Sam Smith set to honour Beverly Glenn-Copeland at LGBTQ celebration PTP Pink Awards

TORONTO – Global pop star Sam Smith will honour legendary singer and composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland at the second edition of the PTP Pink Awards.

Organizers say Glenn-Copeland is this year’s legacy award recipient and one of six prominent LGBTQ+ figures being celebrated at Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel on Nov. 6.

“Sort Of” creator Bilal Baig, “Reservation Dogs” actor Devery Jacobs, Rough Trade vocalist Carole Pope, and American writer Harper Steele will also be toasted for their cultural contributions.

Rounding out the honourees is lawyer Douglas Elliott, whose career involved many cases defending the rights of Canada’s LGBTQ community.

The Pink Awards are run by media company Pink Triangle Press and recognize notable LGBTQ Canadians who are “doing urgent work to fight back and protect 2SLGBTQIA+ communities.”

Five of the honourees, excluding the legacy award recipient, receive a cash amount of at least $5,000, to donate to an individual or community organization they feel has made a difference.

Among the people being recognized this year are several trailblazers who have decades of cultural impact behind them.

Glenn-Copeland may be known to “Mr. Dressup” fans for his frequent appearances on the CBC show, while his 1986 album “Keyboard Fantasies” is credited as a pioneering work of early synthesizer and drum machine sounds. 

He began publicly identifying as a transgender man in the early 2000s, while a rediscovery of “Keyboard Fantasies” by a Japanese record collector in 2015 led to a broader reconsideration of his musical work.

Elliott’s legal battles for the rights of LGBTQ Canadians is enshrined in the country’s history. He represented the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto, the first church in the world to marry a same-sex couple in 2001. 

He was also lead counsel in a class action suit against the federal government over the LGBT Purge, a mass expulsion of queer people from the military, RCMP and federal civil service that began in the 1940s and lasted until the 1990s. His fight led to an unprecedented $145-million settlement and a formal apology in 2017 from Justin Trudeau in the House of Commons.

Pope is best known as the voice of the Canadian new wave hit “High School Confidential,” which pushed the boundaries of queer sexual expression in song and made her duo Rough Trade the underdogs of the Toronto music scene. She’s also long been an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community.

Pink Triangle Press is the publisher of Xtra Magazine as well as an advocate for LGBTQ+ representation in Canadian media, similar to the media monitoring organization GLAAD in the United States.

This year’s event will be hosted by “Schitt’s Creek” actress Emily Hampshire and “Canada’s Drag Race” choreographer Hollywood Jade. 

Tickets to the gala and a new after-party are available through the PTP website.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 2, 2025.