Hence the naked marching: When you can’t express yourself safely in private, there is no act of civil disobedience more powerful, I’d imagine, than doing so in public. There was a time when we weren’t in anyone’s face, but everyone was in ours. Bik describes the night as “terrible.” Anyone wondering why some gay people at Pride are so “in your face” should look to events like these for an answer. In 1981, on a taxpayer-funded mission estimated to have cost a quarter of a million dollars, police carrying crowbars and sledgehammers raided bath houses in Toronto’s gay village, forcing nude and nearly naked men onto the streets, where more than 300 LGBT people were arrested. Our elders don’t cling to convention they run from it. The only difference is that, in the LGBT community, youth rebel by assimilation. The old berate the young about the importance of said tradition, and the young rebel. Replace nudity with coupon collecting, Lent observing, kosher keeping, and the story becomes quite ordinary: An older generation adheres to a tradition that some in the younger set find retrograde, tacky and embarrassing. (The group even offers discount rates to college students in an attempt to attract younger members.) Nakedness at Pride, then, isn’t merely a philosophical debate, but a generational one. Nudist Bert Bik, a 62-year-old founding member of Totally Naked Toronto Men Enjoying Nudity, one of the city’s best-known groups of naked parade marchers, says the average age of a TNT member is between 43 and 47. I have attended Pride four times now, and I have never seen a completely naked person who appeared to be under the age of 40. Those who came to my defence, meanwhile, were overwhelmingly young. What’s more, I noticed that those criticizing me and defending nudity at Pride appeared to be at least twice my age. When I reiterated this argument on social media immediately after news broke about the school trustees’ request, I was denounced by other members of the LGBT community as a “nice gay,” a pejorative term akin to “Uncle Tom.”
I argued (including in this magazine) that, when gays march nude at Pride, we affirm dangerous stereotypes held about us in places such as Uganda, Russia and India, and we alienate otherwise friendly supporters in the mainstream heterosexual world. Prudishness, I thought, was the price of progression.
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Sam Sotiropoulos, the trustee leading the anti-nudity charge, told the media he has “no problem participating with Pride,” but he cannot endorse an event “where the laws against public nudity are being flouted.” He’s not alone: According to a recent CBC poll, 62 per cent of respondents believe there should be no nudity at Pride. Every community has its truly committed.)
#GAY PRIDE DAY IN TORONTO FULL#
(Naked people do turn up at the event frequently, though their presence isn’t as pervasive as some might think one sees a penis at the parade as much as one sees a tourist with a full head of braids at an all-inclusive resort or a crowd-surfer at a rock concert. It’s well-known that Toronto authorities turn a blind eye to bare bums and breasts in the public arena during Pride. No one was especially surprised when Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug announced last month that they would skip the city’s first “world” gay Pride parade this summer, a celebration defined in their words by “buck-naked men running down the street.” (Even less surprising, as journalist Andrea Houston pointed out in Toronto Life, was the Fords’ convenient silence on the topic of buck-naked women at the event.) But many in this city were genuinely caught off-guard last week when three school trustees from the Toronto District School Board-an institution that has a float in the parade-requested that police enforce the city’s public nudity laws at Pride in June.