opinion & features

many may see it as an excuse to party… and that’s OK

Whether this year will mark your first Pride or your 10th, the annual celebra­tions have different meanings for everyone, whether it’s just another excuse to party, a personal political statement or another time to fly your rainbow high and proud. Regardless of the many individual reasons for attending or not attending, Pride time means that the perpetual arguments as to whether or not Pride is still relevant are bound to fill our queer conversations.

My first Pride, in 2004, was an important step in my personal coming out journey, although I didn’t know it at the time. I wasn’t out to my peers in high school and I had just come out to my par­ents a week prior. Taking that first step marching through the streets of Winnipeg and looking back into the crowd of thou­sands of people marching behind me is when I made an important self-discovery, which, looking back, was a turning point in my personal journey. I came to realize that the internal battle I had been struggling with my entire life was not my struggle alone, I was part of something bigger than myself, I was a part of a broader queer community. Seven years later, Pride has a very different personal meaning, but Pride is still as im­portant and relevant as the years before.

Despite the unfortunate beliefs that the major battles for the queer com­munity have already been won, we still have a long way to go before we reach full equal­ity. It’s an unfortunate fact that queer youth are bullied and harassed on a daily basis in the halls and the classrooms of their high schools, trans people are still denied basic health coverage and funded surgery, and bi-phobia is still rampant not only in broad­er society, but within the walls of our own community.

Outside our comfortable Canadian borders, queer people around the world are in desperate struggles for their basic human rights and in many coun­tries, their very lives. Pride parades across Eastern Europe are being blocked and at­tacked by mobs of angry bigoted zealots. And in many more countries, the very idea of a Pride parade is nothing but a far away dream.

In 1987, 200 people gathered here in Winnipeg, many of them with pa­per bags over their heads to conceal their identities. Those brave 200 marked the first Pride parade here in Winnipeg and while we’ve come a long way since then, we still have a long way to go. Pride is more than just a party, it’s a time to gather as a com­munity, to celebrate our victories won and to celebrate the victories yet to come. It’s a time to stand together, locally and globally, to fight discrimination and oppression in all of its forms.

And maybe you don’t agree with any of those reasons, but if Pride this year helps just one person realize that same sense of belonging and shared identity that I experienced at my first Pride, it will be completely and unconditionally worth it once again.

– Jonny Sopotiuk is a student activist. To comment on this or any other article in Outwords, e-mail editor@outwords.ca

2008