Pride 2019

As anyone who’s bothered to read the About The Author section of this blog knows, I’m an LGBTQ person. Specifically, I’m a bisexual man, albeit a married and monogamous one (the frustrating and insulting issue of bi erasure is going to be the subject of a future post) so June is always an interesting time for me — because it’s Pride Month.

Now, way back when I was a baby queer, I remember Pride as being a single long weekend. Lots of music and dancing on Church Street in Toronto, a big long march down Yonge Street, drinking back at the Village and so forth. The parade floats were shabby, most people walked (well, danced), the rainbow banners and whatnot were all homemade or self-funded or put up by businesses, not the city. It was generally regarded as a counter-culture event and there was an intoxicating sense of defiance in the air: Pride wasn’t just about being proud, it was about having the audacity not to be ashamed.

A generation later, times have changed. Pride is now a month-long corporate-sponsored festival of rainbow capitalism, repackaging queer culture into a safe, sanitized, family-friendly package, complete with smiling friendly police officers and ads for Smirnoff on the buses.

This dichotomy causes me some internal conflict: I’m not happy with the co-opting of Pride and by extension, queer culture… but the general social acceptance of that culture, of LGBTQ people, and above all the amount of representation that Pride Month shows — to young people especially — is just so damned important.

I look at all the media coverage of Pride, all the ads and the acceptance and the matter-of-fact nature of the existence of LGBTQ people as human beings with a right to exist and have their own subculture and traditions… that would have made a hell of a lot of difference to my life when I was twelve or fourteen. A hell of a difference.

So I can’t bring myself to wholly condemn the transition of Pride, over fifty years, from a literal brick-throwing riot started by drag queens of colour to a street festival and parade where people bring their kids. It’s become an accepted part of mainstream Canadian (and to a lesser extend American) culture in ways that the original Stonewall rioters could hardly have imagined, much less brought themselves to hope for: Once it was scandalous when local politicians marched in Pride, now it’s controversial when they don’t. I’m not a huge fan of being commodified for corporate profit (especially when those same corporations aren’t going to be contributing to the LGBTQ community next month, or in six months) but it means that things are better, right? We made it, as a community, right? LGBTQ people are accepted, right?

Wrong.

The LGBTQ community is still under attack and is not nearly as unified and accepted as the rosy-warm feeling of a corporate-sponsored, media managed Pride might suggest.

The cracks within the community have shown repeatedly over the years, especially during the 2016 Toronto Pride Parade when Black Lives Matter protesters stopped the parade to demand an end to the routine police harassment of LGBTQ people from marginalized and racialized backgrounds… and most controversially to demand a ban on uniformed police in the Pride Parade until such time as this was done. Parade organizers agreed to BLM’s demands within thirty minutes in order to get the parade underway, and then promptly reneged on their agreement.

The result was a massive schism within the Toronto LGBTQ community between people of colour, transpeople and sex-workers who understand that their rights are not as safe, guaranteed and comfortable are apparently assumed by the largely white and affluent LGBTQ people who traditionally make up the Pride Parade committee. That rift still exists, although the controversial demand that police should not participate in uniform has become… somewhat less controversial.

This is because late in 2017 Toronto police announced they were looking for a serial killer operating in the Gay Village. This surprised almost no one in the Ontario LGBTQ community. Since at least 2010 people had been reporting to police fears that a potential serial killer was preying on gay men in Toronto. In early 2018, police arrested Bruce McArthur for the murders of six gay men (he would eventually be charged and convicted for eight murders… although police have since reopened twenty-five cold cases in the Village dating back to the mid-70s.) For almost a decade LGBTQ community leaders had been begging the Toronto PD to consider the possibility that a serial killer was operating in the city but nothing was done until 2017. And when police finally began a serial-killer investigation they arrested the killer in less than six months. Understandably, that caused some resentment in Toronto’s LGBTQ community.

But it was Toronto police chief Mark Saunders’ disastrous public statement that ripped apart the thin veil of the LGBTQ community’s trust in the cops for good and all. During a press conference, Saunders defended years of police inaction on a possible serial killer by shifting the blame to the LGBTQ community, infamously stating “We knew that people were missing and we knew we didn’t have the right answers. But nobody was coming to us with anything.“

For the police chief to victim-blame the LGBTQ community was the last straw for many. As a direct consequence to his remarks, Toronto police were asked not to march in the Pride Parade in uniform and to their credit Toronto police have consented to the request, albeit grudgingly. A multi-million-dollar study is being conducted to see how the Toronto police and the LGBTQ community can mend their broken trust. (Stop harassing LGBTQ people of colour, transpeople and sex workers. Take our community’s concerns seriously. Train your officers to understand and respect the LGBTQ community. Do that consistently for at least the next ten years. There. Now where do I send the invoice?)

If I’d been writing this post even two months ago, that would have been where I stopped writing. But welcome to Pride 2019. All that stuff is merely background.

