A question I hear time and again from people is, why do we still need a Pride parade? As chair of the Village, I also hear similar questions, such as’Why do we need a Village? What value can it bring us? Won’t this create a ghetto?
These questions continue to surprise me. Even in this post-Will and Grace, post-same-sex marriage society, our community still suffers great inequities and injustices at the hands of schools, government, our peers, and unfortunately, sometimes even our employers, family and friends.
Sunday is the 40th anniversary of the “We Demand” demonstration, Canada’s first civil rights protest for the GLBT community. It was only two years after the decriminalization of consensual same-sex acts in Canada and the Stonewall riots in New York City.
About 150 very brave Canadians gathered on Parliament Hill, with another demo happening simultaneously in Vancouver, to demand fairl and equal treatment on issues like immigration, age of consent, adoption and marriage, human rights protections and more. They faced ridicule’ risked losing their family, friends, possibly even their jobs. At the time, government witch hunts and outings in local newspapers, forced qualified workers to resign and brought at least one person to such despair he chose to end his life by jumping off his apartment balcony.
It’s leaders like Charlie Hill, Marie Roberston, George Hislop, Herb Spiers and Pat Murphy, and all the other activists who attended the We Demand rally in 1971, who I look to for mentoring and inspiration today. In the span of my lifetime, open homophobia is rarer, but homo-negativity, where people subtly discriminate against us or make unfair or misguided assumptions about us, still exists.
Many laws have changed for the better. Others have yet to be changed. Society often takes time to catch up. We still have disproportionately higher rates of suicide, bullying, and homelessness than mainstream society. Gay and bisexual men are denied the option to donate blood. Trans persons are still denied many basic human rights the rest of us take for granted. HIV positive people can be jailed for not disclosing their status, even in no- or very-low-risk sexual activities.
For these reasons I feel it’s vital to have a parade, a vigil, and a Village. Our best defence is to be out, to be strong and to stand together. When people see us live our lives proudly and with integrity and dignity, we become human and not “others”; it’s harder for us to be misunderstood and harder for people discriminate against us.
We still have so much to accomplish.
Glen Crawford is the chair of The Village, a non-profit group asking for a section of Bank Street between Nepean and James Streets to be officially designated a LGBT-friendly village.
-Editor’s Note: A shorter version of Glen Crawford’s column, based on his speech at the vigil and shortened for publication appeared online earlier. This update is a longer, more complete column, based on his speech.
