Toronto’s white, straight politicians have no business defining Pride
Straight, white, cisgender, male politicians in Toronto seem awfully invested in the celebrations and expressions of queer people. For at least the third time in the past seven years, such politicians are threatening to pull funding from Pride Toronto’s annual celebrations.
The latest objection comes from Councillor John Campbell, who says the city should pull its financial support if Pride doesn’t let the Toronto Police march in the annual Sunday parade in their uniforms. Chief Saunders has agreed to the demand, but Campbell sees benefit for himself in continuing the conflict.
Pride is extremely useful to Campbell and other conditionally supportive councillors, so long as it expresses a version of queerness they find comforting and profitable. When Pride expresses its radical political roots — the rejection of police brutality and challenges to state power — many of the council bros no longer see their stake in it. The great value of Pride funding for self-interested councillors is the ability to deny that funding, to control the radical politics of queer people in the name of unity.
It’s highly unlikely a majority of councillors would ever vote to defund Pride, but that isn’t the purpose of Campbell’s motion. He is reminding queer people, particularly Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) and other queer people who successfully demanded an end to ceremonial police participation, that their advocacy has consequences, that the power they are trying to cultivate in their communities is no match for the city’s power.
In threatening to cut Pride, Campbell opens up space for any group that has a grievance or discomfort with Toronto’s queer communities to speak up.
Federal Conservative leadership candidate Brad Trost took his opportunity within hours of Campbell’s suggestion to defund Pride. “I have not marched in any ‘gay pride’ parade,” Trost bragged in an email to his supporters in the hours following Campbell’s tweet (the scare quotes around the words “gay pride are Trost’s, not mine). “Brad is not a big fan of the gay lifestyle,” Trost’s spokesperson declared later for anyone who didn’t get it the first time.
As much as Campbell may insist he is not homophobic and does not support Trost’s stance, his motion gives Trost and other bigots oxygen.
Former mayor Rob Ford did the same thing during the 2014 Sochi Olympics when he objected to the Pride flag being raised at City Hall.
“This is about the Olympics, this is about being patriotic to your country,” Ford told reporters. “This is not about someone’s sexual preference.” Ford, who serially denied accusations of homophobia and transphobia during his political career, added, “No, I do not agree with putting up the rainbow flag, we should put our Canadian flag up.”
BLMTO, with its uncompromising stance against police brutality, threatens to ruin the veneer of unity politicians use to sell Pride and Toronto, and the politicians know it. Mayor John Tory’s response to Campbell’s defunding proposal is particularly telling.
“Yes, there are still issues between the queer communities and the police,” Tory conceded in an interview this week, “but those issues should be addressed with the ultimate objective of having the police in the parade.”
The “issues” Tory refuses to name include studies showing that 24 per cent of trans people in Ontario say they have been harassed by police, and that black trans people continue to experience especially high rates of police violence. The mayor is also threatened by BLMTO’s insistence that Pride itself has excluded black people from its inception, a fact Pride admitted last fall.
“That’s been a sort of healthy part of this event,” Tory said of Pride, “that everybody was in it, everybody was welcomed, it was a celebration of each other.”
This has never been true for black people, and is exactly why BLMTO halted the parade.
But Tory is afraid the truth will tarnish his ability to sell Toronto to the world.
In the same interview, he said Pride organizers “have to be careful to establish that balance, and make sure that an event that is a happy, celebratory, important event to the city is not overtaken by politics.”
What the mayor calls politics, black queer and trans people call their survival and humanity.
Janaya Khan of BLMTO noted this in response to Campbell’s motion this week, saying, “what is missing is a real understanding of what it means to be a racialized person in this city, and the fear that exists in your body when you are around a police officer.”
Black queer people and their allies, who want to celebrate their existence and resilience by resisting police brutality, still can’t do so without being policed once against by politicians.
BLMTO, with its uncompromising stance against police brutality, threatens to ruin the veneer of unity politicians use to sell Pride and Toronto, and the politicians know it