My first few prides are murky in my mind as my mom took me when I was about 9. She took me to Pride, Santa Clause and Carabanna ….ect well the last one was my dad but you get the idea. My mom wanted to expose me to all the different communities in Toronto.

I’d not venture to my next pride until I was 13 by accident. I was looking to hit my favorite comic shop at Yonge & Wellesley and had no idea it was the day of the parade. I mean I still wouldn’t come out to my mom for 2 more years, so going to pride seemed a miss for me looking back on that day. I saw a bit of the parade, got my comics and went home to read. Fast forward past high school and into college when I hit pride a few months after my 20th birthday with friends. Even though I was a homo in high school. I had no interest in guys or going to pride. I was so focused on doing well in school and working to afford my life style of comics, technology and video games.

I marched in the parade in 2004 for Humber College and did my cowboy outfit proud. Friends came and went out of my life for the next 9 years and sometimes I made the tough choice to cut ties and respect myself first and foremost. A few are still around to this day and that makes me go wow at knowing anyone for almost a decade now. What I’ve not said is I’ve moved almost 14 times around Toronto growing up. So I never had a stable set of friends. So the fact I still know Ben almost 9 years later is crazy.

However, as I approach almost a decade of going to pride, a few things stick out to me in my mind. It’s all about seeing my friends and the parade is an opportunity to do that. Pride is nothing without the people you love most right by your side. Pride is really what you made it and if you don’t see something you want… then help create it. We’re one huge ”community” and many times we don’t cater to everyone.

Regardless of what Pride Toronto, City of Toronto and everyone else decides to do. I’ll be calling up my friends to make plans with them on June 27th because that’s a day for us to get together and I don’t need pride to do it anymore.

P.S. Feel free to join us…. You won’t regret it!

- Duane Brown

My first Pride experience was just after my first year of university. I took the train into Toronto with some friends of mine, excited but not sure of what to expect. I’d never felt much of a kinship with body shots or house music – maybe I could just spend my weekend eating fries at the chip truck?

But, when I got there, the element that impressed upon me the most was the true diversity. Not just amoung the queer community, but with everyone. People of all orientaions, races, ages; parents, children, even whole families. I really felt like no matter who I was, this was an event and a community that included me – not just because I was gay, but because I was there. There really was an almost-tangible energy in the air of ‘belonging’.
And so, I went forth and drank my own body weight in Smirnoff Ice.

Even today, I think of Pride less as a queer event and more as an event where everyone is welcome, regardless of our circumstances.

- Trevor Campbell

My favorite pride story is my first Pride.

I had just moved to Toronto in 1996 and come out to my family earlier that year. I was asked to march in the parade with my employer at the time. My mom and my step father, who were visiting at the time, marched with me in the parade and we threw mardi-gras bead necklaces into the crowd it was a great time.

I met my first boyfriend that Pride, and made friends that I still have today … It was the perfect first Pride.

- Kevin Donnay Clarke

I’ve been going to Pride for what feels like an eternity. So needless to say, I’ve got a lot of great memories of the event: My father who seems to almost never miss the Parade & always rings me to mock me over the fact that he’s scored a rooftop vantage point whilst I get carried away by the crowd on the streets below. My mother being hit on (much to my chagrin) during the Dyke marches…and then her innocently wondering why she’s never been invited back to hang out with me. Running into friends I haven’t seen in months & the realisation that it’s Pride that keeps us connected.

I think, though, that my best Pride year was 2007. My business partner managed to convince me that we should volunteer to be Pride photographers. We’d been looking for more queer events to work at (Pete’s the most Queer straight guy I know) and he figured Pride met our criteria perfectly. Not only was it a great parade, but Pride week was a fantastic lead in to my upcoming nuptials. Thinking back on it, it was probably a bit crazy of me to say yes to an event that was a mere 3 days before my wedding day, but I probably needed a “distraction” from the last minute planning.

That Pride seemed brighter, louder & friendlier than any parade I’d ever attended. Maybe it was because I was completely on cloud 9. Or maybe because my wife-to-be was wandering the crowds with me. Or maybe it was because I knew that I live in a city where two gals getting married is really just an everyday kind of thing.

- Renee Navarro

I don’t know if I would call myself a late bloomer, but coming out to my mom was something that didn’t happen until my twenties had begun. I didn’t make a big deal out of the announcement because I had such a strong relationship with my mom up to that point. Sure I expected the initial shock, but anticipated that it would be closely followed by acceptance and pride. I was even so bold to casually mention it days before Christmas while I was home visiting. The reaction, the tears, anger and disappointment that followed was something I was in no way prepared for. My mom said some things I never would have imagined, including many lines I swear she stole from television shows. We were a devastated pair. I had ruined Christmas.

The worst part was that my dreams of sharing this aspect of my life with her were squashed. Meeting my partner or going to Pride with me were things I now felt we could never experience together, but I desperately wanted to.

Two and a half years later, during a hungover Saturday morning of Pride weekend, a text message changed the world. It was mom. She was downtown. On Church St. In a beer garden. Wondering where the hell I was.

