Opinion: Pride photos capture a dazzling community and a deeper message that coming out is essential

Michael Rowe is a novelist and essayist based in Toronto. Angel John Guerra is a writer, visual artist and designer based in Toronto. They are the author and photographer of Pridefrom which this essay was adapted.

We are among the most photographed subculture communities of the second half of the 20th century and beyond.

From photographs of us as “curiosities” to photographs of us as “rebels” (or “monsters,” depending on the viewer’s moral perspective), to those sick in an epidemic, to fighters, to soldiers, to elected officials, to movie and television stars, to same-sex brides and grooms, to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren—spiritual or otherwise—of the original “curiosities” and “rebels,” and many more. And we are rarely as photographed as we are in June.

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that a Pride parade is not a true reflection of our community, but I politely disagree.

Despite the theatrics of Pride, it’s all there in one form or another: the panoply of ages, the rainbow of genders and gender expressions, the lifelong friends, the beloved straight allies, the queer families with their children, the veterans of decades of Pride, the newbies who range from the shy ones taking their first tentative steps into the light of community to those who joyously rush into their new queer lives like meteors entering a dazzling new atmosphere.

I attended my first Pride march in 1982. Back then, the parade was small enough that a 19-year-old, newly-out gay man could step off the sidewalk and join the march if he wanted, and feel safe in this tributary of queer humanity in a way he never would have felt walking the streets of Toronto in the early ’80s.

Back in the day, gangs of straight guys threw eggs and rocks at drag queens walking down Yonge Street to St. Charles Tavern on Halloween night, which was considered healthy and enjoyable entertainment. . Stories of violence against gay people – including by the police – were so common that they hardly raised an eyebrow.

Much has been written about the infamous “Cherry Beach Express,” the colloquial name for a horrific nighttime ordeal, dating from the 1950s to the early 1990s, endured by some gays and lesbians in Toronto, as well as others deemed socially undesirable by authorities.

According to their accounts, unlucky victims were driven by police, under cover of darkness, to Cherry Beach, a lakeside beach park located at the foot of Cherry Street, just south of Unwin Avenue, on Toronto’s outer harbour, just east of Eastern Gap and there, in the headlights of police cars, beaten to death.

That these guardians of Toronto’s vaunted virtue could take such ogreish pleasure in the music of our screams, or the sight of our flowing blood, or the sound of our breaking bones, was one of the city’s worst-kept secrets, but it was also a given.

The eerie ghost of the “Cherry Beach Express” haunted the city between 2010 and 2017, when serial killer Bruce McArthur roamed the streets of Toronto’s queer community, ultimately murdering eight men, most of them men of color, before his apprehension, but not before. community members and activists had tried, in vain, to convince the police that a predator was stalking them and had been met, well into Mr. McArthur’s madness, with a certain apathy that, historically, did not was not surprising.

I discovered stories like the Cherry Beach Express, as well as stories of police raids on the bathhouses we frequented at the time, and stories of gay men’s lives destroyed by the concomitant fallout of exposure and public humiliation.

The year before I arrived in Toronto, on the night of February 5, 1981, the Toronto police launched Operation Soap. Two hundred officers, some armed with sledgehammers and crowbars, raided four bathhouses and arrested nearly 300 homosexuals.

Most of the men, both patrons and owners of the bathhouse, were accused of vague acts of “indecency,” including the incredibly quaint act of “keeping a bawdy house.” This sentence, as creepy and Victorian as a spyglass, is a clear reminder that homosexuality had only been legal in Canada for 12 years when the cops broke down those doors that night.

While these raids have become a defining moment in Canadian 2SLGBTQ+ history, and the protests that followed have been widely considered Canada’s Stonewall moment, as well as the year of the first official Toronto Pride, the subtext of these stories was that being an openly gay man, in the company of other openly gay men, while powerful, could potentially result in a terrible price being exacted in retaliation for the affront of existing visibly – particularly for existing as outlaw sexual beings.

But there was an even more important subtext: getting out was essential – not just for us, but for the generations that would follow.