“I was flipping through an old magazine from the 2000s and they had a directory for all of the strip clubs in the city. There were more than forty. Within twenty years’ time, the landscape has changed so significantly,” says Faith.
There’s a glaring lack of adult entertainment in Toronto. Today there are only five strip clubs left, with the last porn theatre shuttering in 2013 to become a climbing gym.
“If anyone could report back on what the cruising situation at the climbing gym is like, that would be great,” Faith jokes.
In 2024 Faith, a tattoo artist and owner of erotic ephemera shop Chez Moi Books paired up with artist, writer, and DIY punk promoter Bee Traverse to do something about the slow death of Toronto’s sex life. They started Natural Born Sinners, an erotic open mic night that harnesses the thrill of karaoke.
The lineup includes a mix of hand-picked “headliners” and open time slots for attendees, but all performers must read work written by another author. “People’s take on it can be very different. They’ve read Harry Potter erotic fan fiction involving Dobby, that was really funny,” Traverse explains. “Some people are reading very serious works by Anaïs Nin, things that are more heavy-duty. Sometimes it’s really dark. Sometimes it’s really hot.”
Aside from their belief that good writing should be read aloud, they also want the event – which often takes place at the Queen Street queer bar Three Dollar Bill – to foster community. “I feel like everything starts falling apart without ways to meet with like-minded people and share in these things together,” Traverse says.
Natural Born Sinners is an explicit act of resistance to moral policing, creating a space where the erotic can live without shame or moral panic. Earlier this year, Toronto filmmaker Kalil Haddad had his entire paid account on video-hosting platform Vimeo banned after he uploaded the final cut of his film, My Secret Boyfriend Died In A Mass Shooting.
“I’d been uploading cuts of this film all year and nothing had ever happened,” he recalls.
But a week before it premiered, he got a notification that the film was removed. Haddad’s work often draws on vintage gay pornography as source material, and Vimeo flagged the nudity and sexual acts in the film. Then his entire account was banned, cutting him off from ten years’ worth of uploaded and drafted films (that he thankfully had backed up). It’s a cruel irony to have Haddad’s entire filmography censored, as films like My Secret Boyfriend and his master’s thesis Victim of Circumstance use that source material to comment on the erasure of gay men from public life.
“I came to this realization that at a certain point [gay porn] was our only true form of representation. It was the only place where we could really see ourselves,” he explains.
More and more, platforms have been flagging and outright banning explicit art. Game vendors Itch.io and Steam have delisted games featuring adult content following coordinated pressure on payment processing sites and credit card companies from an anti-porn group called Collective Shout. Numerous games with 2SLGBTQIA+ themes but no explicit content have also been shadowbanned.
Though erotic art sometimes gets caught up in the wide net cast by the morality police, censorship is aimed primarily at sex workers.
Jelena Vermilion, executive director of Sex Worker Action Program (SWAP) in Hamilton, points to Bill S-209, proposed by Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, the “Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act.” If it were to pass, the bill would require Canadians to upload their ID and have their faces scanned to verify their age before they access anything deemed “pornographic content” online. Similar laws have already been put in place in the U.K. in 2023, and as of 2025, across 20 states in the U.S.
Artists usually avoid the criminalization, surveillance, and economic exclusion that sex workers deal with. But this bill could bring some of those impacts down not just on porn, but also any art that engages with sex, like Haddad’s.
Vermilion cautions that such laws let tech companies decide what counts as porn and give them access to sensitive personal information.
“We see frequent breaches happening with cybersecurity hacks,” she says. “Do we really want to let bad actors access our personal information and potentially be victims to identity theft and financial fraud?”
While he looks for another platform to host his work, Haddad has resolved to bring his films directly to his audience. Starting in Toronto last year, he’s been touring his films around North America and Europe, going to festivals and organizing his own screenings. His two premieres, in New York and Los Angeles, sold out.
“Touring has been a really amazing experience to go to all of these cities to find out that there were people following my work that I wasn’t even aware of,” he beams.
From Natural Born Sinners, to Haddad’s “He Never Dies” tour, to Eyesore Cinema’s Tender Prey series – which screens erotic thrillers from the ’90s – Toronto’s erotic art events are marked by a kind of nostalgia. They’re looking back at a time when eroticism wasn’t squashed or surveilled, but lived and shared. Not stopping there, they’re proving that eroticism is not just memory, but a living, breathing part of Toronto’s present.
Chez Moi Books is co-presenting the Double Life Bookfair, Saturday, Sept. 20, 1-7 p.m. Standard Time, 165 Geary Ave., 2nd Floor. Free.
Tender Prey is screening Red Shoe Diaries Thursday, Sept. 11, 8 p.m. Eyesore Cinema, 1176 Bloor St. W. $5/PWYC.
This article appeared in the 2025 Oct/Nov issue.