Pride is prejudiced: when Black Lives Matter and pride intersect

With the cancellation of all city-led events through June 30 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, members of the LGBTQI2SA+ community have expressed disappointment over the cancellation of the Toronto Pride Festival—for the first time in the history of Toronto Pride.

The festival is widely regarded as a time to take pride in the progression of the legal rights, acceptance, and achievements of the LGBTQI2SA+ community—but it has not always been a celebration. In Canada and the US, Pride originated in riots and marches that protested continuous police brutality against the LGBTQI2SA+ community.

The Stonewall Inn, a gay club in New York City, was violently raided by the New York Police Department in 1969. What followed were the aggressive, 6 day long “Stonewall Riots” that served as a major catalyst for Gay Rights Movements across the world.

Still, law enforcement continued to target and harass the LGBTQI2SA+ community. Just over 10 years later, four gay bathhouses in Toronto were raided by police in an event known as “Operation Soap.” With 306 men interrogated, terrorized, and charged, it was, at the time, the largest arrest made in the history of Toronto up until that time. These raids incited the first Toronto Pride Event, where 3,000 people marched in protest of police brutality against the LGBTQI2SA+ community. The march, however, was met with violence when 200 police officers blocked the peaceful protest from continuing.

With the progression of LGBTQI2SA+ rights in Canada, Pride has since grown into a corporate-funded display of acceptance rather than an urgent intervention against LGBTQ+ intolerance. With the recent Black Lives Matter uprisings overlapping with Pride Month, Black LGBTQI2SA+ activists are encouraging the community to question whether their acceptance is truly intersectional.

This is hardly a new request. In 2016, a Black Lives Matter sit-in protest paused the Toronto Pride Parade for half an hour, urging attendees to examine the intersectionality of their movement . The protest, led by BLM-TO co-founder Alexandria Williams, sought to enlighten the mostly white crowd about the oppression and criminalization that Black people continued to face because of their sexual and gender identities. The group read out a list of requests to be approved by Toronto Pride before they agreed to move, including diversifying their staff, hiring Black ASL interpreters, increasing funding and autonomy for Black queer youth community spaces, and removing uniformed police, floats, and booths from all Pride related events.

The protest and demands were met with controversy, both at the parade and in the media. While many white onlookers chanted to “Move That Truck” and that “All Lives Matter,” the executive director of Pride Toronto agreed to the demands—only to revoke his approval the next day. Further, Black Lives Matter Toronto was vilified by the media, which portrayed the group as an “aggressor” with radical demands and an “outsider” of the all-inclusive LGBTQI2SA+ community. These responses only emphasized the message of the Black Lives Matter protest: that the accepted idea of an LGBTQI2SA+ person is a white person, and anti-Black racism remains a prominent force within LGBTQI2SA+ communities.

The Black Lives Matter sit-in at the 2016 Toronto Pride Festival refocused the parade as an event of protest and intervention , raising the question of whether Pride can flaunt acceptance and inclusivity if Black LGBTQI2SA+ people continue to be oppressed both within and outside the community. With Pride Month and the Black Lives Matter movement once again intersecting, it is crucial for white and non-Black LGBTQI2SA+ people of colour to recognize the privilege that they have, and to do better in creating an environment which acknowledges intersectionality rather than celebrating a conditional and limited acceptance of the queer community.