The ArQuives is excited to be hosting the Glory Hole Gallery for a special series of exhibitions over the coming year. The gallery has been given a home on the wall of the Reading Room, where it will continue its mission of platforming and celebrating the creative practices and lived experiences of 2SLGBTQ+ communities through four exhibitions presented between September 2026 and September 2027.
Glory Hole Gallery is the world’s first and only 2SLGBTQ+ micro-gallery, programmed by curator Emily Peltier. Founded in Toronto, Ontario, in 2017, the gallery emerged as a hyper-local, community-rooted response to erasure, censorship, and institutional gatekeeping. Its founding vision was to create a community-indebted micro-space dedicated to platforming 2SLGBTQ+ creativity and lived experience. Through nearly a decade of exhibitions, public programming, and community events, this commitment has remained at the core of the gallery’s Mandate. The name Glory Hole Gallery, drawn from a deeply embedded Queer practice and history, points to the social conditions that made Queer anonymity necessary, and those that still persist today: policing, homophobia, transphobia, racism, whorephobia, and ongoing attacks on sex workers’ rights. By reclaiming this term in a cultural and community-rooted curatorial context, the gallery positions Queer creative resistance as both method and message, reframing the “glory hole” as a site of refusal, survival, and radical cultural formation.
Over the years, Glory Hole Gallery has been operated and programmed through collaborations with Toronto-based artists and curators, alongside invaluable support from local organizations, galleries, businesses, and community partners. The gallery’s work has also been supported through funding from the Toronto Arts Council, Community One Foundation, the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, and The ArQuives.
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To stay informed about upcoming exhibitions and learn more about the history and pastprogramming of Glory Hole Gallery, visit: https://gloryholegallery.ca/