It's Toronto Pride today—read BLMTO co-founder janaya_khan's reflection on why Pride needs 'a paradigm shift led by dreamers'
The year is 1981. The Toronto Police Services, under Operation Soap, raided four gay bathhouses throughout Toronto. More than 300 men were arrested in the second largest mass arrest in Canadian history at the time. Gay and lesbian bathhouses had been raided before, but something about this one felt different. Peoples’ anger at the injustice of being criminalized by police for their sexuality had reached a boiling point.
These acts of protest were created out of the idea that people should not have to live in fear for who they are. That idea transformed into a vision as more people adopted the call to action. Today, there are Pride Parades all over the world, from Dryden, Ont. to São Paulo, Brazil. That’s what prompted me—and other members of the Toronto chapter of Black Lives Matter—to do the unthinkable: bring last year’s Toronto Pride Parade, and the thousands of people present, to a complete halt.When I co-founded BLMTO back in 2014, none of us knew just how big it would become.
The list of demands came first. They were ambitious, but so are we. As an organizer, you learn pretty early on that the demands themselves are as important as the process to achieve them. After hours and hours of deliberation, we finally had a plan. We would halt the Parade for as long as it took to get our demands signed by the then-director of Pride Toronto.
From Halifax, where police have opted out of Pride amidst heated debates, to Vancouver, where police participation is conditional, to this year’s #NoJusticeNoPride action in Washington, DC., change is banging on the doors of the status quo.
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