Love is in the air for this year's Edmonton Pride Festival, as organizers try to get the mojo flowing with the festival's 1960s Stonewall-Riots-era-inspired theme of "Age of Aqueerious." But some artists, academics and activists hope that this year's Pride is also an opportunity for the city's LGBTQ community to remember its own national and local queer roots, and possibly learn from them to help usher in the dawning of a new era in the province.
In a widely circulated email last week, doctoral researcher and LGBTQ activist Kris Wells shared his thoughts on why Pride mattered this year especially, writing, "The Stonewall Riots took the fight for equality to the streets of New York City during a time when we were deemed to be degenerates and criminals. It is time to return to the streets and to tell the citizens of Alberta that our identities will not be assaulted."
The impact of the June 1969 events in New York cannot be understated explains David Carter, author of Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution.
"It is common today to trace the tremendous gains made for lesbian and gay rights since the early 1970s back to the Stonewall Riots of 1969, when gay men, transvestites and lesbians fought the police during a routine raid on a popular gay club in Greenwich Village," he says. "It is also commonly asserted that the riots, which continued on and off for six days, marked the beginning of the gay rights movement."
While the streets of New York were alive with rioters, here in Canada the words of then-Minister of Justice Pierre Elliot Trudeau were echoing in the ears of Canadians. With his famous "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation" speech, Trudeau and his omnibus Bill C-150 ushered in a new era in which abortion, contraception and homosexual acts between consenting adults was no longer illegal.
"It was an important shift not just for lesbians and gays, but also to the police," says Miriam Smith, author of Political Institutions and Lesbian and Gay Rights in the United States and Canada, of the cultural shifts that happened in the wake of Bill C-150. "Their power to arrest people for particular acts was gone. Of course there was still policing of queer sexuality, there were other laws they could use."
Almost two years after bill passed, on August 28, 1971, George Hill and a handful of other activists from around Ontario gathered on Parliament Hill to demand the federal government make changes to how the country viewed and ruled over gay and lesbian people. It was this demonstration that put in motion how Canadians would celebrate Pride for the next decade.
"[In cities across Canada] a loose coalition of gay and lesbian activists would meet for an annual national conference and hold a march around that same August date every year," Smith says, adding that she think it's critically important to remember the roots of Canada's Pride celebrations. "These days we've lost sight of that early history, of that first demonstration in August 1971 and what a turning point that was in Canadian history for people to be able to stand on Parliament Hill and hold signs that said Gay is Good, Crush Heterosexual Imperialism. It was a major turning point."
Edmonton also has its own largely unrecognized queer roots, which will be highlighted during this year's festival on the Queer Edmonton Historical Bus Tour (Wed, Jun 17, hosted by Darrin Hagen), which will explore Edmonton's LGBT past as far back as the late 1960s.
One the many stops on the tour will be the location of the now long-gone Pisces Bathhouse, which was raided by police in 1981. According to Tom Warner in his book Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada, and conformed by Edmonton LGBT expert Michael Phair, Edmonton had a gay liberation group as far back as 1971, but like Stonewall in the US it was the bathhouse raid that started the gay rights movement in Edmonton. About a month after the raid, in which 56 men were charged with being "found-ins" at a "bawdyhouse"—an example of how queer sexuality was still policed in the early '80s—Edmonton had its first Pride parade.
With crowds along Jasper Avenue on Pride parade day (Sat, Jun 13) expected to hit 12 000, a lot has changed since those early days of the parade, showing just how far the movement has come in the city.
"It was about 40 people walking down Whyte Avenue," recalls Phair, "15 of which were wearing bags over their heads."
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