Submitted anonymously to North Shore

This past Sunday marked the passing of yet another Hamilton Pride, complete with all the rainbows you can pack into a swag bag and a good measure of generally joyful times had by all. The stage was set for this gathering of Queers in Gage Park – a cornerstone of Hamilton’s public spaces – and it was billed as a day of family fun, free food, and entertainment. I attended the festivities, but this year I was there to fill a specific role.

I was one of a few fellow anarchists tabling for The Tower.

Let me just set this up by saying that I’m not speaking for The Tower, but as an individual who supports the space and organizes out of it. The day’s events were rather fine. Despite worries from some that we were setting ourselves up for a day of defending riots and arguing with liberals, quite the opposite happened. Dozens of people came up to offer up their support and solidarity, took our free literature (including this zine telling the anarchist side of the story of the last few months), and made plans to come visit our fabulous new space on the corner of Barton and Lottridge.

There were some dark spots to the day – mainly the intrusion of a bunch of right-wing-nut street preachers with some vile signage – but I’ll speak more to that later. Because I think that the weeks and months leading up to Pride this year tell a more interesting and challenging story. One that I think lays a lot of context to my critique and offers something for my fellow Queers in this city to consider.

So I ask you, how political is your Pride?

I’m not going to go into any short history of Queer struggle because every yes – homo with their head out of the sand knows that the first Pride was a riot. We’ve read it stamped into buttons and printed on t-shirts and even cross-stiched into decorative pillows. At the time of the riots, those Trans women and radicals leading the charge on the streets were betrayed by a growing movement that wanted to present a polished face of respectability as a pathway to acceptance, but we like to believe we have seen the error of our ways. Our communities are proud of our riot origin story and we defend those who took action in the streets outside the Stonewall Inn. The pages of our history now herald them as heroes.

While I am thankful that those people are now given the respect they deserve, I can’t help but feel that it comes at a terrible price. Their actions are placed at the beginning of a timeline that tells a story of things continually getting better, rights being won, and equality slowly achieved. A timeline that reinforces the very liberal idea of social progression through engagement with the state. “Riots were necessary back in the 60s, but things are different now.” “Pride isn’t about struggle anymore, it’s a celebration of our success.” “We’ve made it. Hurrah.”

Let’s bring this back to Hamilton. I live in this city as both a queer and an anarchist, among various other identities, and my Pride is fucking political. Back in March a bunch of black-clad folks marched through a rich neighborhood and down a bougie retail street and lit off some fireworks and broke some windows. Okay, they broke a lot of windows. And people were scared. The action set off an all-consuming political debate in the city over tactics and gentrification and retaliation. It brought to the surface a conflict that had been simmering for years about the rapid take-over of Hamilton by capital and the forced displacement of the poor. People shrieked for the police to bring those responsible to justice. Some even advocated taking the law into their own hands. Donut Monster made a donut.

Then about a month later, the police went full commando and kicked in the door of a collective house of anarchists. They threw in flash grenades and dragged people naked out of bed and threatened to shoot their dog and threw a bunch of feminist art in the toilet. They arrested my dear friend Cedar. All of those people affected that day are Queers in the Hamilton community and yet the Queer community said nothing.

Cedar was hauled off to Barton Jail and was denied bail on account that they were “too dangerous” to the people of Hamilton. They would go on to spend 30+ days in pre-trial detention in that hellhole. During that time, as a Trans person in jail, they were aggressively interrogated about their gender, kept in segregation, forced to endure invasive strip searches, and threatened with sexual violence. My friends and I spent countless tearful and angry hours ensuring as best we could their safety and fighting to secure their freedom. And yet there was silence from most of the Queer community.

As we struggled over these months fighting white supremacists and losing The Tower space and finding a new space and then dealing with a second round of arrests involving seven more of our comrades (including more Hamilton Queers, by the way), we continued organizing and staying true to our politics. One of the ways we did that was accepting a tabling space at Hamilton Pride that was offered to The Tower about a month prior to the event. The Tower has historically run a monthly Queer and Trans Social, participated in alternative Pride month programming, houses a library of Queer and Trans radical literature, and is a meeting place for political Queers.

A few weeks before Pride, that table space was taken away from us.

At the same time, it was announced that Pride had accepted a sponsorship from the real estate sharks of Ambitious Realty – one of the most aggressive driving players in the ongoing gentrification of Hamilton. Ambitious Realty came out with a rainbow version of their logo.

Now, the situation was complicated and we didn’t want to jump to conclusions so a couple friends asked for a meeting with Pride organizers. And people wrote things online about it. I want to cover this delicately. I have a lot of respect for those who showed up to talk and I consider them part of my community, but I think it would be doing us all a disservice if I tried to spare feelings by not writing about it. This isn’t about throwing people under the bus, it’s about investing in things being better.

