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And it walked from Allan Gardens over to Queen’s Park. I’ve heard there were maybe as many as 75 people, but I think we were pushing 50. McCaskell: The ’74 one is the first one I was at. The parades themselves, when they did happen, were more likely to be referred to as marches, took place on Saturdays, when there were more people around downtown to witness them, and were scheduled for August, to mark the presentation on Parliament Hill in August, 1971 of our demands to the country. Zorzi: The Pride in the 1970s took place along with all the other usual cacophony. Queer culture was booming in the ’70s in urban America and Canada, but its political wing-the influence we had politically, to change laws- we didn’t have nearly as much of. Look at the music and the culture and the fashion of the day, the clubs of the day. People who think that we were running around hiding, no, my god, we were like, outrageous in the seventies. But we were always kind of the more radical end of the queer resistance movement, people who weren’t afraid to lose their jobs, be out, thought queer was better than straight, and heralded that. There was the Community Homophile Association of Toronto, which was kind of more mainstream and stodgy and we were the young kids back then and we just thought they were way too conservative for us. Appearing in Guerrilla magazine, this photograph captured an event in August 1971 that was a precursor to the Pride that we know today.Ĭheri DiNovo (Queen’s Park LGBTQ critic, MPP for Parkdale-High Park): It wasn’t as diverse, but in many ways it was as if not more radical movements existed back then, because just like Black Lives Matter, it wasn’t a huge group of people who were active around queer issues back then. We all wanted a future where people would not have to deal with the things we’d had to deal with.Ī gay picnic goes to Hanlan’s Point.
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In the 1970s when we took part in Pride events it was very much with a feeling of kinship with the people we were among, a ragtag group sharing a sense of mission.
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Peter Zorzi (founder of Toronto Area Gays): I was a street messenger in downtown Toronto in 1971 when I discovered gay liberation, and I met my lover, Charlie, at a Toronto Gay Action meeting in July of that year. People on backs and on top of each other. That one I remember well, including the Hanlan’s Point crazy, youthful fooling around. Gerald Hannon (journalist, member of the Body Politic collective): I’ve been in every one since ’72 essentially. When a lot of people talk about Pride they obliterate the ancient history and talk about ’81 on. Then nothing happened until after the bath raids in ’81. Tim McCaskell (Toronto AIDS activist, member of the Body Politic collective): There was one in 1971, a number in ’72, and I don’t think there was anything in ’73, and I came out at the one in ’74. But there were other gatherings since 1971: something called gay days at Hanlan’s Point. It was only a decade after the bathhouse raids of 1981 that the City officially recognized Pride.Īmong Pride pioneers are Tim McCaskell, Cheri DiNovo, Brian Mossop, Eve Zaremba, Gerald Hannon, Amy Gottlieb, Ken Popert, Rinaldo Walcott, and Peter Zorzi.īelow, the nine reflect on the evolution of Pride-from that first picnic to the mega block party it has become today.Īmy Gottlieb (founding member of Lesbians Against the Right, Gays and Lesbians Against the Right Everywhere and the Toronto Lesbian and Gay Pride Committee): The first Pride was the first celebration was organized in conjunction with the marking of the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which is why we now celebrate Pride at the end of June. The picnics eventually became annual celebrations. The gathering was very different than the corporate party that Pride is today: political at its core, the group assembled to demonstrate gay solidarity just two years after then-prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau decriminalized homosexuality. On a warm summer day in August 1971, dozens of gay and lesbian activists headed to the Toronto Islands to celebrate a gay picnic, the first iteration of Pride in the city.