Even though Pride 2014, the largest Pride festival Calgary has seen since the first Pride Rally held in 1990 (that had 140 mostly masked individuals attend) has been over for over a month, reactions against it continue to hit the Letters page in Calgary’s papers. We have gone through this every year that there has been a Pride march/parade; the arguments against it are predictable.
‘We don’t have a Straight Pride parade, so why do the gays [sic] feel it necessary to have one?’
‘I don’t care what they do in private, I just don’t want to be confronted with it.’
"Why not have a march for green-eyed, left-handed, introverts, extraverts and straight sex orientated people, etc. I think it is not wrong or a special feature to be gay. So why then do they celebrate and not other groups?" – a direct quote pulled from of a letter to the editor in the September 4th issue of The Calgary Sun, and it pretty much sums up the usual reactions. So, syntax aside, let’s address that.
We celebrate, dear writer, because for years we had to hide who we were. We were criminalized, hunted down, arrested for even being in a gay bar, attacked on the streets, and denied even the most basic of civil rights – like access to rental accommodations, jobs, and public services – simply for being gay or lesbian (or even suspected of being gay or lesbian). I’m not talking the 1950s here. This was happening as recently as the ’80s and ’90s. Lesbians and gay men in Alberta had no protection whatsoever under the then provincial human rights act, The Individual Rights Protection Act (IRPA). A handful of activists fought to have ‘sexual orientation’ included in the Act under the Lougheed, Getty, and Klein administrations, to no avail.
It took a quiet unassuming lab instructor, called Delwin Vriend, who had been fired from King’s College Edmonton for being gay, and his inability to gain redress through the Alberta Human Rights Commission because ‘sexual orientation’ was not a protected characteristic in legislation at that time, to change that. He fought his case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. It took years – almost a decade – but in 1998 he, and all of us alongside him, won. The Klein government was told to ‘read in’ sexual orientation into the, by then, new human rights legislation of Alberta. In response, Klein threatened to invoke the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to continue to deny protection to lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. Neither he, nor his ministers, saw the irony in using the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to deny rights and restrict freedom, but that’s a whole other story.
We also celebrate because we have built a community over the last few decades that is worth celebrating – a community in every sense of the word. An inclusive, tolerant, accepting community, by and large.
We celebrate to honour those who fought back during the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and initiated what is seen as the modern homosexual movement. I say modern because it was not the first, but rather a third wave of emancipation. The first ocurred in the 1700s when men who had sex with men began to form communities, usually centered around what were known as Molly Houses. Having sex with another man was gaining perception as an innate, key aspect of someone’s identity, not just a deviation from the ‘norm’.
The second wave, and a far more organized and widespread one at that, was the Homosexual Emancipation Movement that initiated in Berlin in the 1890s and fanned out to Moscow, London, Paris, and Vienna, the then cultural centres of Europe. That movement was much like ours today – brandishing its own culture, art, literature, expression, and academic studies – and was largely spear-headed by Magnus Hirschfeld and his Scientific Humanitarian Committee and the Institute for Sexual Research which he founded in 1919. It was this movement that coined the term homosexual (from the Greek homo meaning ‘same’ and the Latin sexualis) as well as the term transvestite. Hirschfeld’s was the Kinsey Institute of its era.
All that was lost in 1933 when the Nazis looted and destroyed the Institute and burned its library and archives.
Over the years of Pride parades in Calgary, organizers and participants have had to contend with skinheads trying to pull the Imperial Sovereign Court of The Chinook Arch’s Empress out of the convertible in which she was riding (and Empress Tiffany, a petite little thing, whacked the (female) skinhead a good one with her sceptre while maintaining her Imperial composure the whole time until the skinhead let go and stumbled, a bit dazed I would think, onto the pavement); right-wing Christians showing up with placards denouncing our sin, at best, and scrawled with real vitriol, at worst. One year another skinhead/redneck showed up with two large pit bulls on chains and stood menacingly across the street from the Municipal Plaza as Svend Robinson, the openly gay NDP Member of Parliament for Burnaby-Kingsway, spoke, then wandered through the crowd until police told him to go back across the street to Olympic Plaza. He claimed he was just there to ‘see the queers’.
When Joe Clark was parade marshal for the Pride parade which, by then, had grown from a march to a full parade with a route from Connaught School, to 11th Street SW and back to the fairgrounds of Connaught School, a then well-known conservative columnist by the name of Peter Jackson showed up. Sporting a leather blazer and pleather pants, he attempted to join in the parade and near Joe Clark’s convertible. Mr. Jackson had been highly vocal in his opposition to Pride and to homosexuals for some years. He was asked to leave, which he reluctantly did.
One year the Westboro Baptist Church, out of Topeka, Kansas, threatened to disrupt the parade following the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada. They never made it across the border.
Despite all this, Pride continues to grow, perhaps because of all this. This year’s Pride parade attracted a reputed 40,000 to 50,000 people of all sexual orientations, genders and ages. I find that incredibly reaffirming. As one of the organizers of the first Pride Rally and March in 1990, I can see how far our community has come. I am no statistician, but going from 140 people in 1990 to 50,000 in 2014 is an amazing percentage jump over 24 years.
I distinctly remember a meeting with what was then Pride Calgary, a group originally formed to create a Calgary presence at the Gay Games in Vancouver and which was evolving to become the principal organizer of Pride Week, as the original group, the Calgary Lesbian and Gay Political Action Guild (CLAGPAG), prepared to hand over the reins, and having the President of Pride Calgary announce they were going to dispense with the political tone of the event and not hold a march but a parade. We were aghast at this perceived turning of backs on the political roots of Pride in favour of some party instead! I also remember him saying something to the effect that pride was not about politics but celebration – total anathema to what I, and likely other members of the CLAGPAG Steering Committee, perceived this annual commemoration of the Stonewall Riots to be. But he was right.
With a parade and festival attendance jumped immediately. Pride became increasingly high profile, no longer wending its way through a deserted downtown on Father’s Day to the Bridgeland Community Centre, but parading down 17th Avenue with floats and colour, music and joy. Our little march now seems rather dour by comparison! However, with a higher profile has come a stronger reaction. How dare we tie up traffic? How dare we ‘flaunt’ ourselves in the streets and subject children to it all? Have we no shame?
No. Not any more.
Do we hear the same criticisms levied against Caribfest; the Latino Festival? Do we have protesters showing up at the annual Sikh festival held in Forest Lawn, or decrying the Dragon Dance through Chinatown? These events are seen as part of the cultural fabric of a cosmopolitan city, proof that Calgary has shed its hick town image and embraced all that makes a city vibrant. Pride celebrations are also part of that. That, my friends, is what we have fought for over so many years. Equality. We are a hell of a lot more equal now than we ever were, but there is still work to be done. Pride celebrations celebrate where we came from, and highlight where we still need to go – and that is why we have Pride parades.
