RM Vaughan is a Canadian writer and video artist based in Toronto.
Dear straight people: You know I love you. Many of you are my dearest friends, and by all likely accounts I am the robust product of heterosexual mating. I even have heterosexuals in my family. But we need to talk.
In the coming days, I want you to do something for me, something you have never done before. Please shut up about the Pride Parade. Yes, shut up.
Gather up all your opinions and hot takes, your updated or antiquated, informed or spit-balled theories, your rants and raves, all your endless, hectoring chatter about the five short hours a year my people get to walk down the street wearing rainbow face paint and cram it. Cram it. Clam up. Make like a church lady passing gas and say nothing as you stare down at the floor. I don’t want you to bite your tongues, I want you to swallow them.
We queers have had a tough year.
In Alberta, the United Conservative Party wants to make queer kids unsafe by creating a snitch line between public-school gay/straight alliances and parents. In Toronto, we learn more every day about how the police lied to our community about a serial killer who was preying on our most vulnerable men. In New Brunswick, my home province, the provincial government hemmed and hawed over the painting of rainbow crosswalks, citing, ridiculously, “safety issues.” It never ends with you people.
And now in Ontario, you’ve just elected a premier who, when he previously held municipal office, refused to attend Pride events. A premier who derisively called parade-goers – everybody from LGBTQ Muslims to leather fetishists, firefighters to lesbian knitters – “middle-aged men with pot bellies running down the street buck naked.”
To add insult to insult, as of this writing, the new premier now says he will attend the parade only if the Toronto police are “allowed” to attend. Sigh.
Mr. Premier-designate, they were never not “allowed.” Rather, an agreement was reached wherein the police will not march carrying weapons or in their uniforms, because a great number of LGBTQ people do not trust the police and see them as part of the larger problem of systemic homophobia. Cops in civvies are more than welcome.
Oh, Great Rainbow Goddess, now I’m doing it too, parsing out the parade and its intricacies! You see what you made me do?
I have lived in Toronto for more than two decades, and every year, the parade – indeed, all Pride festivities – are overscrutinized by straight people. If the Santa Claus Parade had to put up with this much kvetching, Santa (a man who dresses like Liberace and surrounds himself with doll dressers – you figure it out), his elves and army of upside-down clowns would pack up and take the show someplace more welcoming. Like Belarus.
Yes, Mr. Premier-designate, sometimes paraders are “buck naked” at Pride.
Who can forget the time the premier-designate’s fellow right-winger, Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, lurked around the Toronto Dyke March videotaping topless women – in order, he said, to prove that topless women are anti-Semites. Yes, that happened.
In response to the annual question “How come there’s no Straight Pride?”, I present Mr. Mammoliti, the very personification of the answer.
Public nudity, FYI, is not entirely illegal in Canada. There are provisions in the law for a “community standard of tolerance,” and since the parade is a cultural festival geared to queers, the nude “pot bellies” that so fascinate the new premier are breaking no law.
And yes, sometimes contentious activists march in the parade. That’s the whole point. Personally, the presence of LGBTQ Christians has always upset me, but I strive to be more tolerant. Likewise queer TTC workers, but full points to them for courage.
Thus goes democracy. For further elucidation on the basic human right of public assembly, I refer confused or upset heterosexual co-citizens to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, most of which was actually written by straight people. You can’t have it both ways, folks.
Weirdly, underneath all the moral and political nattering lies a larger, stranger truth: Moan as they do about Pride, heterosexuals show up in droves. I couldn’t even see the parade last year, could barely glimpse the Day-Glo tufts of the drag queens’ wigs, because the front rows were permanently staked out by straight couples reinforcing the barricades with strollers. Straight people come to Pride, take photo after photo, and then go home to the suburbs and startle their neighbours with safari slide shows.
Are you not entertained, my too many Caesars?
Every Pride, something sets off the straights: an activist group, the design of a float, men in leather harnesses, the price of parking, you name it. And then they go crazy and we have to justify our parade, again. This year, please stay home. Mow the lawn. Watch NCIS reruns. Take a nap. Okay, I don’t really know what you folks do with your time, but just do it.
Leave us alone.