It is a despicably hot week in Toronto. I’m writing this from my desk in my one-bedroom apartment. I do not have air conditioning, so I’ve got four fans pointed at me. Sweat is beading my forehead; my shorts are sticking to my thighs. Thirty-five degrees of sweltering summer have penetrated the city I love.
A short subway ride from my apartment, at the legendary intersection of Church and Wellesley, groundwork is being laid for the annual Pride festival, which shutters Toronto’s gay village and transfigures its streets and alleys into a series of enormous and glittering parties. There is music and dancing, a parade, makeup and glitter. There is serotonin; there is freedom.
As per usual, there has been some drama surrounding Toronto Pride this year. Following the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equality and inclusion, a number of cowardly (mostly American) corporations have withdrawn their long-held financial support for the festival, exposing once and for all what many of us already knew: that a corporation is at best a fairweather friend to the queer community and at worst an enemy whose money poisons the radical foundations of our precious festival.
I’ll admit I was relieved when they divested from us. I am proud of my community because, on an essential level, we are the antithesis of the moneyed hegemony. We are perverted and strange, and it was only a matter of time before those in power finally admitted that we are too gross to wholeheartedly endorse.
In Toronto, where the major Pride festivities have over the years become increasingly sanitary, one event has long held my support: the Green Space Festival. Held over several days in the Village’s Barbara Hall Park, Green Space is a free outdoor event that hosts celebrity drag queens and bombastic dance parties. There are free fans to thwack and Whitney Houston remixes; Drag Race royalty and antiretroviral advertisements. The parties are thrown by The 519, a historic LGBTQ2S+ community centre located beside the park. Attendees are encouraged to donate to The 519, which profits enormously from the festival and redistributes that money into an assortment of programs and services that help our community’s most vulnerable: seniors, youth, people living with HIV and, in particular, unhoused queer and trans people.
In my short lifetime, I have donated a substantial amount of money to The 519, and I’ve spent countless hours at the Green Space Festival. It is invariably a blast, one that costs me nothing, unless I choose otherwise, and supports a good cause. But during this very hot week, things got more complicated.
News broke on Instagram that police were evicting an encampment at Barbara Hall ahead of the Green Space Festival. In and beyond my circles there was outrage, and tough questions were pointed toward the community centre. Why is The 519, which claims to serve its community’s most marginalized members, allowing police to evict unhoused people on its watch so it can throw a days-long dance party? Is that not fiercely hypocritical? Does it not undermine everything we, and they, stand for, everything we believe in? Is Pride about parties or about community?
I spent that morning seething. Before the news, I had fully intended to make my grand return to Green Space later this week for several of its many parties. After the news about the encampment eviction, it no longer felt right for me to go. Yes, my money would go to a cause that does a great deal throughout the year for unhoused people in Toronto, including, and especially, unhoused people in Barbara Hall. Conversely, I’d only be dancing because unhoused people were displaced during an historic heat wave. It didn’t sit well with my spirit, so I’m opting to spend my nights this week doing other things. I believe a medal for my valour is in the mail.
It bears mentioning that on the night of the eviction, The 519 issued a lengthy statement explaining the context around the encampment eviction. They pointed to the great work they do year-round and how essential the revenue from Green Space is for making that work possible. They also directly addressed the eviction. “Over the past week, including this morning, we have helped connect individuals to shelter, where possible and where it was desired,” read the statement. “As per the City’s protocol, police were present at the site today to support the City’s encampment outreach and response staff in their work.”
As a friend who has worked in encampments pointed out to me this week, supporting unhoused people in Toronto is a highly complex issue. Shelters have operated beyond their capacity for years, and deaths remain all too common. In the Village, this problem is acute and visible, and The 519 is the primary resource centre for unhoused people in the neighbourhood. In no way do I want to diminish the life-saving work the good people of The 519 perform every single day, in sun and sleet.
But the encampment eviction of this week is difficult to understand, especially after the centre’s statement. And though I believe The 519 took measures to locate shelter for the Barbara Hall evictees this week, I am finding it hard to square its actions with an open letter it co-signed and published in 2021 condemning encampment evictions. “The right to housing should not be interpreted narrowly as ‘having a roof over one’s head,’” it reads. “Forceful evictions and involuntary relocation to shelter hotels likely violates residents’ rights to life, liberty and security of the person.” If this is the case, then how are the evictions at Barbara Hall justifiable?
It remains unclear to me what exactly happened during and after the encampment at Barbara Hall was forcibly dispersed. What is clear to me is that I am not comfortable attending a party that was only made possible because a police-led encampment eviction took place. I am not an expert on encampments, nor was I physically at this week’s Barbara Hall eviction, but I am an engaged and concerned member of Toronto’s queer community. From my perspective, it is nearly impossible to rectify the stated cause of this year’s Green Space Festival with the violence that made it possible.
I’ve spent a great deal of brain power contemplating why this incident has struck such a nerve, not just with me but with my community. On my feeds and within my circles, many have decried the backlash against The 519, rightfully pointing out that the centre hardly has a reputation for bullying the unhoused and ought to be supported despite this incident. I generally agree, but I think this is an issue that stretches beyond any mistakes The 519 may have made this week.
In the past year and especially since the re-election of Trump, Pride festivals across North America have become a hotly contested battleground in the culture war over DEI. Simultaneously, the queer community has found itself at the forefront of what I would say are the two most galvanizing social issues of our time: the Free Palestine movement and the fight for trans liberation. For a long time, the liberal majority appeared to be on the side of LGBTQ2S+ people, fighting with us for gay marriage and media visibility in exchange for a profit. Now that the rainbow capitalism well has run dry, we have been abandoned; left to fend for ourselves and each other. But as it was during Stonewall and the bathhouse raids of 1981, we will always respond to isolation and peril with cries for justice. We are tired of the most oppressed among us having to relocate and suffer so the richest and whitest can drink and do K and possibly make a passing mention of Marsha P. Johnson and call it Pride. No, it has become abundantly clear that the stakes are too high for that.
Pride ought to be a party. We deserve to celebrate our hard-won liberation, and there is no jubilance like shoving unadulterated faggotry in the face of the uncomfortable heterosexual. But the incident at Barbara Hall Park prompts the question propelling our current social moment: Who needs to get out of the way so the rest of us can enjoy the luxury of pretending that everything is all right?
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