Pride & Prejudice
Is it really that time again so soon? Yes darlings, we’re well and truly into June and with it, Pride season. Last month, a friend reported that John Tory, the mayor of Toronto, claimed to unequivocally support both Pride and the police in the wake of debates over uniformed police presence in the Toronto Pride parade. Splendid! How wonderful, to support everyone. Shouldn’t Pride be a place of welcoming openness? Shouldn’t everyone be accepted? Shouldn’t we try to accommodate everyone beneath our beautiful LGBTQ umbrella?
So some might say. But the idea that inclusion is simply about a crude gesture of letting everyone in amounts to pretending that there aren’t real, powerful differences between us already — pretending that we don’t all bring our histories and scars and baggage with us everywhere.
In our estimation, that means you don’t let uniformed police march in Pride when their presence will serve as a reminder of the state-sanctioned violence they continue inflict on Black queer people even in nominally progressive places like Toronto. And you don’t let your queer bars fill up with straight people when they’ve got the rest of the world to take up space in. And lastly — and to get to the point of this missive — you don’t waffle over definitions of queerness when you’re trying to create space for queer artists.
Because we’re sick of hedging, of hemming and hawing, of always finding more space for straight people to occupy, of being afraid to foreground queer artists because what is queer anyway, maybe it’s nothing, everyone’s a part of it maybe? We should be past this. With Ignota, we’re trying to prove that we can be.
We believe there is such a thing as a queer voice, contested and complex and multivocal as it may be, and we want to cultivate it, share it, and learn how you sing with it. We’re tremendously grateful to the artists who’ve shared their work with us thus far and we’re so excited to finally be able to present it to you. Part one of issue one is out today — we’re calling it The Ruin. We hope you love it.
Introductions are in order. Meet Our Contributors
- We’re watching: Chris Fleming’s I’m Afraid To Talk To Men
- We’re reading: Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind
- We’re exploring: Robert Rauschenberg Among Friends
