crying! at the pride parade
Halifax holds its Pride festival in July, rather than June. For those of you not in the know (shout out to all my cisgender heterosexuals! I know you’re out there somewhere), June is Pride Month. This is because the Stonewall riots, widely held to be the origin of the LGBTQ2+ movement as it exists today, took place in June of 1969. Most of the big cities that hold Pride celebrations, wherever they are in the world, will hold them in June.
Halifax’s Pride committee has said outright that it went for July to reflect local history — the first Halifax Pride Parade took place in July of 1988. It’s a cute bonus that Halifax Pride doesn’t usually clash with any other parades as a result. If you want to fly west to Toronto Pride in June, you can still make it home for Halifax’s parade in July. (This relies on your having the energy for more than one Pride celebration in a year. Couldn’t be me!!)
I almost didn’t go, if you can believe it. It’s been a weird month so far — a lot of anxiety, a lot of anticipating imminent travel plans. I didn’t want to risk Covid with my visit to San Francisco getting increasingly close. I am also grimly aware of how I get in prolonged social situations. There’s a point beyond which my body will start to unplug from my brain, as though to warn me: hey, you need to be alone. I can stick it out! But at that point, I’m borrowing against tomorrow’s capacity, and the interest rates are steep.
In the end, a friend messaged me the night before, asking me if I wanted to watch the parade. I remain very aware of being new here, and of wanting to participate so I can make the most of the time I have in Canada. I put on my Doc Martens and my they/them pronoun pin (sadly retired, at the minute, since I no longer have a work lanyard to display it), and I ventured boldly forth to be queer in public.
Last time I went to a Pride parade, it was June 2018 and I had just come out as non-binary at work.
Or maybe I hadn’t; maybe that was the year before. It’s really hard to remember, because huge amounts of 2017 and 2018 are just big awful blurs of mental illness in my memory. I think I had just come out that year, because I am pretty sure it prompted the Head of Admin to come out as bi, and I am equally (pretty) sure that was the reason why I went to Pride that year. She was hesitant to go alone, and I was trying to be a comrade, I guess.
Oxford Pride in 2018 was also my first Pride parade ever. My hometown didn’t have a Pride parade, though I learned a few years ago that it has more queer history than anyone ever taught me. When I lived in Cambridge, I was a student; I was always either out of town or in the exam throes come Pride season. Also, I don’t love crowds. Or sounds. Or sunlight? I lack the disposition for festivity, is what I am saying. Catch me getting married at San Francisco City Hall with five people present and an extended nap scheduled after the fact.
But it was good! Exhausting, sure; by the time the parade was over, I was staggering around in considerable pain, hoping the bus stop would simply appear to me. I spent the rest of the day horizontal in my darkened flat. But crucially, it was an experience full of joy and solidarity. I marched with the University contingent in the parade itself, and I got to hold a banner for a bit, and it is an experience I will always remember — a good first Pride to have attended.
I didn’t go in 2019, because despite those good memories, the very idea was exhausting. I couldn’t go in 2020, because it was 2020; I couldn’t go in 2021, either, because despite its best efforts it was also 2020. And then I moved! I’m sorry, Oxford Pride. I regret not making the effort more often.
About two weeks ago, here in Halifax, I peeled some homophobic stickers off some lampposts on my way downtown.
They weren’t explicitly homophobic, in the same way that the transphobic stickers we used to see all the time in Oxford were only occasionally explicitly transphobic. These people take their little dogwhistles, and they shove them into their awful mouths, and they blow until glass starts to shatter. The stickers (before I set about them with my keys) attempted to inform me that various children’s television channels are ‘groomers.’ If you know, unfortunately, you know.
I already set out some of the reasons why I hesitated over going to Pride. I didn’t lead with this one, though it was probably the reason that carried most weight with me. There were reports, in the days leading up to the parade, that the truckers and some other far-right groups had been active in the city. I didn’t know how active — I didn’t know if they knew it was Pride at all, or if they were doing it on purpose, or if they might have more up their sleeves for the day itself. I didn’t know, in short, how scared I needed to be.
It probably sounds paranoid, if you’re cis or if you’re straight. But recent years have left the progress narrative feeling hollow for many of the rest of us. There has been talk about repealing Obergefell (the Supreme Court decision protecting equal marriage) in the States; with Roe struck down, it’s impossible not to take that seriously. The Conservative Party leadership race in England is apparently also a race to see who can say the most transphobic shit in the least amount of time. And these are just two examples. The rhetoric is heating up. I was, embarrassingly recently, naive enough to imagine that I would escape it entirely in Canada.
‘My whole existence is a political talking point’ sounds obnoxious. It’s also lowkey true. It was why I was anxious about going to Pride, and it’s why I ultimately made the decision to attend.
Because, like — if Pride isn’t for moments like this one, what is it for? I mentioned Stonewall at the beginning of this piece, because Stonewall has passed into memory as the proto-Pride; well, Stonewall was also bricks through windows and active, communal resistance against the immediate violence of oppression. It was a recognition — one of many such recognitions that queer and trans people had around that time — that we didn’t have to settle, and we didn’t have to hide. People are going to look back at the 2020s in the future (I am assuming, for the sake of argument, that we have a future) the way we look back at the 1960s now; they’re going to remember what we did to hold the line, and to keep pushing forward. They’re going to read about it, and when that same old violence mutates into a fresh new strain, they’re going to use what they learned and adapt.
I cried as the parade went by. I sat in the shade outside the Public Gardens and I saw queer elders marching alongside queer kids while Whitney Houston blasted from a speaker on the back of a truck, and I hid behind my sunglasses and cried while I clapped and cheered. I don’t like to be sentimental and I don’t like to be visibly distressed in public — half the time, I don’t even see myself as part of a wider ‘community.’ I roll my eyes with a deeply felt violence when people debate what constitutes good representation, or when extremely online baby gays pick yet another fight about who gets to be in the acronym. I cannot stress enough that I am simply not that guy.
Except that apparently I am that guy, when we get half a moment to celebrate our endurance. The Halifax parade was led by the local two-spirit alliance, followed in short order by a sexual health service. One of the people at the very front was carrying a sign that read ‘Trans Kids Are Unstoppable.’ It’s special! Queerness is special, actually. I am embarrassingly moved by the beauty and the power of our survival, despite epidemics and state brutality and populist invective, day after day after day.
Tony Kushner ended his great work by telling us that the world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. I watch us marching together and I can believe for a moment that he was right.