I hauled my ass out of bed and joined her, roommate and boyfriend in tow. We spent the afternoon drinking, dancing and getting my mom all of the temporary tattoos and Pride flags we could find. It was a day I was sure would never be able to have. It was the first time since I came out that I felt that she was proud of me. And I was proud of her.

- Curtis Norman

It was a sunny day in Sarnia (I’m now the second Sarnia boy featured here). I chose to check out the City’s Pride Parade during a summer home, after an invitation from a friend in a liberal religious group, the only in the City to marry gays. I knew them through environmental activism and local Green Politics. Upon arrival I realized it was one of those little parades where everyone walks – not watches.

And so I’m now walking at the head of the Pride Parade, one with good spirit but mostly neutral to unsure onlookers. This was a parade in which in recent years, a councilor tried to deny a street permit. I’d also heard that stones were thrown at participants the year before.

After filing into a park for further celebrations, I was asked to say a few words on behalf of my friend who had to leave early to officiate a wedding. So with a kiss and a “he’s cute” from the drag queen emcee, I said a few words on rights – on same-sex marriage, in a spirit of celebration at what had been made legal earlier that year.

The awkwardness of the whole situation – unexpectedly walking, leading, speaking – is that I was not out myself, still figuring things out about who I was.

A good friend still jokes how I came out to her – “her” at the time, whose gender identity and orientation had changed as well – a few days after getting that transformative kiss from a drag queen.

Reflecting, I now see that identity and politics have been always intertwined for me.
I have since walked annually in the Toronto Pride Parade with the Green Party and once as an activist VP of the UW Federation of Students, enjoying the celebration and representing the personal political perspectives I bring. Toronto’s Pride must continue to be a place for proud, uncensored, political voices, or it will lack purpose and depth.

Now in Toronto, I’m still working on sustainability and food issues, along with trans rights. Having today returned from a political conference where a group of rural and urban Greens age 20 to 80 didn’t bat an eyelash at the idea of explicit human rights protection on gender identity, I wonder why it can’t be the same for the governments in power. I believe this will soon change because of the hard work of activists.

As a Sarnian, I now share some of my upbringing story with the gay author of Fruit. But Sarnia’s not the smallest or least tolerant of places. There is much work to do on rights and health today, in those small towns and cities across Canada and in many countries throughout the world. I hope we keep shakin it up.

- Darcy Higgins

Pride for me has always centred on the Alterna-Queer space next to Buddies, a space still dedicated to misfits and outsiders. Just a little outside the main hustle and bustle, the vibe a little different, a little rougher, and oh so much queerer. In his book Stroll, Shawn Micallef writes “[like] all borders that don’t exist anymore, we cross…without thinking, only occasionally noticing something that reminds us it was there.” Pride has that feeling these days, of crossing the boundary out of the straight world that has created a space for us, back into our queer past where we inhabited the margins. I’m old enough to remember what it was like when all queers were forced to live on the outside – unseen, unheard, unrecognized, often mis-seen, mis-heard and mis-recognized. And I’m deeply grateful to live in the here and now, where I can cross that boundary, back into comfort, acceptance and safety. But Pride exists as a presently lived reality, not just a remembered testament, for all of those who can’t always cross that boundary, from outsider to acceptance. At the Alterna-Queer stage, I see myself, the outsider that I was, reaching forward to my present, as a bridge and a beacon.

- Cheryl Coffin

You always remember your first time – in this case, we’re talkin’ Pride. Mine was a month or two after I had moved to Toronto in 2007. Before that I went to high school in Small Town, ON and delayed my coming out process until I left home to attend the University of Guelph. Even though I was out to my family and friends by the time I had a degree in-hand, I still wasn’t really interested in doing any of that “gay stuff”. I was content to drink pints at the pub with the boys, two-step with the ladies at the country bar, and when I was invited by some friends to take a road trip to Toronto one summer to attend the Pride Parade, I politely turned down the offer. Friends would comment that I was the straightest gay guy they’d ever met – they were probably right.

Back story now provided, I was livin’ it large in the big city – I had a big place in midtown with an awesome roommate and I was ready to spend the summer partying while looking for a job. When June rolled around, curiosity got the best of me so I decided to invite a few people to my place and to join me for the Pride Parade. I was nervous and excited (and just maybe a little hung-over) when we got downtown for the parade, but we snagged a spot up front and took it all in.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t the parade itself that sticks in my mind as my most memorable Pride moment. That moment came just after the parade had finished and we found ourselves in the sea of people heading towards Church Street. In that hot sweaty mess of people, I saw men holding hands, kissing one another, and checking each other (and me) out without worrying about what other people thought. It was this feeling of freedom that was most memorable – it was something I had never experienced before.

Pride isn’t just about the parties, the scantily clad guys, the stage shows, and the street celebrations (although they’re all pretty fabulous), it’s about freedom, it’s about friendship, and it’s about finding yourself. It shows, on a massive scale, just how strong and how vibrant our community really is. It shows, as this year’s theme proclaims, you belong.

Over the last four years, I met some of my closest and dearest friends at Pride – and these friends have helped me grow and accept myself. That “gay stuff” is part of my life now – and it’s awesome. Of course, not everything has changed – I’ll still two-step with you if you buy me a pint.

Happy 30th, Pride Toronto! I’ll see you there!

- Josh “Jack” Hass