A TIMELINE OF TORONTO PRIDE

Know your history, Toronto…or at least the highlights

1971 Toronto’s frst “Gay Day Picnic” is held on the beach at Hanlan’s Point on Sunday, August 1. The groundbreaking event was organized by Toronto Gay Action, the Community Homophile Association of Toronto and the University of Toronto Homophile Association, with around 300 people from neighbouring cities as far away as New York City and Detroit attending to show their support. 1972 On July 9, the second annual Gay Day Picnic is held as part of a series of events for the frst Gay Pride Week. The week includes a festival, flm night, Pride Dance, rally and march to Queen’s Park.

1973 Pride Week is held from August 17-26. The organizers ask Mayor David Crombie to recognize the event, but are turned down. Permission to march down Yonge Street is also denied. 1974 Pride Week is held from August 17-24 and includes another Pride Picnic on Ward’s Island, a theatre night and a church service at Metropolitan Community Church. More than 100 people march from Allan Gardens to Queen’s Park in an effort to pressure provincial legislators to add sexual orientation to the Ontario Human Rights Code. 1978 After no organized events were held from 1975 to 1977, GAYDAYS: In Celebration of Lesbians and Gay Men is held from August 24-27. This is the frst year that Pride Day is celebrated at Cawthra Park, with ceremonies on the steps of The 519 Community Centre and a beer garden in the park. 1981 After no organized events were held in 1979 and 1980, Lesbian and Gay Pride Day Toronto is legally incorporated and 1,500 people celebrate Pride Day on Sunday, June 28 at Grange Park. Just months earlier, on February 5, Metro Toronto Police had raided various bathhouses as part of “Operation Soap,” arresting 306 men.… In spite of the politically charged atmosphere, Lesbian and Gay Pride Day is billed as a time to relax and celebrate, and as “an afternoon of fun and frolic.”

1984 After previous Pride events at Grange Park (1981 and 1982) and King’s College Circle (1983), the annual festival makes a move. For the frst time, Church Street – the heart of Toronto’s queer village – is closed and people dance in the street. 1985 Mayor Art Eggleton refuses to proclaim Lesbian & Gay Pride Week – the theme of which, ironically, is “Coming Together.” Eggleton will become Toronto’s longest-serving mayor (from 1980 to 1991), and through his entire tenure he will refuse to proclaim Lesbian and Gay Pride Day. 1991 Toronto City Council proclaims Pride Day for the frst time, and Councillor Jack Layton reads the proclamation at the opening ceremony. Eggleton refuses to attend. 1992 June Rowlands becomes the frst mayor to sign a Pride Day proclamation, though she does not attend the actual parade. 1995 Barbara Hall becomes the frst mayor in Toronto’s history to not only speak on the Pride stages, but also to attend and walk in the parade. 1996 The frst-ever Dyke March is held on Saturday, June 29, and it has a turnout of 5,000 people – police had projected an attendance of 50.

1998 After initial reservations, Toronto’s new “mega-mayor” Mel Lastman participates in the annual Pride Parade. He ends up having a fantastic time, riding on a fre truck and getting soaked by revellers with power water guns. 2001 For the first time, the City’s Official Proclamation of Pride Week includes a mention of bisexuals, transsexuals and transgendered persons. 2009 The First Trans March is held after Karah Mathiason organizes the event. It is not recognized by Pride Toronto as an offcially programmed event but is supported by the group. 2014 Toronto hosts WorldPride 2014, the frst to be held in North America and the largest event of its kind. 2016 Toronto Pride celebrations take over the city when the event becomes one month long. On Sunday, July 3, Black Lives Matter brings the Pride parade to a standstill to force the annual celebration of LGBTQ equality to answer for its “anti-blackness.” 2020 Pride Toronto cancels its full in-person festival weekend, which includes the Pride Parade, the Dyke March and the Trans March, due to the coronavirus pandemic. Virtual events, parties, performances and seminars are held throughout the month instead.

33

Asian culture is underrepresented on your screens

By Jaime Woo

During the premiere episode of the second season of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, the contestants were asked to present a look based off their favourite British gay icon. When the two Black contestants, Asttina Mandella and Tayce, both chose Naomi Campbell, regular Drag Race viewers may have prepared themselves for a catfght like when Gia Gunn and Trinity the Tuck battled over playing Caitlin Jenner on their season of All Stars. I held my breath, worried that the show would carelessly exploit the struggles of people of colour for petty drama. realized the names that came to mind were all American. George Takei, and B.D. Wong, and Margaret Cho, and Bowen Yang – although Bowen did live in Montreal as a child. I spent a few hours of effort, and came up with author Wayson Choy, city councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam and television host Lilly Singh. The list isn’t exhaustive, especially depending on how you defne “icon,” but it’s depressingly not far off. (Maybe we can squeeze in Sandra Oh, who is nothing short of iconic as a lesbian in Under the Tuscan Sun. Is Keanu Reeves a gay icon?)

Thankfully, the two British queens instead shared their frustration at how diffcult it was to think of any other Black British gay icon aside from the supermodel, and lamented the lack of visibility and representation. It made me wonder how the same assignment would have played on our homegrown version, Canada’s Drag Race. Would the Black contestants all have to choose Jackie Shane (who is American but lived in Toronto long enough for us to claim her as one of our own) or pay tribute to the late great Michelle Ross? It’d be even slimmer pickings for contestants like Kyne, Priyanka and Ilona Verley. The reason it’s so shocking is because, until I had enumerated it this way, I hadn’t realized how little of myself I’d seen on screen. Because Canada has worked hard to diversify media representation – the CBC alone has Schitt’s Creek, Kim’s Convenience, Queens and Trickster – it’s easy to create a composite of sorts. In a Venn diagram, seeing the two outer circles gives an illusion of (or, more generously, hope for) something to fll in the overlapping region. Yet spottings of queer people of Asian descent are so rare, I fnd myself leaping out of my seat when I see them, like the climax of a round of Where’s Waldo.

