Pride ban on uniformed police ‘complicated’
The incident occurred more than two decades ago and it didn’t exactly scar him for life.
“I knew my rights, so I pushed back,” says Kevin Allen of being stopped and grilled by a police officer one afternoon in the neighbourhood of Inglewood.
Still, the unsettling experience came back to Allen on Thursday morning as he sat down to write a blog post for the Gay Calgary History Project (calgaryqueerhistory.ca), of which he is the research lead.
“He was communicating to me that he didn’t like the wiggle in my walk,” says the longtime leading voice in the city’s LGBTQ community of that encounter as a young gay man in his 20s. “It was him asserting his power.” Allen, a 46-year-old fourth generation Calgarian, says it’s the kind of harassment LGBTQ people of his generation share in a city that a mere decade ago wasn’t so welcoming.
For him, then, the recent announcement by Calgary Pride that members of the Calgary Police Service can march in its annual Pride Parade on Sept. 3 — but not in uniform and “not with any forms of institutional representation, such as floats, etc.” — comes down to two words:
It’s complicated.
“I’ve met some great officers over the past few years,” Allen says of his work with the CPS’ diversity unit. “On the other hand, I have a visceral response to the institution.”
For Tet Millare of VOICES (Calgary’s Coalition of People of Colour), the complicated relationship between many of her transgendered members and individual police officers continues today.
“I am privileged, police are pretty much my friends wherever I go,” says Millare, a lesbian/queer of colour. “We are looking at this from the perspective of the most oppressed of our group — for many of them, these issues aren’t in the past.”
The announcement Wednesday by Calgary Pride — said to be in consultation with the CPS and VOICES — received its own visceral reaction from various segments of both the LGBTQ and wider community.
Some politicians, from such right-leaning types as Brian Jean and Derek Fildebrandt to Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and Coun. Diane Colley-Urquhart, slammed the decision. Jim Heaton, who ran a local clothing boutique catering to gay men, said he would boycott all Calgary Pride events, while some members of the LGBTQ community expressed their disapproval on social media.
There was also a good number celebrating the decision, among them Green party leadership candidate Grant Neufeld and Michelle Robinson, a candidate for Ward 10 in the upcoming civic election; prominent local blogger and LGBTQ activist Mike Morrison, hoping to shine a light on the thinking behind the move, wrote a long and thoughtful essay on his Facebook page about the community’s not-so-ancient issues with police.
The Calgary decision comes on the heels of similar pronouncements from cities including Vancouver and Toronto, where a high-profile sit-in by members of Black Lives Matter disrupted its 2016 parade until Toronto Pride’s executive director signed a document agreeing to a list of demands.
While the decision by Calgary Pride to include the CPS but under new terms has inflamed emotions on both sides, Allen sees it as an opportunity to have a broader discussion about such issues as redistribution of power and atonement for past mistreatment.
“We do have a very conflicted history with the Calgary Police in the gay community — we were incarcerated in the past, harassed in the past,” he says. “It’s not an easy thing to just say the police get a free pass, they’re a new police force now.”
Such issues as a police-in-uniform presence in the parade itself, he says, have only recently come to the fore thanks to greater acceptance in the wider community of its LGBTQ citizens. “Now we’ve moved into the mainstream by demanding power and getting it.”
Despite this, Allen can’t say how he would have voted if he’d had a seat at the table with Calgary Pride, the CPS and VOICES. “I really don’t know what I would do,” he says. “I can see both sides of the issues quite clearly.”
As he noted earlier, “It’s complicated.”