It’s been another year of small, distanced Pride gatherings across Canada as a second June rolls by under public health restrictions.
Before the pandemic upended public life, Xtra’s video team visited three small towns in 2019 to see what Pride looks like across the country. Small Town Pride premiered at the Inside Out film festival in Toronto in June. (If you missed it, the documentary will be shown at a few more festivals before it’s released widely in Canada and elsewhere—stay tuned for more details.)
As cities across Canada celebrate Pride Month, Xtra checked in to see how people in those towns are holding up and what June has looked like in the (hopefully) last summer of COVID-19 restrictions.
“It’s just growing and it’s awesome”
It’s been a strange year and a half in Norman Wells, Northwest Territories, says Sarah Kelly, the teacher responsible for the Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) at Mackenzie Mountain School.
The town is only accessible by air during the summer and by an ice road during the winter, but the pandemic has made the town feel more isolated than ever. Until recently, there was nowhere to quarantine after returning from elsewhere in Canada or abroad, so many people haven’t left the town of about 800 people since last year.
“It would be completely understandable if everyone was miserable and at each other’s throats,” Kelly says, “but it hasn’t been like that.” Instead, the GSA has grown larger than ever this year. Students are already getting ready to organize Pride for when school returns in September and public health restrictions will hopefully ease.
Students couldn’t hold most of the usual Pride events last year, but they kicked off June by planting flowers outside the school, and Kelly says they’re planning for bigger celebrations at the end of the summer. “It’s just growing and it’s awesome,” says Kelly.
“I felt like I was walking in a daze”
Pride was small but festive this year in the Southern Alberta town of Taber, where the Pride committee asked people to stay home and watch a live-streamed flag raising to mark the beginning of Pride Month this June.
“Last year, I almost felt like I was walking in a bit of a daze, just because the pandemic was really new,” says Pride organizer Jayce Wilson. This year was more relaxed, she says, with just a handful of people attending the flag-raising ceremony in person.
Pride and the rainbow flag have had a difficult history in the town of about 8,500 people. During Taber Pride’s first year, in 2017, a rainbow flag was stolen from the town flagpole and a second was burned. The following year, all but one municipal councillor voted against allowing the flag to fly again. And in 2019, a petition demanding that Pride be banned gathered more than 1,000 signatures.
Provincial politicians have shown up at Taber Pride in past years, but almost all of the town’s councillors have never attended. Taber’s mayor, Andrew Prokop, also declined to attend for the first three years of Pride, citing a prior engagement each year.
But for the past two years, Prokop has sent a video message to officially mark the beginning of Pride month—a welcome sign, Wilson says, that the town and local government are working to build a more positive relationship with LGBTQ2S+ people in Taber.
Pride on hold
Meanwhile, in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, Pride has been on hold since 2020 and won’t be back until next summer, says Bleu Rae, one of the local Pride organizers.
“I don’t think it’s the time for it yet, but I look forward to it happening again, and I look forward to what Pride looks like next year and five years from now,” she says.
Annapolis Royal, the smallest town in Nova Scotia, started holding official Pride events in 2018. Many of the town’s almost 500 residents have turned out each year since then for what Rae calls their “100-metre-march” through Annapolis Royal’s small downtown.
“I love the smallness of it. I love that it’s meaningful and small and precious. If it grows, that’s okay, but I love where it started,” Rae told Xtra at the town’s Pride in 2019. “We have a small town, we have a small population that are going to come, we have a small little strip of the street we’re going to march on, and that’s awesome. It’s exactly what I think it needs to be right now.”
Even though the events were on hold this year, the town re-painted its rainbow crosswalk—an annual tradition since it was installed three years ago.
Even if Pride events can’t happen, that crosswalk is an important symbol, Rae says. “Everybody sees it… it makes us remember it, and that’s the whole important thing: Can we all be a little bit more kind? Can we all be a little bit more understanding? Can we all learn to love the differences?”
Why you can trust Xtra
