We are our families, and we are citizens of our nations. Never is this truer than during Pride month, when the definition of familial consociations are reshaped and reformed to mean something broader, defined and bordered only by who we are, who we love, what we love and what we share. In June we are the Republic of Queer and our borderless country and its citizenry stretches across the world. In June, we’re not Canadians, or Americans, or Europeans. We’re something else entirely.

Forty years ago this month, a group of drag queens at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village did the unthinkable. As they were being rounded up to be taken to jail for being men dressed as women, a crime in New York City in those days, they decided they’d finally had enough. And they shoved back. They shoved back very, very hard. It wasn’t something the police ever saw coming. The authorities were used to submissive fags, dykes and trannys who hoped, at best, not to be beaten to a pulp with night sticks or that their photographs and names would not appear in the newspapers, which in those days meant the immolation of their lives.

The full-scale riot that ensued announced the arrival of what later became known as the gay rights struggle in America, and everything from then ’til now encompasses our history as “LGBT people,” a term our antecedents didn’t have at their disposal. The word ‘Stonewall’ entered the queer lexicon and, 25 years later, even people who don’t know the story, or that it was the name of a bar, know it as a byword for gay liberation.

In Toronto, in 1981 the city’s gay community, long-suffering under a penal code that even included an actual provision for flogging as a punishment for homosexuality well into the ’60s, experienced its own Stonewall moment.

At 11pm on the night of Thurs Feb 5, a synchronized police sting on four city bathhouses resulted in 268 arrests of men under the city’s “bawdy house” law, a law designed for whorehouses. The next night, the massive protest march from Church and Wellesley to Queen’s Park turned violent when the police attacked the crowd. And the crowd didn’t back down.

What we have today, we have because of those people. The price of Canada’s Stonewall moment was blood and broken bones, and it was willingly paid by Toronto men and women now in their 50s, 60s and 70s.

Generations, and the beauty and sweetness of great age and great youth, are never far from my mind as I walk down Church St in the pellucid months of early summer. It’s the time when the full generational spectrum of our community is best represented. For perhaps the first time in our queer history, we have three full generations of self-aware and self-identifi ed LGBT people comprising our community. This is a concept that might have been merely hypothetical to the fighting generation of the ’60s and ’70s, wedged as they were between decades of the closet on one side, and the as-yet unborn queers on the other. It’s these LGBT youth who take those rights and freedoms for granted in this millennial world of male prom queens and gay-straight alliances in high schools.

In 1997, I interviewed US gay marriage activist Evan Wolfson for Fab National magazine. It was the eve of the Hawaii gay marriage decision and a victory for American gays and lesbians was confidently predicted. The domino effect would instantly make gay marriage legal in every state. Many Canadians looked enviously south and wondered if it would ever happen here, feeling a little bit like the unpopular, fat cousin the family makes the other kids play with on holidays.

“Within a matter of months, gay people are going to be legally married,” Wolfson pronounced. “It’s going to be a whole new ballgame. Certainly in the United States,” he stated loftily before adding, almost as an afterthought, “maybe in Canada.”

Needless to say, it didn’t happen that way. The gay marriage challenge in Hawaii was resoundingly defeated. In short order, the Clinton government passed the Defense of Marriage Act, eliminating at a stroke any chance for the legal domino of federal marriage recognition to take place should gay marriage ever become legal in any state, as it would later, first in Massachusetts then elsewhere. When Canada became the fourth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage in 2005, we did it in a very Canadian way, with reason and equality as the argument, and with the certitude that offering up the rights of a vulnerable minority to the obdurate bigotry of a majority was immoral and beneath our dignity as Canadians.

Even more tragic is the ongoing persecution and dismissal of American gay and lesbian soldiers suffering under the oppressive weight of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, another cigar from Mr Clinton (and a lesson that we as LGBT people still haven’t learned, about confusing not actually being abused with being supported.) Canadians woke up one morning in 1992 to a military where being gay was not cause for being expelled from the army but gay bashing or harassment was. Our American brothers and sisters in arms still struggle to reconcile their own willingness to fight and die for their country with their country’s refusal to see their sacrifice as relevant or even desirable. We stand in solidarity with them as fellow citizens of the Republic, and their pain is our pain as well.

Activism is generational and every generation has its fight. Many of our veterans assert that they were fighting for the right to love, to fuck, and to be queer. They disdain the fight for legal marriage and the right to serve in the army as bourgeois and regressive, unworthy of the aims of the gay rights movement.

The younger generation sees those rights as an essential continuation of the right to existence that was won by their fathers’ and mothers’ generation, and they take them for granted. What they do with those rights is up to them, but it was the previous generation’s job to win them so that LGBT youth had the options they themselves never had. It will be incumbent upon our youth to learn from, and honour, our history and especially to respect the people who made it happen for them. And it will be similarly incumbent upon our elders to respect the promise that LGBT young people represent, and to teach, lead and eventually pass to them the torch that cost so very, very much. Words like “troll” and “twink” are unworthy of our citizenry, because one trivializes the value of youth while the other diminishes the worth of age and sagacity. Every healthy civilization is built by the wisdom of its elders and the strength of its youth.

The cost of pride is vigilance and this is the time to be proud. We were always on the right side of history — that of our Republic and that of the world. And in June the world is borderless, at least for us.


Michael Rowe is a contributing writer to The Advocate and a political blogger for TheHuffington Post. His book Other Men’s Sons won the 2008 Randy Shilts Award for Nonfiction. His second published article appeared in The Body Politic in 1983.