Pride Toronto hosted a community town hall Tuesday night at Daniels Spectrum to give feedback on Toronto’s first month-long Pride event. However, the focus for many was Black Lives Matter and the demands which they
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Punam Khosla, 58, has been an activist for the LGBTQ community for years, and also for people of colour. She says she doesn’t go normally go to Pride anymore, but when she listened from home this year she was excited about what she saw as social justice coming back to the community.
“They took a very strong position on these black shootings and these black youths, they were very bold and brave and very out as queer people doing that work. And they were honoured as this group in Pride and I was very pleased about that,” said Khosla.
Things quickly heated up within the crowd at Tuesday’s event, though, as the dispute resolution process — used to review and resolve complaints about Pride — was brought up. After a speaker who did not give his name said he had filed a complaint against Black Lives Matter over its parade-disrupting protest, shouts of “shame” and “racist” could be heard throughout the venue.
Pride’s board of directors did not respond to any of the individuals that voiced opinions or concerns, announcing as much before the open-mic event. The crowd seemed generally supportive of Black Lives Matter, though some speakers objected to one item on the list of demands: the removal of police floats from future parades.
Alexandria Williams, 27, herself part of Black Lives Matter, called it a privilege “to see the police as a force that can protect you.
“The minute that we even say that we are against the police, that is the one thing that overshadows everything. One of the demands we asked was to make sure we had ASL interpretations, that's a vulnerable community right there,” she said in an interview.
Tuesday was the launch of Pride Toronto’s two-day consultation to plan for the future after a summer that drew fierce criticism and the
executive director’s resignation.
“Pride has become a global money-making event,” Brian De Matos, secretary of the steering committee at Queer Ontario said before Tuesday’s event. “We need to get back to the original roots of Pride and make it political again.”
Some of Pride Toronto’s former partners opted out of this summer’s festivities due to problems that were brewing long before Black Lives Matter launched a protest during the parade, calling for better representation of minorities and fewer police.
Queer Ontario, a provincial group that advocates on behalf of LGBTQ rights, was among the groups that opted out of the parade, saying Pride Toronto is focusing too much attention on corporations that provide a lot of money instead of grassroots organizations.
“We need equal space for all folks. That’s what inclusivity is about,” said De Matos, adding there have been public consultations without much result before. “I hope we’ll see real changes this time around.”