Prides of the past: 1992
12 Jun 2020. -

Pride was pretty exciting in 1992. The Supreme Court of Canada had just ruled that under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Human Rights Act, gays and lesbians could not be excluded from entering the Canadian Forces. The federal government does not appeal the ruling. Party, motherfuckers!

“Breaking the Silence” was Pride’s theme that year, and the Grand Marshals were children of gay and lesbian parents, who clearly hadn’t suffered enough. Attendance was estimated to be 120,000 people.

The previous year saw Glad Day Bookshop under siege, busted by the cops for selling a dirty filthy lesbian porno mag called Bad Attitude. The bust resulted in a huge march months earlier and the anger carried over to Pride. Buddies in Bad Times upped the ante with a sexually suggestive in-your-face float featuring S&M and jail bars and sex toys and tits and ass. Newly opened men’s strip club Remington’s put a hunk on the roof of a car. Wearing only a lime-green G-string, you could see his dick from two blocks away. Gina the operatic drag diva once again trilled what some believe might be opera from atop her float. The cutest were the AIDS Committee of Toronto who hired some guys to twirl flags while wearing Sgt Pepper jackets, and boy, were they having a blast. And once again, Bitch Diva worked her umbrella while looking pretty and demure atop some vehicle. 

The only sombre note was the die-in. Back in 1992, people still died of AIDS, and every issue of Xtra featured dozens of pictures of guys we all recognized from the bars, now dead way too soon. As always, gay activists appealed to an indifferent federal government for help. One way to get attention was with a die-in. In the middle of the parade, some guy blew a whistle and hundreds of people lay down on the pavement (imagine, lying down on Yonge Street!) and someone else would come by and draw a chalk outline around them. The idea was, every chalk outline symbolized some young gay man who needlessly died of this disease. The effect was very powerful, until some goof decided to draw hair and facial features on the chalk outlines. Well, it was powerful while it lasted.