Inside one of Canada’s largest public porn archives

“Pornography can tell us a lot about the limits of culture, the limits of imagination, and the limits of consumption and production,” says Patrick Keilty, a professor with the Faculty of Information and the collection’s current director. “It tells us a lot about ourselves.”

Here, take a look at some of the most fascinating items from the collection:  

Playboy, the Russia issue

The world’s most popular porno magazine captured more than just sex: articles by literary giants like Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami and Margaret Atwood have appeared alongside the publication’s risqué photography. Keilty points to “the Russia issue” from 1964 as an example of how the magazine kept in-tune with the culture and politics of the Cold War.

Screw 

If Playboy was a cultured, intellectual father-figure to American pornography, Screw was its scrappy, perverted little brother. In the tabloid’s first three years (from 1968 to 1971), publisher Al Goldstein was arrested 19 times on obscenity charge; over the next three decades, he spent millions on First Amendment lawsuits. It’s hard to stand by claims that Goldstein was caught up in any kind of good fight: his paper’s contents were often outright offensive, from unauthorized nude photos of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to the headline “Is J. Edgar Hoover A Fag?”

The Body Politic

The Body Politic, a Toronto-based magazine hailed as the first real voice for queer communities in the ’70s and ’80s, is among the archive’s most significant Canadian items. Its contents included an article titled “Lust With A Very Proper Stranger,” a piece on the etiquette of fisting. Despite the publication’s earnest, informative tone, it was met with more than its fair share of controversy. Soon after the fisting article was published, the Toronto police raided The Body Politic‘s office and charged all nine magazine staffers with obscenity.

The Max Allen Collection

The Max Allen Collection, donated by the former CBC producer and anti-censorship activist, contains most of the archive’s non-pornographic material. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Allen was involved in several legal battles that forged Canada’s obscenity laws. Canadian censorship reached its peak in the early ’90s, with customs agents seizing 15,000 books in two years, including The Man Who Sat in the Corridor, a literary novel by renowned French author Marguerite Duras; Pornography, Andrea Dworkin’s book-length polemic against pornography; and The Joy of Gay Sex, a guide to same-sex relationships by Charles Silverstein, founder of the influential peer-reviewed Journal of Homosexuality. For Keilty, it’s telling how often agents seized products bound for queer bookstores. “Whether it’s raiding bathhouses, shutting down magazines or customs censorship,” he says, “it’s frequently the sexuality on the margins that’s the first to be suppressed.” The peak of Canadian customs censorship even became a cover story south of the border—like in this issue of the San Francisco Bay Times—and was one of the main issues Allen advocated against. 

Early VHS porn

The archive’s boxes of VHS tapes showcase an early technological win for the porn industry. In the late 1970s, a videotape format war broke out between Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s Video Home System, or VHS. Both companies knew the market would only support one type of tape. VHS had lower picture quality, but it was cheaper—and naturally, it came out on top. Sony took another hit after it prohibited the use of Betamax technology from the erotic entertainment industry, which explains why you’d be hard-pressed to find a porno on Betamax.

The Adult Video Network 

The Adult Video Network (AVN), North America’s largest and most influential trade magazine for pornographers, was born out of porn’s “Golden Age” (1969–1984). The magazine’s adult entertainment awards introduced the idea that porn was something that could be both celebrated and respected. Since the late ’80s, this idea has been pushed forward by feminist porn, which aims to undo the emphases on male pleasure, objectification of women and fetishization of non-white ethnicities.

Kink event poster 

The Lord Morpheous Collection focuses on the acceptance of BDSM and all things kink. Morpheous is a Canadian sex educator, fetish photographer and the author of guidebooks How To Be Kinky, Bondage Basics, and How To Be Kinkier. He’s also the developer behind KinkMe, a dating app that matches users based on their kink compatibility. This poster is from one of his annual Bondage Extravaganzas in Toronto—the largest rope bondage art installation in the world.