Whose Pride is it Anyway?

This week marks the beginning of Pride celebrations in Vancouver. Those of you who have been hearing about Pride celebrations all month may be wondering how that can be? Well, Vancouver is a few weeks behind the rest of the world when it comes to Pride for a very simple reason. When the first Pride parades were held in Vancouver the organizers didn’t want to miss out on the much bigger and more exciting Pride celebrations in San Francisco, so they scheduled Vancouver’s parade at the beginning of August, instead of the beginning of July, and so it has stayed. From a weather perspective it’s probably a good result, the weather in Vancouver in early August being generally more parade friendly than late June/July.

As a seventy year old gay man I have a pretty good perspective on the growth of Pride in Vancouver and, particularly in recent years, considerable criticism of some of the actions of those now charged with managing and running the Pride celebrations here. I get that the gay community has expanded and diversified since I was young and it was just beginning. I used to know what the various letters stood for. “LGB” was easy. “Q” was added for “queer”, a term gay men of my generation find profoundly offensive by the way. And now, well, I don’t know. We have “T” for “trans” and several numbers and other words and letters. It kind of begs the question: what exactly do we all have in common? From my perspective at least, not a lot. I certainly don’t identify with transexuals or two spirited (not even entirely clear what that means) or all the other sub groups and I wish they’d stop speaking on my behalf.

Which brings me to the Pride Parade and the people who now organize it and speak for it. Our goals as young gay men and lesbians were pretty simple: we wanted to stop being hassled, and discriminated against, and bashed, and murdered, and put in prison for simply being who we were. We understood that to do that we had to come out of the proverbial closet and a parade seemed a good place to start. The early versions of the parade were more exciting for the behaviour of some of the hostile spectators than for the actual participants but, in time, it grew to be the enormous positive event it is today.

Somewhere back there though, other groups decided they wanted in and, generally, we welcomed them, not realizing their agendas might differ significantly from ours and, indeed, might undermine ours.

And that is what’s happened.

Perhaps the first really noticeable example involved the group “Black Lives Matter”. It began in the the States in response to repeated examples of police brutality towards black people there. And then it appeared up here where people, who apparently had little else to do, proclaimed themselves their spokespeople. And we invited them to join our party, although I have no idea why given, as far as I know, they are not predominantly made up of any of the exhausting alpha-numeric mumbo jumbo that is now used to identify the Pride community. The next thing we know, they are blocking the parade in Toronto and demanding that uniformed police be banned. And from that annoying little spark, Pride societies across the country fell into line, including Vancouver Pride, which promptly banned the VPD from the parade. For those of us of a certain age this was a particularly galling action given the enormous amount of work we had invested as far back as the early seventies to cultivate a positve and mutually respectful relationship with the VPD. But apparently our objections meant nothing, although in an especially irritating and condescending message, the Vancouver Pride Society said they appreciated the views of “the elders” but were responding to fears of younger people.

Predictably, that was only the beginning. This year the Vancouver Pride Society has banned UBC (full disclosure here: one of my alma maters) from participating because they had allowed a speaker, who some trans people find offensive, to use one of their facilities. And just when it seemed it couldn’t get any worse, they went further and announced another ban; this one of The Vancouver Public Library (THE FRIGGING VPL FOR GOD’S SAKE!) because it seems it too, has offended the deities of transdom by allowing some other speaker to use one of its rooms. Freedom of speech? Not so much apparently.

Watching the local news these days, I cannot help but wonder why the Trans community is wasting its energy blocking free speech among the gay community and not exerting some leadership over the issues its members are bringing forward. I’m referring to the current dispute where a pre-operative trans man is pursuing a human rights complaint because he was refused a bikini wax. As if that was an appropriate use of taxpayers’ money and the judicial and policing system! All it does is bring discredit to the community and lessens the likelihood of making real progress on the significant issues facing trans people. But I digress.

And just in case their strategy to cause me and my kith to have an aneurysm wasn’t working, a Pride spokesperson tells the newspapers that the Pride Parade was started by trans women of colour and, therefore their views should somehow be paramount. This, by the way, follows earlier claims that the Stonewall riots were led by trans people (it is to weep).

What the f..k?

Aside from being gratuitously wrong (I’ll assume for a second that they’re ill informed and not just outright lying), that claim’s an insult to the gay men and lesbians who worked so hard and so long to create and build the Pride celebrations in this city.

Most of my generation of gay men was wiped out in the Aids epidemic, but there are still a few of us left to bear witness and, on behalf of all of us, I simply ask the leaders of Vancouver Pride today: where do you get off appropriating our history, our story, our struggle, and…our parade?

Happy Pride.

just sayin

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