I’ve long been ambivalent about Canada’s largest city.

Moving to Hogtown (as it’s colloquially known) to pursue a film career during Montreal’s secessionist-besotted 1990s at first felt like salvation… but it didn’t take long for my adopted homeland’s flaws to come to the fore: like my previous stop on this trip, Boston, Toronto’s not known as a particularly warm or inviting city.

Its physical face is equally inscrutable: with a weak architectural heritage (unlike its palatial Great Lakes cousin, Chicago), Toronto’s often accused by rival Montrealers (and others) of being a bland urban space, endless glass-box high-rises making up the bulk of its cityscape.

My recent trips there have only affirmed the stereotypes: although I have a warm circle of friends who call the city home, my forays to nightspots have met with mixed success: folks were distant, regarding my adopted-Yankee friendliness and approachability with disdain. More than once, while attempting to strike up a conversation with a fetching guy or two, I had the prospect simply walk off mid-convo.

Suffice it to say, I was a bit nervous about holding a book event in this town.

At least I did my homework: the event was respectably promoted, with listings in all the major newsweeklies and a terrific radio interview care of the folks at CIRR 103.9 PROUD-FM. But I’d been in this boat before and been let down, I mused, as I walked into Glad Day Bookshop, one of the world’s oldest LGBT bookstores. The store, too, has had its share of trials of late, struggling, as many indie bookshops have, to stay afloat in the ever-changing literary marketplace. But I was determined to hold my event there for a number of reasons: in addition to Holistic Ideas Press’s support for indie bookstores, many years ago, a younger and more closeted me nervously wandered in to Glad Day to buy my very first gay-themed book.

Maybe it was karma from coming full circle, but early signs were hopeful: at the scheduled time (punctuality for a book event? really?) people began filing in, asking “is there an event here tonight?” In addition to friends and relations (and wonderfully supportive workmates — my day job has an office out in T.O.) I soon learned the reason for the large number of younger folk in attendance — as with many literary events, my readings have tended to attract something of an older crowd: a group from George Brown College had decided to make the book and the event a case study for a sexual diversity class. Say what you want about Toronto the Good (as it’s been known from its boring Protestant past), it’s a town where people show up — and on time to boot. We filled up the store and nearly sold out every copy of Wander the Rainbow in stock, our most successful event since the launch in June. Thanks everybody!

After the requisite drinks post-reading, I wandered the city’s main “gay drag,” Church Street, with an old friend — one with whom I made my first equally nervous semi-closeted forays to gay bars all those years ago. Gazing at the shimmering skyscrapers and the CN Tower in the distance, I regained that feeling for the city I’d once had and lost: Toronto’s not a place that inspires passion or excitement. But it does the so-called “hard things” well: orderly public transit, schools & hospitals, a gay community that’s good about supporting its creative crowd big and not-so-big. Like the city itself, the audience at my reading was quieter and more subdued than those in ebullient America. But they came, they saw, they listened, and they bought. For a second time in a lifetime, this oft-inscrutable place buoyed this itinerant homo in his artistic pursuits, and for that — at least from where I’m standing — this city gets a grade from me that’s far better than Good.

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