The region's first-ever Pride day went ahead despite council's refusal to acknowledge it

In 1995, local LGBTQ activist Cait Glasson had been trying to drum up support among councillors across the region for a Pride day. She wasn't asking for the raising of the Pride flag at city hall or a rainbow crosswalk. She just wanted a public declaration for the day she was proposing.

Glasson wasn't able to get the support to make a city-sanctioned day happen, but she helped launch a celebration anyway.

"We just took it into our own hands to make a Pride celebration," she told CBC News.

"There was a gathering of people who got together and formed the first Pride committee."

June is LGBTQ Pride month across Canada, and a series of events are organized in the region to honour the occasion, but this wasn't always the case. Pride in Waterloo Region was the result of the work of activists like Glasson and others.

The first Pride day celebration was held on June 28, 1995. Although Glasson said that they didn't get the support of Kitchener council for the Pride day she'd originally been after, her group managed to hold their event at Kitchener City Hall in the rotunda. They rented out the space for $202.64. 

"We just had a bunch of tables and chairs and people were speaking and that was about it really," said Glasson. "So it was pretty tame."

Glasson said that 76 people showed up that day.

"It was about being able to come together as a community," she said, explaining that it was the first gathering in recent years that they were able to get together outside of the LGBTQ bars. 

Importance of Pride today

Nearly 30 years have passed since that first Pride, but Glasson feels that things like Pride month and the raising of the rainbow flag at city hall are hugely important "because there's still a lot of people out there who want to tell members of [their] community that they need to live in shame."

"And as long as there are people who say we should live in shame, then we're going to be standing up and saying, 'No, we're going to live in pride,'" Glasson said. "And that's what Pride has always been about. It's the opposite of shame."

'Personal validation'  

The Pride flag was first flown at Kitchener City Hall in 2014, 19 years after the first Pride, and Jim Parrott, the Grand River Rainbow Historical Project editor, was one of the people who helped to make that happen.

Back then, he felt that having that sort of visibility was significant, particularly since the only gay bar in the city had closed the year before.

"Many of these 'validations' — if you want to use that word — happen at a personal level," Parrott explained. "And so I think individual people seeing that, seeing the Pride flag up, was something that validated them personally."

"Nowadays, of course, we see Pride flags on all sorts of establishments. Sometimes they're little stickers, but I think it really, really helps out a great deal, so personal validation."