This is the Trump era. And in Ontario this is also the Ford era. And because President Donald Trump is an openly bigoted homophobe in the US and Premier Doug Ford is an openly bigoted homophobe in Ontario, homophobic bigots have been emboldened to renew their attacks on the LGBTQ community in general and LGBTQ people specifically. (It’s also emboldened other scum of a variety of flavors, but we’re specifically talking about homophobes today.)

In Toronto last week a group of so-called “Christians” staged a demonstration in the heart of the gay village, screaming homophobic abuse via bullhorns at the people who live in the area. Police were forced to intervene and arrest one self-described “street preacher” and are apparently contemplating charges for hate speech (for my American readers, hate speech is a crime under Canadian law and is emphatically not protected by our right to free speech, a point which pisses off the neo-Nazis to no end.) The fact that this was the second such incident in the Village in as many months has ratcheted up the tensions in the LGBTQ community.

Those tensions aren’t exclusive to Toronto, either. This past weekend people were shocked when armed neo-nazis openly marched against Detroit’s Pride celebration… and were protected by police while they did so. Almost simultaneously, reports of an active shooter at the Washington DC Pride Parade triggered a panic and a stampede that injured several people. There turned not to be an active shooter, thankfully, but the reaction from the crowd speaks unhappy volumes about the prevalence of gun violence and mass shootings in American culture and the utter plausibility of someone shooting up a Pride event.

And of course there’s the ongoing flap about Boston’s “straight pride parade”, which has turned out to be organized by some of the same white supremacists who were behind the infamous Charlottesville alt-right rally which ended in bloodshed and murder.

Homophobic street preachers. White supremacist parade organizers. Armed neo-Nazis. In my opinion, these are not isolated incidents. Emboldened by the current reactionary political climate, the extreme right-wing — aided and abetted by the more mainstream political right — is making a move against LGBTQ people. And they’re doing it because Pride has become so accepted.

These incidents are occurring as part of a deliberate and organized assault on LGBTQ people. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not envisioning some Bond-esque supervillian behind it all, some would-be-Fuhrer rubbing his hands in a luxurious bunker somewhere; rather there’s a network of connected hate groups and dozens of wannabe-fuhrers all chattering away at each other on their own social media networks. It’s less a directed attack and more of a self-reinforcing movement of trolls and scumbags, but the end result is the same: More incidents targeting the LGBTQ community. And these real-life incidents are being are being backed by an army of alt-right internet trolls. As you can see from the tweet by StanceGrounded (@_SJPeace_ on Twitter) I’ve posted below as a typical example, mainstream expressions of concern are met by derision and mockery by the alt-right.

But that derision isn’t (or isn’t just) about a cowardly internet troll being an ass. It’s a deliberate and calculated tactic to minimize and undermine mainstream horror at the far-right’s resurgence. The anonymous commenter “arthur” minimizes concern over “10 clowns in nazis gear.” (sic) But it’s not about the number of Nazis. It’s about the fact that Nazis were allowed to threaten people and shut down Pride. They did this to frighten LGBTQ people. They did this to send a message to all people that Nazis are back. But mostly, they did it to normalize the existence of Nazis in public spaces… and the chorus of jeering online by alt-right trolls is part of that normalization effort.

Let me be clear: our concern is not about the number of Nazis; It’s about the presence of Nazis at all.

Because if the far-right can manipulate the public into the tacit acceptance of a “minimal” number of Nazis at Pride events then that’s the big victory for them. It’s about getting their foot in the door (or jackboot, or whatever.) It’s not just about getting to be a presence — however hated and reviled — at Pride, it’s about being a presence in any public space. Pride is merely being targeted because LGBTQ people are a very visible and yet easily-targeted minority, for all our current shallow acceptance by the bottom-line of rainbow capitalism, who can (and will) be easily abandoned by social conservatives when push comes to shove.

So here we are, partway though Pride 2019. We’re here, we’re queer, we’re commodified and divided and we’re under attack by religious bigots, the alt-right and literal fucking Nazis… and we’re supposed to rely on the same police who have repeatedly broken the trust of our community to protect us.

I guess it represents real progress that our problems are different from those of our queer ancestors at Stonewall, but there’s a reason why LGBTQ gun clubs are getting popular.

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Update: Shortly after posting, a friend shared this absolutely hilarious firsthand account of a group of Proud Boys — a violent alt-right hate group — who decided to show up at New Orleans’ Pride celebration in their preppy little frat-fascist uniforms, only to be milkshaked and then have their cowardly asses kicked by a single self-described “middle aged faggot.”

While the read itself is intensely gratifying to me as both a middle-aged faggot and an anti-fascist, the presence of Proud Boys at another Pride event only reinforces my point about a concerted effort being made by the extreme right wing to normalize their presence at LGBTQ events… and about the importance of resisting that normalization. The analysis at the end of the piece is spot on, and makes me wish I knew who Anonymous Contributor was so I could buy them a beer.

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Update #2: Wow. I guess it’s not just the Toronto Police who can grossly mishandle their relationship with the LGBTQ community: Chief Craig defends decision not to warn public about neo-Nazis’ violent plans for Detroit