The meeting went well – The Tower was offered the table space back. But the reasons for retracting their initial offer became readily apparent through the course of the conversation. One of them was to do with public image. They were afraid of how Queers would react to our presence. Underneath of that, they were worried about how anarchists might act on the Ambitious Realty booth. It’s worthwhile to note that the committee was torn on the issue of inviting us or not, but those who were real adamant we be left out we’re holding a firm line. It is to the credit of the committee that they realized after spreaking with us that excluding a community space from Pride on those grounds just couldn’t stand up to scrutiny.

This raises some interesting issues though. Like who is actually included in this so-called “Queer community” that we talk about so much? And what kind of Pride are we building in Hamilton when sponsorship becomes more important than politics? As we slowly see our neighborhoods gobbled up by Toronto, I can’t help but feel like Pride is slipping a similar way. Can we be on the same page about one thing? Toronto Pride sucks. Big time. It’s one long week of advertisements peppered in with protests by Queers over the event itself. Just this week, folks in Toronto are holding an event called RIP Toronto Pride: 1981-2018 that’s a wake to mourn a dead event. Let’s not do that here, okay.

Let’s talk for a minute about the issue of sponsorship. The line goes as such: we need corporate sponsorship because our event needs to grow and therefore we need money. It seems to make sense, but I argue that this logic misses the mark entirely. Pride isn’t a festival, it’s a statement. It’s about claiming public space and demanding our right to be there. When anarchists talk about gentrification, it’s not something separate than the struggles Pride is meant to celebrate. A lot of the people who come out to Gage Park are also facing displacement as rents continue to rise, and so what does it mean when groups that are profiting off that are given a place of honour?

If the Pride that you’re planning can’t happen without taking money from the companies actively destroying your community, then scale it back. The Pride committee has a kick-ass mission statement that clearly states its opposition to homo-gentrification (they even held an anti-gentrification workshop as part of the schedule of events). If taking a sponsorship is going to violate your own organizational principles, don’t take the money. Queers in Hamilton are really good organizers and we can keep this grassroots and we can do it well.

I feel like I’ve spent a good deal of time in my life defending Queerness as having radical organizing potential whilst quietly urging other Queers to actually be those people. And here I go again, I guess.

How political is your Pride, y’all?

It’s not worth it to take the sponsorship from Ambitious Realty – giving them all the good rainbow cred that comes with it – for a few more free samosas. And what happened to the Pride March? I’m not convinced we get to throw a party and stop fighting until we’ve actually won our freedom. Not just freedom for those among us who can pay for it, freedom for all of us. Freedom with a circle A. That means standing up for Queers in prison. It means showing up for Cedar and the other people charged in the same case . It probably means standing against prison itself.

There’s a tour of queerphobic street preachers making the rounds to Pride events right now. They showed up in Hamilton and guess what… a lot of those who held down and stood out in front were anarchists. And communists, to be fair. Without these non-associations the courts have imposed and other restrictive conditions , we could have done more. Don’t get me wrong, nothing the courts and the cops can do is going to stop us from organizing and being the “ liberal commie homo-fascists “ *** the Right thinks we are. But things are still fresh and right now we could use your support.

The Pride organizers have done an amazing job of keeping the police out for the last two years (and they extend that to pandering politicians, thankfully). But if we are going to tell the police to fuck off then we need to be prepared to keep each other safe and defend our spaces. A small crew of organized folks could have easily intercepted those fools and edged them out of the park. Some paint and some water guns would have made short work of their cameras and signs. There’s folks willing to do that work, we just need to know you all have our backs.

This is important because the answer to defending Pride from Christian hate-mongerers isn’t getting the police involved. The police being involved will always put Queers at risk. And it isn’t about getting the city to enforce a bylaw infraction so that they could be removed for protesting without a permit. That sort of nonsense will only be used against anarchists and organizers when we try to rally and march and demonstrate dissent on the streets that we’re entitled to take. Without a permit. The answer is engaging in meaningful community defense. The first Pride was a riot, a community defending itself. Fighting back against gentrification in Hamilton isn’t just a rhetorical position, it’s real daily work that comes with risks: what would it look like if we saw real estate speculators as threats to the queer community in the same way those street preacher jerks are?

Okay, okay, I’ve said a lot. So what am I asking you to do?

Start by making sure you check in on how the person arrested at Pride is doing. The one who wrestled the sign away from one of those homophobes and ripped it in half. If charges come down, show up to support him. He had your back so have his too.

Then maybe come by The Tower and check out our new digs. Or donate to the legal fund of those arrested. Maybe organize your own fundraiser. K eep your fellow Queers out of jail. So much of what Pride and its supporters claim to stand for is the same as what we fight for as anarchists. Don’t let the media and the cops trick you into fearing the wrong people. We’re really quite lovely.

And lastly, when Pride organizing starts up again next year, make your voices heard in making it what it should be. Sponsorship-free. Anti-gentrification. In support of riots. And fucking political.

*** one of the street preachers signs read “Liberal Commie Homo-Fascists are Ruining our Children”

North Shore Note: