For Pride month, Canada Post puts Hanlan’s Point nude beach on a stamp
Naturists used to worry about their mail being confiscated by postal authorities, but in Canada, one famous nudist locale is being honored on a new postage stamp
TORONTO—Naturists used to worry about their mail being confiscated by postal authorities, but in Canada, one famous nudist locale is being honored on a new postage stamp.
Just in time for Pride month 2025, Canada Post has issued a four-stamp series called “Places of Pride / Liuex de la Fierté” that commemorate four key sites in the country’s LGBTQ history.
From among several candidates, one of the places that made the cut is Hanlan’s Point nude beach in Toronto. The beach was where a group of gay and lesbian activists met on August 1, 1971, to finalize a document called “We Demand,” which laid out an agenda for what blossomed into Canada’s queer liberation movement.
That gathering, advertised at the time as the “Gay Day Picnic,” is now recognized as the country’s first Pride event. Afterward, those militants who met at Hanlan’s went to Canada’s capital, Ottawa, to present their demands for equality to the government.
The other three “Places of Pride” are Calgary’s Club Carousel, a pioneering queer club from the 1970s; Montreal’s Truxx, a bar where police harassment in 1977 sparked mass protest; and the 1990 North American Native Gay and Lesbian Gathering in Manitoba, where the Indigenous queer term “two-spirit” was derived.
So, while it wasn’t nudity, necessarily, that put Hanlan’s Point on Canada Post’s list of places to honor, the artwork for the new stamp also doesn’t shy away from the beach’s clothing-optional status. Illustrated by artist Tim Singleton and designed by Kelly Small, several people are seen enjoying the sand and the sun, with some clearly implied to be soaking up the rays au naturel.
There’s also an overlap of naturist and queer liberation values in the art, with a diversity of body shapes, colors, and genders represented.
While it may be the first time a nude beach is represented on a postage stamp, it’s not the first instance of nudity. When the Spanish Post issued stamps featuring artist Francisco de Goya’s La maja desnuda painting in 1930, Time magazine complained, “An indecent picture is bad enough, but a postage stamp, whose backside must be licked?”
So big was the backlash against a nude woman reclining on envelopes that the U.S. Postal Service refused to process mail from Spain if senders used the de Goya stamps. Canada Post’s Places of Pride stamps are only for domestic letters, though, so there’s little worry this time about puritanism south of the border delaying the mail.
In an interview with Canada Post Magazine marking the launch of the new stamp, activist and historian Travis Myers of the non-profit group Friends of Hanlan’s (formerly known as Hands Off Hanlan’s) said the beach has been a mainstay of queer culture in Canada for well over a century.
The beach, which sits on the western shores of the Toronto Islands, just off the city’s lakefront, has long been a place of refuge for those who don’t fit mainstream society’s conformist norms.
“To be gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, you couldn’t be yourself on the mainland,” Myers explained. “So, Hanlan’s Point was a respite, an escape for people to get away from prying eyes.” From at least the 1950s onward, it has been a queer rendezvous point.
A similar search for freedom from voyeuristic intent is also what long made Hanlan’s Point a popular spot for nude sunbathing and swimming, even as far back as the Victorian era. In 1894, it was officially made a clothing-optional beach by city council, a long-lost historical fact recovered from the archives in the late 1990s by attorney Peter Simm and the gay naturist group Totally Naked Toronto! Men Enjoying Nudity (TNT!MEN).
Though nude use had been banned in the 1930s, Simm unearthed proof that not only did Hanlan’s have a naturist history, it was likely the first legal nude beach to exist anywhere in the world. TNT!MEN and other groups, like the Federation of Canadian Naturists (FCN), spearheaded a campaign that restored the beach’s legal clothing-optional status at the turn of the millennium.
Myers’ group, the Friends of Hanlan’s, was founded in 2023 to protect the beach and the natural habitat that surrounds it from overzealous city planners who envisioned building a busy event space right next to the beach, sparking concerns about safety and security for the users of Hanlan’s Point.
Since then, the Friends of Hanlan’s has not only succeeded in protecting the beach from the stadium scheme but also expanded its clothing-optional zone to include the entire beach and cemented its recognized status as a queer cultural space. It has also worked to upgrade facilities and access to the beach and lobbied for environmental restoration efforts, such as remediating Hanlan’s eroding shoreline.
Getting Hanlan’s Point included in the Canada Post “Places of Pride” stamp series was the latest effort undertaken by the Friends of Hanlan’s to publicize and promote Hanlan’s Point’s place in Canadian history. Myers and others in the organization worked with Canada Post behind the scenes for the better part of a year to make the stamp happen.
On Saturday, June 21, Friends of Hanlan’s, the FCN, Toronto Nude Dudes, and other organizations are collaborating to host “Naturist Beach Day” at Hanlan’s Point under the theme “Suns Out, Buns Out.” It’s a chance for fun and recreation sans swimsuits, but also an opportunity to remember the work of generations past and present that has gone into preserving spaces like Hanlan’s—right up to and including the new Canada Post stamp.
Talking about the first Pride back in 1971, Myers said, “When you hear ‘Gay Day Picnic,’ it sounds like a little fun party, but it’s always been political, too. It’s always been about securing rights and making sure that queer people can live openly and freely.
“Every time I say that I’m queer at work, or every time I walk down the street and see a rainbow flag, it’s those people on that beach who did that for me,” Myers said.
That fighting ethos has been at the heart of the parallel struggles faced by the LGBTQ and naturist communities for decades. Just like they have at Hanlan’s Point in both the past and present, queer activists have often played a vanguard role in establishing and securing other free beaches.
Naturist Society founder Lee Baxandall wrote in Clothed With the Sun magazine in 1981, “Gays on the nude beach have often led because of more experience at defying intimidation on behalf of values that are too central to abandon.” He said that repeatedly throughout history, gays “staked out remote stretches” of shoreline which have then been “shared by heterosexual couples and singles” alike for nude use.
“The interaction of the gay and naturist value systems in the development of the body freedom movement,” Baxandall said, made the two communities natural allies.
That united front spirit lives on and is memorialized on the new Hanlan’s Point Places of Pride stamp. Pick one up today and send a letter or postcard to a friend. 🪐
The Hanlan’s Point Beach stamp and others in the Places of Pride series can be purchased from Canada Post.
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VERY cool! But TBH, I'm not seeing the people "clearly implied to be soaking up the rays au naturel." I see a guy in the foreground without a shirt, next to one in a shirt. It's the beach. To me, the implication is he's in shorts (probably baggy board shorts). Next view is a woman in a red one-piece swimsuit, largely obscuring her two companions beyond arms, legs, and a shoulder of one (that's probably the implied nudity since we don't see straps), and beyond them are just humanoid dots in the distance. For nudity, albeit a Greek statue, back in 1996 to honor the Atlanta Olympics, the U.S. Postal Service issued stamps picturing a Greek statue of a clearly nude (side view) male discus thrower. I still have some.
Happy to see Canada being awesome. ^_^ Happy Pride, all!