been a delicate situation for the store. Sometimes a story will be printed or shown on the evening news that is completely informed, unbiased, and even generous. Other times, a reporter will represent Little Sister's as a smut shop, whose modus operandi is to import child pornography and to expose Canadians to images of incest and bestiality. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Since the store opened in 1983, we have expanded our stock of books, magazines, movies, clothing, and music. Less shelf space is dedicated to erotica than to our women's fiction section. We have never stocked child pornography!

In my role as the book buyer for the store, I spend a lot more of my time writing reading lists for libraries, schools, parents, and book clubs than I do ordering dubious pornography. I sell important books to people with very specific needs, like young people who want to come out to their parents, or parents who want to understand their child better. I sell travel books to men and women going on holiday and mysteries that they can read on the beach. I sell academic texts to students of literature and social sciences, and nutrition guides to people with HIV and AIDS.

Little Sister's also carries erotica and sex-positive fiction, and for that we will never apologize. Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people grow up and live day-to-day with a difference from the rest of society. That difference is sex and gender. For a large part of our community, sex-positive imagery and ideas are liberating, edifying, and celebratory. Keeping that in mind, erotica is still a small portion of what is stocked and sold at Little Sister's.

Little Sister's has been placed in a double bind by Canada Customs. On the one side, in every box of books that gets seized, searched, detained, banned, or otherwise delayed en route to the store, there are non-sexual books that are clearly not obscene. On the other side, when we do try to import quality sex-positive literature, the delicate process of deciding what is acceptable for Canadian readers is often being carried out by uninformed, ill-prepared, and biased people enforcing a law that has been shown to discriminate against some of those Canadians. This dilemma was summed up very well by Judge Lance Finch, in the B.C. Court of Appeals:

"A statutory scheme which imperils the distribution of morally unimpeachable material cannot be justified by the lame excuse that obscenity was the real target."

The Customs regime puts unwanted pressure on other Canadians too. One afternoon in 1994, in the Supreme Court of B.C., I watched as Jane Rule took the stand to give testimony as a writer in Canada. From her wheelchair, she spoke with her trademark confidence and certainty about her personal experience:

"Now there are quite a number of people in Canada who do know that The Young in One Another's Arms won the Canadian Authors' Association Award for the best novel of 1978. There are a great many more people in Canada who know that The Young in One Another's Arms was detained by Customs. And that is what I have to carry. I have to carry a reputation created by this charge from which I have no way of defending myself. … And I bitterly resent the attempt to marginalize, trivialize and even criminalize what I have to say because I happen to be a lesbian, I happen to be a novelist, I happen to have bookstores and publishers who are dedicated to producing my work. The assumption is, therefore, that there must be something pornographic because of my sexual orientation, and I think that is a shocking way to deal with my community."

There are many lessons to be learned by the court challenge by Little Sister's against Canada Customs. As Jane Rule's testimony attests, words can be very powerful. As well, it's clear that when dealing with issues around erotica/pornography, "community standards," and what kind of discrimination is "justifiable," there are no easy, objective answers.

It seems to me that another key lesson from this case is that books, bookstores, and booksellers can effect change on a large scale. In the last 12 years I have been fortunate to work with some very political and tenacious book lovers. Little Sister's Book & Art Emporium and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association have spent well over half a million dollars engaged in this struggle. The politics, idealism, and tenacity of the independent bookseller did not disappear with the advent of the big-box stores. We must all remember that we can be activists, and that when it comes to defending books and words, we are obliged to act.


Mark MacDonald is the book buyer for Little Sister's Book & Art Emporium.

Originally published on the Quille And Quire web site - April 2000.