Come As You Are is a worker-owned sex-toy cooperative in Toronto, Ontario. Cory Silverberg founded it in 1997 on the model of Good Vibrations in the United States. Retail was not the whole job. Education and community service were written into the brief, so adult customers could get accurate sexual information while they shopped. For readers tracking kink, disability access, and sex education, the shop is a long-running Canadian case of cooperative ownership sitting next to sex-positive retail.
The address moved. The original store on Queen Street West closed in 2016. In 2020 the co-op opened a new shop in Kensington Market, so Toronto still had a physical counter after the Queen West years. Across that time Come As You Are pushed to make sex toys more usable for disabled people, and treated disability as a design and service question rather than a footnote added later. Readers voting in Now Toronto have repeatedly picked it among the city’s best sex shops.
Off the shelf, the co-op runs sex-education and health workshops with sex-positive writers and educators, including Susie Bright. It also takes outreach workshops to local community groups and universities. In 2013 a proposal from Come As You Are won The Co-operators’ National Co-op Challenge and carried that educational outreach to communities across Canada. On a BDSM and adult-retail map it stands with places like Good Vibrations: worker-owned, education first, disability-aware, and already awarded. The practical next step for a visitor is still the shop’s site and its event calendar, for workshops or for advice on accessible products.
