This Sunday’s Pride parade will be the first in 22 years in which Brian Provini will not be marching.

The 70-year-old gay man told me Friday he plans not only to boycott the Pride parade but he and his partner won’t even be walking Church St., which is closed to car traffic through the weekend.

He says many of his friends are leaving the city for the weekend or avoiding the Gay Village or, like him, attending a small celebratory BBQ on Sunday.

Provini says he’s also heard from some of his American friends that they have decided to bypass Toronto and attend Pride festivities in Montreal this year. This has become more of reality, he says, since they heard Toronto police have been banned from the parade and instead, a contingent of uniformed Toronto officers will be joining this Sunday’s New York City Pride parade.

The retired community college professor is heartsick with what has happened to Pride.

“I’m very disappointed,” he said. “I’ve been calling this a Black Lives Matter (BLM) Toronto Pride event...I don’t consider this Pride.

“People don’t feel right about attending...it’s not the right atmosphere this year.”

The decision to ban the police from the parade came when a group of self-described “white butch dykes”/BLM supporters hijacked the Pride AGM in January.

Despite mounting public pressure to remove the police ban, Pride executive director Olivia Nuamah continued to insist over the past few months that conversations needed to be held with the police first to address those who feel “marginalized” and “intimidated” by the police presence (BLMers to be exact).

In late May, council voted down a move to withhold this year’s grant of $260,000 to Pride until the ban was lifted. Just a few days later, we learned that BLM — after dividing the community and excluding the police from an event that is supposed to be inclusive — did not register to march on Sunday.

It has been true theatre of the absurd.

While Mayor John Tory, Pride officials and the councillors who attend Sunday will no doubt try to put a positive spin on what happens, I predict the attendance will be down and the parade will not be the same. In addition to the absence of Toronto’s cops and police forces around the GTA, the Toronto Professional Fire Fighters and the paramedics are not marching in solidarity with the Boys (and Girls) in Blue.

Barb Williams, a retired Peel board employee, will not be attending the parade as a spectator for the first time since she moved back to downtown Toronto 10 years ago.

She says she has many friends in the gay community and, like her, they don’t feel right about the police ban.

“It’s very sad...I have always gone down to the parade,” she said Friday. “I’m not going this year.”

Williams insists the $260,000 city grant to Pride should have been withheld until the ban was lifted.

“Maybe that would have made them (Pride officials) wake up,” she said.

She also believes it is “very sad” how BLM has been able to “control things.”

Provini said the Millennials behind the ban (and I saw all of them at the Pride AGM in January) have “no clue” about the police brutality people of his generation lived through and how far the police have come.

“This (decision to ban police) turns it all around,” he says.

Provini says if BLM cared anything about the black LGBTQ community, they’d be protesting Caribana.

After all, he says, a large majority of Caribbean governments are “incredibly homophobic” — places where gays are not only arrested but beaten.

He adds that he’s just sickened by our city politicians for caving to BLM.

“I think it’s obvious this year Pride no longer has the support of the entire LGBTQ community,” he says. “People are just disgusted.”

SLevy@postmedia.com