Awareness
This August marks the fifty-first anniversary of Canada’s first Pride Week, a landmark moment in Canadian GSRD history that caused a ripple effect that can still be felt today.
According to the May 29th, 1973 edition of The Brandon Sun, a Manitoba-based newspaper, the idea for the Pride Week was thought up by a ‘Gay election coalition.’ The coalition was formed to make Canadian politicians aware of the struggles faced by Canada’s GSRD community and to demonstrate the voting power they held. At a meeting held in Brandon, MB, the coalition also began planning for a Gay Pride week to be held in cities across the country. Regrettably, primary sources on Canada’s first Pride week are few and far between, and as such it’s hard to tell exactly how this monumental undertaking of coordination across the country was achieved, but it’s easy to tell that it was indeed pulled off.
The Pride Week took place from the 19th to the 26th of August that year, with programming taking place in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Saskatoon. Some sources imply that other cities may have also held their iterations of Pride Week as part of the national effort, but once again, sources are few and far between on the internet. The programming across the country included an art festival, a screening of a documentary, a picnic, a dance, and a rally for Gay rights that took place in every city involved in the Pride week.
The mood was overwhelmingly celebratory, but on August 25th, the day of the rally, it shifted towards something much more like a protest. The political theme of the week—a tradition which has been carried on today by organizations such as Vancouver Pride—was “sexual orientation in provincial human rights codes,” and the rally exemplified this. According to an October 1973 edition of Gay Tide, the protest was designed for attendants to “hear something of the growth of the gay movement and to declare their determination to continue the struggle.”
Pride Week was a landmark occasion in all the cities it took place in, marking the power of cooperation by folks across the nation for a common goal of liberation, but it would be remiss to not mention its importance to the city of Vancouver specifically. Pride week in Vancouver marked a definitive shift in the city’s (and the Country’s more broadly) GSRD communities. The shift was from the older ‘homophile’ movement, which prioritized assimilation into the heteronormative culture, into the new and growing Gay liberation movement, which centred around celebrating the GSRD community’s inherent differences. Pride week also marked the first large-scale demonstration for GSRD rights in Vancouver, while other cities that hosted Pride week, such as Toronto, had held previous events of its like. Three hundred people attended the art festival on the first day of the city’s programming, and many of them attended the subsequent rally on the steps of the courthouse. Pride Week’s presence in Vancouver—Canada’s third largest city—was thus a massive step forward for the city, British Columbia, and Canada as a whole.
Pride Week did not end up morphing into or sparking the creation of any annual Pride events like we see today, although Vancouver would end up hosting its first ‘modern’ Pride parade in 1978. Not only did it exhibit the solidarity and strength of Canada’s GSRD communities, but it’s also said that a number of straight individuals also attended in either solidarity or simple curiosity, something that could be said to mark changing opinions among the majority of the public. While we’ll doubtlessly come to learn even more about Canada’s first Pride week as more sources come to like, it’s currently not at all hard to declare the events a crucial moment in the GSRD history of Vancouver and all of Canada.
