A few quick thoughts on this year's Pride celebrations in Toronto.
* Major parade trend: So many cops marching. You only have to go back a few years to the time when it was just the LGBT police liaison officer and her girlfriend driving a single car, unable to find any other officers to join them.
* Queers Against Israeli Apartheid had a large, colourful contingent. So did the pro-Israeli group. Neither overwhelmed the parade. Nobody seemed particularly shocked or upset or distressed. Guess what: Free speech works.
* The recession cast a shadow over the parade's fabulous quotient--many of the floats looked makeshift. Major sponsor TD had a lot of bodies in the parade, but the float was very basic. No lavish spending in sight. At least two entries looked to have recycled old Christmas decorations.
* I only saw one Michael Jackson look-alike all weekend.
* Yet again, the Sunday night Wellesley Stage lineup--which hosts the biggest acts-seemed designed to kill as much buzz as possible. There was talent there--Kelly Rowland, ABC and Divine Brown, for example--but the strange sequence, long gaps between acts and sleepy interstitial soundtrack cleared the air of any sense of build or excitement. I don't know if this is a contract-management problem or if Pride organizers purposefully want to drive audiences out of the venue in order to bring in fresh supplies of drinkers. Regardless, poor talent curation hurt the mood more than the rain.
UPDATES:
1. QuAIA organizer Andrew Brett gives his take on the issue here and clarifies that the pro-Israel contingent was the Kulana Toronto group. My comments on this issue are regarding the appropriateness of these two groups carrying the messages they carried in the parade--I think it was all perfectly appropriate and any debate their participation generated has been positive all around--not on whether Israel is more pro-queer than the rest of the Mideast (a fact so obvious it's not worth debating). In the last few years, Pride Toronto has increasingly taken on a global human rights agenda. In doing so, the organization has opened the door to giving a platform to groups who have things to say about what's going on in countries beyond our own and, while I think it will take some finesse to manage this evolving role (check out how Pride handled the anti-Catholic Raelian entry in 2004), the increased relevance makes the effort totally worth it.
2. I did like the parade this year; sorry if I gave the impression I didn't. Though many floats wore their budgets on their flatbeds, there was a lot of creativity and many small touches that turned what would have been dull marching contingents into something special. It's amazing what energy and splash can be accomplished with a sequined hat, a tinselled pompom and a genuine smile. When I see pictures of the beefy go-go boyed parades of, say, Paris or Sao Paulo, I am proud that Toronto's Pride parade is filled with such a diverse cross-section of this city's (this province's? this world's?) citizens who are there because they want to be, not because they're paid to be there and look good. We may not have the flashiest Pride in the world, as defined by cookie-cutter standards, but we have the most engaged and real one.
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