Ain’t I a Queer? A Letter to the Vancouver Pride Society on Black Lives Matter, Political Expediency, and Poor Leadership
It should not have taken global protests against anti-Black police violence for the Vancouver Pride Society to declare that Black Lives Matter. It should not have taken a global pandemic with no physical parade for the Vancouver Pride Society to be comfortable banning police from participating in the Pride Parade. It should not have taken 4 years for the Vancouver Pride Society to slither onto the right side of history hoping nobody would notice it took so long or hold them accountable for the harm they caused.
I was a core Black Lives Matter organizer in 2016 and 2017 when we were leading the push to centre the voices of Black youth, who are some of the most marginalized members of Vancouver’s 2SLGBTQ+ community, and remove law enforcement as an institutional participant in the annual Pride Parade.
During the first year we managed to get the Vancouver Pride Society to agree to remove the police department’s armoured military vehicle from the parade. While the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) insisted that it was for “protection”, I still don’t know whose or how it would ever have been useful on the parade route in a crowd of civilians.
By 2017 we were louder, demanding that the VPD and RCMP be entirely banned from marching in the parade. We explained in all venues until our voices cracked and our fingers bled from the exhaustion of convincing the Vancouver Pride Society and the public that Black people are queer and trans too, and how violent anti-Blackness runs deep in both the queer community and mainstream society — particularly perpetrated by police.
Multiple times, we met directly with representatives from the VPD and the Vancouver Pride Society. The meetings were hostile, full of gaslighting, concern trolling and veiled threats from both institutions (e.g. “But Vancouver has one of the most progressive police forces in North America”, “Vancouver is not like Toronto/ the United States”, “We are scared for your safety if you keep doing this”, “If the police are banned are you prepared for the backlash?”)
Constable Dale Quiring, a hate crimes detective, who still holds his position as the straight, white LGBTQ+ Community Liaison, told us he did not see how race was relevant to the conversation at a meeting on March 24, 2107. Coincidentally, Jim Deva, for whom Jim Deva Plaza on Davie St. is named, once said, “If [the Liaison] was a straight, white, six-foot-two officer taking on that position, I would be extremely concerned”.
Throughout our many meetings the Vancouver Pride Society Board behaved as though they were not in charge of who was in their parade and simply made weak cosmetic tweaks by allowing the armoured vehicle to be replaced with a big purple police bus (called a “diversity bus”), reducing the number of police participants, and requesting that some of them not wear uniforms (i.e. not be armed).
In a city that was unused to being challenged at this magnitude so directly and visibly about its ingrained anti-Blackness, and one that hails itself as the queer-friendly, multicultural paradise of the West, our calls for inclusion were seen as a direct attack on both Vancouver’s curated liberal identity and its “world class” Pride event. And so a group of queer, trans, and non-binary Black youth were assailed by our own queer community, white gay men who refused to acknowledge that their feelings of safety were not the same as others’, people who thought “Black issues” didn’t belong in Pride, police apologists of all stripes, members of the Black community for bringing uncomfortable conversations into their circles, and garden variety suburban white supremacist trolls. Because of the support from strong queer elders and some parts of the community we did have, we pressed on through the unabating online violence including death threats, declarations of anti-Blackness and, at times, even physical abuse.
We printed off a binder full of examples of the hate we received to show the Vancouver Pride Society Board in a meeting in February 2017 hoping they would help. The racism from the Vancouver Pride Society that evening was astounding and hurtful. We plainly spelled out that they needed to decry the abuse we were enduring. In return, we received lukewarm “both-sideism”. The Vancouver Pride Society Board could have publicly supported us and taken an unequivocal stance for Black lives back then. They did not. Many of the same Board members and staff today, now unabashedly declaring Black Lives Matter, were the same Board members and staff who said things that made people in our group break down in tears after meeting with them and even, in my case, plan to leave the city and step back from organizing altogether. We were essentially told in both words and (lack of) action that our queer and trans Black lives did not in fact matter and that we should stop raining on their parade. It was completely lost on the Board that pointing out anti-Blackness does not cause anti-Blackness. The realities of white supremacy were always there and, in many ways, remain.
As the saying goes, if there’s no room at the table, you build your own damn table. And build we did. We hosted our own parade: The March on Pride, named in reference to the March on Washington and headed by painted images of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera in reference to the original Pride parade, the Christopher Street Liberation Day March in 1970 in New York — the year after police raided the Stonewall Inn and Black and Brown trans women led the fight back. We would not be silenced.
After the summer from hell and our successful March on Pride over, I left the city and left BLM. It was too much. I later learned that BLM had been monitored by the police and that the RCMP had paid a software company $20,000 for social media monitoring during the three-month time period beginning four days before the March on Pride and ending after the Vancouver Pride Parade. Perhaps this was a coincidence but history would suggest that Black organizing is often seen as a threat to the state, and worthy of disproportionate state intervention.
My public question to the Vancouver Pride Society is this: What was so different this year from what we said years ago after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Andrew Loku and many others who were killed by police? Or after Black people were assaulted by police officers right here in Vancouver? Was it that this year there was an unprecedented wave of public agreement that the institution of policing is harmful to Black and Indigenous people? And that anti-Blackness is a dangerous, global condition of white supremacy?
Or was it perhaps that this year it was trendy and politically safe to support BLM?
What does the Vancouver Pride Society intend to do to repair relationships specifically with Black people in Vancouver? Giving money to people of colour to do work for the organization, put on dance parties, or run online anti-racism workshops does not erase harm or repair community relationships.
To my most recent knowledge, the Vancouver Pride Society has not approached BLM Vancouver as an organization, let alone its current or past members, to offer so little as an apology for the community and direct personal harm it caused and assigned to a group of Black queer and trans youth simply asserting that our Black Lives Matter.
It is on our backs and by our labour that the Vancouver Pride Society had the faintest clue as to how to blend in to support the movement this year.
Throwing money at people of colour generally, undergoing a fancy website redesign that conveniently erases questionable statements from years past, and adding a couple of new people (notably, none Black) to the Board are not signs of meaningful institutional change or accountability. These are signs of self-absolution, political expediency, weak allyship, willful omission, and most definitely, poor leadership.
