The rising tide of anti-2SLGBTQIA+ legislation, political scapegoating, and violence has raised concerns about the saftey of Pride events, and of queer and trans attendees. Despite the fact that much of homophobic and transphobic violence is state-sanctioned, many organizations continue to look to police to keep Pride safe.
On June 5, 2023, the federal government announced that up to $1.5 million of security funding will be available to Pride organizations, in response to increasing safety concerns. Although this funding includes a budget for staff training, barricades, and safety gear for staff and volunteers, it also allows organizations to hire paid-duty police, possibly increasing police presence at Pride events.
For some, the police’s presence at Pride creates a mirage of safety, however, the ongoing and historical struggle for queer liberation makes it evident that the police do not, and will not, protect queer and trans lives.
Keep Pride abolitionist
Although Pride celebrations today often reek of corporate diversity optics and white LGBTQ+ assimilationist rhetoric, Pride is deeply rooted in abolitionist and liberatory frameworks.
The first Pride parade – the 1970 Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day March – honoured the 1969 Stonewall riots, where queer and trans folks fought back against violent and recurring police raids on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club which acted as a haven for New York City’s queer and trans communities. The Stonewall Riots responded to a long and gruesome history of police crackdowns on 2SLGBTQIA+ community spaces, serving as an example of queer and trans people’s resistance against police and state violence.
In a similar vein, the Toronto Police have a clear and ongoing pattern of policing 2SLGBTQIA+ communities.
In 2000, the Toronto Police raided the Pussy Palace, a bathhouse party run by the Toronto Women’s Bathhouse Committee, aimed at uniting queer women. Under the guise of a liquor license check, two undercover female officers and five plainclothes male officers raided the bathhouse with little warning, violating the privacy of, and simultaneously fetishizing, many nude or semi-nude queer women who were in attendance.
In 2016, Toronto Police launched Project Marie, a sting operation with the intent of cracking down on – and criminalizing – predominantly queer public sex acts. Police used tactics reminiscent of entrapment to arrest men who were cruising in cars and bushes near parks.
These examples are part the long history of Toronto Police over policing queer communities, which includes censoring queer literature in 1983 and 1993, the 1981 Toronto Bathouse Raids, and the ongoing use of strip searches by police to target and scrutinize trans folks, or anyone else who does not fit neatly into the gender or sex binary.
This ritualistic pattern of criminalizing and inciting violence upon queer and trans people – often, simply due to queer people’s engagement with queer culture outside of cisheteronomative respectability – shows that the police are simply unfit to aptly protect queer and trans people from violence.
A review of the Toronto Police Service (TPS)’s relationship with marginalized communities affirms the failures of the institution of policing in protecting 2SLGBTQIA+ communities. Seventy-one percent of trans and non-binary respondents have little to no confidence in the police, compared to 19 percent of heterosexual respondents. The distrust of police among marginalized communities in Toronto reflects the experiences of many 2SLGBTQIA+ communities across Turtle Island.
Pride has always been, and will continue to be, deeply political. In order for queer communities to celebrate and honour the struggles of our queer and trans elders and ancestors, we must remain grounded in the abolitionist roots of Pride. At its core, Pride celebrates the 2SLGBTQIA+ community’s fight against state and police oppression, reminding us of the necessity of queer liberation.
Intersectionality over respectability
Queer communities today look back at Stonewall as a landmark act of resistance to oppression, signifying a significant shift towards legislative gay rights in the United States. Many queer communities today aptly hold up trans women of colour, namely Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, as symbols of the revolutionary spirit of the gay liberation movement. However, the modern-day adoration and praise these organizers receive lead many of us to forget the racist scrutiny and dismissal that trans women of colour were met with in gay rights organizing spaces.
At a 1973 Gay Pride Rally, Sylvia Rivera was met with an uproar of heckling and booing by the predominantly white LGBTQ+ audience as she shared her experiences of racist transphobia – mirroring a pattern of violence and mistreatment of queer and trans people of colour. The cultural rifts between more privileged white middle class gay communities and racialized, or otherwise intersectionally marginalized, queer and trans folks remains today.
Due to the ongoing violence of cisheteropatriarchy, queer and trans people’s livelihoods continue to be threatened by dominant culture and the state. However, replicating the historical pattern of assimilation, more privileged white queer communities often push aside the experiences of working-class 2SLGBTQIA+ people of colour. When we listen to queer and trans people of colour the reality is clear: the police will not, and have never, kept queer and trans communities safe. The prison industrial complex, with deep roots in cisheteropatriarchy and racial capitalism, is a system in which queer and trans people continue to have their livelihoods put into question.
Police attempts to placate queer and trans communities through preformative allyship do not address the experiences of intersectionally oppressed 2SLGBTQIA+ folks. It blatantly disregards the experiences of queer and trans people who are racialized, unhoused, poor, sex working, and/or living with disabilities. The police continue to function as protectors of capital, enacting violence upon those who challenge or simply struggle to survive within the bounds of racial capitalism.
We must remember that respectability politics will not grant us our freedom. As Assata Shakur, an American Black liberation activist, states in her autobiography, “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
We cannot defeat the violence of cisheteropatriarchy, or even simply protect queer and trans folks from violence, when we are hinged on respectability and assimilating into cisheteronormative society. Seeking protection from police –an institution which continues to further marginalize queer and trans people rather than protecting us – will continue to fail us, stripping 2SLGBTQIA+ people of their autonomy and self-determination.
Instead, we can ground our Pride celebrations in acts of solidarity. We have the power to resist homophobic and transphobic violence with community-care, to demonstrate that hate has no place at Pride. It’s our responsibility to act in solidarity with 2SLGBTQIA+ community members, and resist cisheteropatriarchial violence. We have the power to keep each other safe.
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