A SUMMER OF PRIDE

I’m not sure when it happened but Pride got bigger around here. 

 

Ever since I moved to Vancouver twenty-five years ago, the parade has always been on the Sunday of the first weekend in August. It coincides with an official long weekend in the province, the first Monday of the month being a public holiday with the flashy name, British Columbia Day. There are some official events on the Monday, mostly attended I imagine by speech-happy BC politicians, historians who haven’t been outdoors in ages and people who like to drive around in old cars, reminding the rest of us what the provincial flag looks like—something with a sun on it which is apropos in the middle of summer but has absolutely zero relevance from November through March. My five minutes of research about BC Day is that it started to show up on the calendar a few years after another province, Ontario, named the first Monday in August a provincial holiday back in 1969. Basically, it’s a day off in the middle of summer because another province started it and we wanted an extra Monday to sleep in, too. Yay, BC!

 

The first weekend in August has become a whole weekend of fun, at least for people in Vancouver, with one of several fireworks nights on the Saturday and the Pride parade on Sunday. All those historical speeches on Monday, a buffer day of festiveness, I suppose, help folks wind down so they can head back to work Tuesday, perhaps without a hangover.

 

Okay, so that’s more than enough context than you need. (Perhaps in my next life, I’ll be a speechifying historian.) What I recall during my first Pride in Vancouver was the Sunday parade and a festival of sorts at a park by the beach where you could pick up a nice plastic bag with a fancy corporate logo on it and walk around, staring at a bunch of tables with tarps over them, signing up the upcoming AIDS Walk, picking up handfuls of free condoms and listening to business pitches just so you could make off with more corporate swag. (Who doesn’t love a fridge magnet?) Really, the post-parade “festival” was a chance to walk around in a really crowded space with your friends, whispering things like, “Check out the abs on that guy in the purple Lycra shorts” and, “Girl, look at Miss Thang over there stuffing her bag with lube. She was so wasted at Celebrities last night.” Ah, memories. I’m beaming with pride as I type this.

 

I’m sure it was a small roomful of gays who didn’t have six-pack abs (or even purple Lyrca shorts) and lesbians who couldn’t get into riding motorcycles topless who decided there needed to be other events like queer documentaries and art exhibitions that might include something more than a bronze of a penis that surely made a cerebral political statement if one stared and pondered on it long enough. Pride Day stretched into a week and then something more.

 

I stopped researching for this post after that heady reading about the civic holiday, but I’m guessing that other cities saw their Pride celebrations grow out of the similar circumstances. As parades dotted different weekends in summer, perhaps to allow the Proudest queers to embark on an international Pride tour, the media started covering Pride events with more depth and breadth than just broadcasting drag queens and hedonistic shirtless gays and lesbians on the eleven o’clock news to shock the straight folks in the suburbs who would call and blast the news station for airing such trash that might titillate vulnerable children without reasonable bedtimes and possibly a few wavering husbands.   

 

Mainstream media began to pick up on Pride’s origins, springing from the Stonewall riots which stretched from June 28 to July 3 in 1969. More news coverage popped up in the week leading up to New York City’s parade and, in time, June became known as Pride Month, not just in The Big Apple but across the U.S. and globally.

 

Of course, Vancouver wasn’t going to change the date of its parade. It would have left a glaring gap in its smashing weekend to kick off Dog Day Month. (That’s not an official name for August and its internally nonsensical but pass it on. Things are rather sparse of the calendar for the year’s eighth month.) 

 

While I’m often away for much of the summer, enjoying travel and—drat—failing to hit a single parade on the Pride circuit, COVID has kept me close to home this season. I don’t know if this has been going on for many years but, as I’ve blogged earlier, local businesses started hanging rainbow flags, slapping up Love Is Love signs and displaying other pro-queer messaging at the beginning of June because every corporate entity that wants the gay dollar knows now that’s Pride Month. It was quite nice. Everyone loves a rainbow, right?

 

Here’s the bonus: In Vancouver, Pride Month is now Pride Summer. Due to our delayed Pride events, the banks and shops have kept up their We Love Queers. Pride decorations have a longer shelf life than Halloween’s witches and spiders and even All Things Christmas. 

 

June, July and early August…’Tis the season. The Pride goes on.