I keep a mental list of queer people of Asian descent, as I imagine most people who belong to multiple underrepresented groups do. As I ran through this thought experiment, I became defated as I It reminds me of a game I’d often play in my corporate career. I’d look up the highest-ranking person of colour in the company where I worked, and the highest-ranking person from the LGBTQ

community, to get a sense of where the various ceilings might exist. When it came time to ask who was the highest-ranking person of colour from the LGBTQ community, it was usually me – and I never ranked that high. I played this game because visibility and representation matter: when you are rarely seen, that vacuum is flled by stereotypes, and to not be seen at all is to live as a ghost in the place you call home. After the shootings in Atlanta, people began campaigning to #StopAAPIHate. It’s well-intentioned, but will hardly move the needle until we refect on how that hate comes about. Nothing springs to life spontaneously, independent of its environment. Let’s not forget how sex work was a key component to the shootings, and refect on how limited the portrayals of women of Asian descent are in Western media.

In the gay community, there are many stereotypes around men of Asian descent. The ease with which the community trivializes and erases men of Asian descent is clear to anyone who has used a hookup app. We have to trace these sentiments back to Mickey Rooney’s yellowface as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the character of Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles. We have to refect on the absence of Asian men from formative television shows like Will & Grace, Sex and the City and Queer as Folk.

The few signals being sent can be so subtle that they slip under the radar, but if you’re aware of them, it’s impossible to miss. For instance, Michael Patrick King’s repeated dubious Asian representation includes having, in Sex and the City, a Pakistani busboy that Samantha could reject in order to feel better about herself, and a scheming Thai housekeeper named solely to allow Carrie Bradshaw to make a Chinese food pun; his frst flm features a handsome man in heels as a quick, queasy punchline; and his sitcom 2 Broke Girls has an antagonist, Han Lee, who fts the stereotype of being undesirable and calculating. If you never took note of these portrayals, here’s an invitation to take a minute and ask yourself why. Even on Canada’s Drag Race, not a single person at the judges’ table was of Asian descent. I’m thankful for Sabrina Jalees’s mini-challenge appearance, but doesn’t that say something about the composition of our cultural landscape? (Similarly, the second season of the UK version doesn’t appear to feature a contestant of Asian descent, leaving Sum Ting Wong as the only representation out of 22 queens.) Little was made of how Kyne and Priyanka broke ground, perhaps even making history on Canadian television. Perhaps paradoxically because Canada is so multicultural, Canadians don’t notice the gaps in representation: they fll in the centre of the Venn diagram even if it’s not there. It’s clear Priyanka didn’t win to compensate for a dearth of representation, yet her win in this light now feels that much sweeter. The awareness around anti-Asian violence has brought to the surface a lot of anger, and it can be diffcult to know what happens after #StopAAPIHate. I think about the advice of Tibetan lama Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, author of the wonderful In Love With The World, who suggests that within anger and hatred we fnd love and compassion. What does that look like? To me, it means enlarging the spotlight. It means understanding how the representation of people of Asian descent relates to other underrepresented groups. It means not just inviting Canadian creators to view the LGBTQ community as including more people of Asian descent, but all of the BIPOC community. We need more flms about Indigenous LGBTQ lives, such as the short flm Aviliaq: Entwined, by Inuk flmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, where two Inuit women in the Arctic try to stay together during the rampant colonialism of the 1950s. Arnaquq-Baril was featured in the moving documentary Two Hard Things, Two Soft Things, by Mark Kenneth Woods and Michael Yerxa, which explored the impact of colonialism on LGBTQ acceptance in Nunavut, and the quickening change since the territory’s creation. The flm’s out Inuit participants Nuka Fennell, Jesse Mike, Kyla Gordon and Kieran B. Drachenberg again likely made history within Canadian media representation. Their stories matter because they remind us of our common humanity, that we are more alike than not. The documentary ends at a Pride celebration in 2015, where we hear part of a speech from the former Premier of Nunavut, Paul Okalik. He says, “I recall going to school and to university and feeling very alone during discussions on Aboriginal rights, and who was there with me? The gay community was there with me, supporting me all the way. I’ll gladly return that honour to you any day, every day.” Solidarity is a rising tide. To properly support one another, we must also learn from one another. One of the most interesting threads from the documentary is the discussion around how to translate the feeling of Pride into Inuit languages, given that pride is not viewed as a desirable trait. It’s a demonstration of the drive to unite while still respecting one another’s beliefs and values.

The world becomes less scary when we learn more about the people who live in it. The original Drag Race broke ground with Gottmik, a trans man; let’s see Canada’s Drag Race break convention with a drag king. I want a spin-off centring on tech entrepreneur Lawrence Yee from HBO’s Succession. I’m hungry for a world where we get more representation from people like Nyle DiMarco, the openly queer and deaf model. Why don’t we have a screen version of the reimagined Lilies staged at Buddies in Bad Times that was led by a predominantly Indigenous and Black cast? Doesn’t a world with those things sound more exciting, like a place we can grow and thrive? When I refect on Rinpoche’s advice, I see where I want to be. I’m still angry about the poor representation of LGBTQ people of Asian descent, but I see now how it can be transformed. Rather than being depressed and diminished by how little there is, I’m emboldened and energized to imagine what must be.