Jearld Moldenhauer

Jearld Moldenhauer was born in Niagra Falls, New York in 1946. In 1969 he graduated from Cornell University where he had helped form the Cornell Student Homophile League, which was only the second such homophile group established at an American university. In 1969 he moved to Canada and worked as a research assistant at the University of Toronto. Here he founded the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA) which held its first meeting on October 24, 1969. UTHA was the first gay and lesbian group to be established in Toronto and would eventually grow into the Community Homophile Association of Toronto (CHAT). Moldenhauer went on to open the Glad Day Bookshop in 1970, which challenged Canadian censorship laws by selling erotic and gay liberation books, such as The Joy of Gay Sex. He was also a founding member of the monthly magazine, and one of Canada's first significant gay periodicals, The Body Politic. He has also been involved in such groups as Toronto Gay Action and the Gay Alliance Toward Equality, and has helped establish the Canadian Gay Liberation Movement Archives, which eventually became the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, one of the largest archives of gay and lesbian documents in the world. 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.