Come As You Are is a sex-positive sex shop in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Cory Silverberg founded it in 1997 as a worker-owner cooperative modeled on the United States-based Good Vibrations. The project was never just retail: the co-op built an educational and community mandate so people could get accurate sex information alongside products. For kink, disability, and sex-ed audiences, the store is a long-running Canadian example of cooperative ownership meeting sex-positive retail.
Locations and accessibility
The original bricks-and-mortar shop on Queen Street West closed in 2016. A new location opened in Kensington Market in 2020, keeping a physical Toronto presence after the Queen West chapter. Across those years Come As You Are pushed to make sex toys more usable and accessible for disabled people, treating disability as a design and service problem, not an afterthought. Readers of Now Toronto have repeatedly voted it among the city’s best sex shops.
Education, outreach, and prize
Beyond the shelves, the co-op runs sex education and health workshops with sex-positive authors and educators, including Susie Bright and others. It also takes outreach workshops to local community groups and universities. In 2013 Come As You Are won The Co-operators’ National Co-op Challenge with a proposal to expand that educational outreach to communities across Canada, recognition that the co-op model and curriculum were exportable beyond one Toronto address. On a BDSM and adult-retail map, Come As You Are sits with Good Vibrations-style institutions: worker-owned, sex-ed first, disability-aware, award-backed, and still selling toys in Kensington Market after the Queen West era closed. Official site links and event calendars remain the practical next step for visitors seeking workshops or accessible product advice in Toronto.
