In 2016, when Black Lives Matter staged a protest at Toronto’s LGBT Pride parade, complete with colourful smoke bombs and a series of demands — the most notorious one being the elimination of police floats from the event — every queer person I knew had an opinion. They ranged from “Why can’t we all just get along?” to “Let’s get critical, our Pride is political!” A spineless moderate, I landed somewhere in the middle.In this newspaper, I proposed a compromise. Rather than ban police floats from the parade, I suggested, Pride Toronto could drastically reduce its (then) extremely high police participation to a single float. As it stood there were so many officers from different jurisdictions marching in the event, no one could blame an uninitiated passerby if he assumed it was a day dedicated exclusively to law enforcement. Why not reduce police participation to one float carrying a handful of LGBT cops who have deep ties to the Church and Wellesley village?But no matter where I stood on the policing issue and where my peers stood, we all had and have one thing in common: a horse in the race. We belonged to the community directly impacted by the 2016 protest.This is why some of us were quite surprised to discover that BLM’s actions wounded a group of people we had no idea cared so deeply about the fate of LGBTQ pride — a group of people I had never seen at the event before, nor around the Village, unless of course they were in drag and I simply didn’t recognize them: Canada’s conservative pundit class. The way heterosexual conservative pundits went on in 2016 and continue to go on today about how absolutely wonderful Pride was, until those pesky BLM people showed up and ruined the thing with all their unreasonable demands, you’d think gay pride was as dear to them as Christmas morning.The single most prevalent argument bemoaning the “bully” tactics of BLM? Toronto’ ...
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