My favourite Pride memory? I feel that today, this moment, this year, is the most important Pride experience yet.
As I reflect on my personal history, I see that Pride was an annual touchpoint, a moment for me to checkin with myself. Pride was a critical tool for personal development.
I am a smalltown gay boy who did not come out until well after leaving university and moving to the bright lights of Toronto in 1995.
I was a reluctant gay. I was not at the vanguard of struggle for my own rights. I was a free-rider moving into the social spaces created by others through struggle, confrontation, free expression and decades of engagement and activism.
Of course, I didn’t know this at the time.
Over the years, every year, I have felt more at home in myself and have developed a much deeper appreciation of the diversity of the community that at first felt foreign, exotic and unfamiliar to this rather conservative, morally conflicted, small-town boy. Every Pride, I felt the protective layers of untruth and shame removed through the development of my relationship with this community and myself.
I became increasingly engaged in the community, particularly through the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation. Last year I organized a fundraiser with my friend Adam Schwabe called SpinTO that sought to bridge LGBT communities with others in Toronto while raising money and awareness for people living with HIV/AIDS.
Today, I am inspired by those much younger than I, who have grown up and have worked to develop these spaces created by activists, artists and community leaders over the years. I look to institutions like the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives to help me learn my history, to honour those struggles and those leaders and pioneers. I learn and pay tribute to the fact of Pride’s history as political protest for civil rights as well as cultural expression.
And this year, unlike any other in my 15 years of Pride, I feel the urgency of that history.
I feel in a more personal way that struggle for freedom of expression and the responsibility to pay my debt to the community. I feel a responsibility to help create safe spaces for all not only in this city I love, but for all the smalltown LGBT kids across Canada and to those who struggle for their human rights around the world.
Pride Toronto’s recent organizational challenges, negotiating the diverse interests in and around the community, have shown how tenuous these spaces for freedom of expression are. At any moment, the fragile bubble of freedom could come crashing in on itself through political or commercial intervention.
My favourite Pride memory in the future will be how Pride 2010 was the year of renewal in the relationship between the organization and the community that resulted in an improved understanding by everyone that Pride is political, and an appreciation by all for the struggles by so many over its more than 30 year history.