Pride at a crossroad: Making the circle bigger

In 1969, during a routine altercation with police in New York City at a pub called the Stonewall Inn, a stiletto shoe was thrown at an arresting police officer.

That shoe toss was part of a riot initiated by the transgressive and visibly different in our community — drag queens, crossdressers, trans women of colour and femme, flaming white homosexual men — standing together, side by side, pushing back against brutal oppression.

This riot spawned a movement that changed our world.

Born of radical roots, the homosexual liberation movement in a few short years morphed into gay and lesbian Pride — going into the hearts and minds of community after community, taking back spaces, with the notion that we can find pride in who we are; who it is we love and how it is we want to be with them. Celebrating how we identify and express ourselves, our genders and our bodies.

The movement morphed again, as we began to understand that each of us had varied experiences of our queerness. In our circle, our lived experiences were profoundly different. Yet we all wanted the same thing — meaningful lives with meaningful relationships. Reflecting this reality, our movement, our celebration of diversity, become one word.

Pride. 

Pride was about creating a place for all of us, and not just some of us.

Pride is not just a march or a series of parties. Pride is much more than that. It always has been and it always will be.

It is a public celebration of our personal and often private trials and triumphs. It is a declaration of individual and collective crucible experiences, of walking through the fire of gender and sexual diversity, for our friends, families and allies.

A fiery crucible

Coming out to yourself is no small task. It is often the single most terrifying moment in our lives. Coming out to others is an extension of that moment. From the fiery crucible of self-confrontation and self-acceptance, we are connected and bound together.

We held together through the horror of AIDS. It was our lesbian sisters who wept beside us, in our thousands, as blood family tossed us away like garbage. They nursed us and sat with us as we died; they collected our bodies when none would claim us. They buried us, when none would make arrangements. The horror bound us together. Death made our numbers smaller but love kept our circle bigger.

Pride was where we came together and celebrated.

I am fiercely in love with Pride. I am in love with its past, its present and its potential.

For over a decade, I worked on Pride executives. Serving as the inaugural president of Fierté Canada Pride — our national Pride association — I was privileged to connect with thousands of lovers of Pride regionally, nationally and internationally.

I've had the honour of sitting with those who were at the Stonewall Inn that fabled night when it all began. I've meet activists from some of the most persecuted regions on the planet and have heard from them how much Pride in our country means to them. How it inspires them to never give up.

I know the shoulders on which we stand. I want our shoulders to be just as strong, for others to stand on them.

Our movement is at a crossroad. For a time, we forgot our stories and our bonds. The incredible gains made in the last decade or so gave us blind spots. Many of us believed that everyone benefited equally from them. We began to think we didn't "need" Pride or gay bars or safe spaces anymore. We began to think we don't "need" each other anymore. We forgot who it was that carried us and how it is we got here.

We have the potential to remember who we are, and who it is we wanted to be, when it first began.

Go back to the very first shoe toss. Look at who was in the circle then. Until recently, the circle was missing quite a few folks from those early days. Absent were trans folk; those who are gender-fluid or non-binary; queer people of colour and those whose lives take them to the margins or edges. They had been put aside, like parts of our stories.

We are making the circle larger. We are welcoming voices from our two-spirit Indigenous families, alongside those of the differently abled; voices of newcomers and refugees and of our elders or seniors.

We are engaging and having conversations around intersections in which we live. We are exploring the impacts that decades of tokenism and marginalization have had on those who are not socially mobile or well-jobbed or educated. We are exploring the differences between intent and impact; between how systems operate and the limits that individuals within them have, if the system itself does not change.

Some of those conversations are hard. Some of those hurt and cause conflict. They offer us the opportunity to reflect and what we see is not always pretty. That is OK. We are our chosen family — we can choose to see each other. We can do this.

Pride reminds us that we are strong. We are fierce, we children of the fire. We have come through our crucible. We can make our circle bigger, to include all of us, and not just some of us.

Happy Pride!

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