Should Pride marches be parties or protests — or both?

Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance is a new documentary that explores the history of Pride marches in Canada. The film asks: is Pride a party or a protest — or both? 

Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with culture critic Syrus Marcus Ware and journalist Tobin Ng about Parade and what the documentary says about Pride marches 50 years on.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player

Elamin: Syrus, tell me about what stuck out for you from this new documentary.

Syrus: What I loved about it is, first of all, there's all these personal narratives about people who  were actually there, living the story, living the lives. Unlike a lot of stories that we hear about queer liberation, this centres on Canada. We often hear about Compton's Cafeteria riot, about Stonewall, but where are the stories about Toronto? So we see that here.

And what I love about it is that there's lots of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Colour] stories in this doc. That's the other thing that we sometimes have a problem with, is that we don't always see queers of colour represented in the archive. And in this documentary, we have [Jamaican and Toronto-based queer activist and artist] Courtnay McFarlane, we have [Grenadian-Canadian queer filmmaker and community advocate] Debbie Douglas. We have all of these incredible folks who laid such important groundwork to make it safer for all of us in this documentary. So the personal narrative, the ephemera, the banners and the chants and the singing reminding us that, yes, Pride was a riot, but also activism is joyful and fun.

Elamin: Tobin, there's been a lot of buzz about this documentary, about Parade. It opened Hot Docs. It won the audience award for best documentary at Inside Out. What do you think people are reacting to when they have such a great, big reaction to this documentary? 

Tobin: I think there's something so visceral in the documentary, in the way that it situates us in the middle of so many of these protests. It's really rare that we get to see historical footage — hear them, see them, watch them moving in such big numbers — of these queer ancestors, people who we often can't easily point to because we don't learn about them in school, we don't see them in textbooks, we don't see them on TV. And so I think it's really meaningful that there's this kind of documentation. And I think that the movie really takes on this responsibility of restoring all of our collective memory in that sense, of remembering these people — a lot of whom we've lost because of the HIV/AIDS crisis — and having them front and centre in that way.

One of the early scenes in the film is actually filmed at Parliament Hill, not that far from where I live. It's one of the first — I think it is the first — national rally of queer and trans people in Canada, and that was decades ago. And there was something so moving, I think, to see that footage, knowing that I had walked those grounds not far from where I live, that there is this history of resistance that we can point to and remember and think of, particularly as we see these rollbacks, particularly when it comes to trans youth. 

Elamin: Syrus, it feels crude now to say: do you have to pick between whether Pride is a protest or a party? It feels like maybe that particular binary is not a binary you're really interested in here. 

Syrus: I think the most important thing is that Pride is a movement. And in movements, there are all sorts of factors that are part of a movement. There's dancing in the streets, and there's rattling the doors of the legislature, which we saw [Indigenous actor and writer] Billy Merasty do in that video when they run up the stairs of the legislature after the protests of the bathhouse raids. So it's both. And I can't stress enough, protest is a party. Protest is joyful. 

So yes, Pride is absolutely about resistance, about strength of our community, about coming together — and we can shimmy and shake while we say, "Hell no, we're here, we're queer, we're not going away." We can make it into a joyful experience. I'm not interested in whether Pride should be this or should be that. All I know is that I want my community to be able to come to Pride, to be free of policing, to see other BIPOC folks, to have Indigenous community present at Pride, to have disabled, deaf and mad people at pride, and to have a space for all of us to get to be out and free. 

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Amanda Burt.