How Pride 2024 didn’t accommodate my Life Partner
It was with a heavy stomach I anticipated the return to Pride Toronto for 2024. There was anxiety surrounding the city securing the funding to allow the festival to continue it’s growing participation. The celebration was slated to be a dimmed affair with the city’s new municipal government navigating a deficit left by the disgraced former mayor John Tory. Having been an active participant in the Pride parade the previous year, I’d looked forward to seeing it from the outsider perspective again. If nothing, at least I might understand how the quick pace of our TMU Pride float (we’d only been in the parade for just over 10 minutes) gained such momentum.
But no, it wasn’t because of the anxiety surrounding the event budget that left me with a heavy stomach. It was a serving of sushi consumed with far too much wasabi leading to food poisoning that had me questioning if I’d make it at all. Fortunately, I did arrive at the Pride Parade just to see the finality of an early departed yet fabulous Pride parade.
Finding my way through the Church Street celebration, I wandered about finding my way into an alleyway with Pride-goers abound enjoying the celebration. I’d decided to mingle with the crowd relaxing in the shade of the back alley. With my trusty skateboard in hand, I resolved to attempt a wallride on a smooth surface at my disposal. It all ended too soon with a private security guard stopping me before I’d even attempted once, forgoing any other illicit or unsavoury behaviour that may have been in the surrounding area. “Skateboarding is a crime” or so the saying goes.
This would become the crux of my Pride Toronto 2024 experience. I was forced into a strangely thwarted displacement from the freeing spirit that had defined my first Pride experience of climbing rooftops, learning to gay twang at any person who’d seemed approachable. The penultimate Pride Toronto experience was to be at the apex of my street skating ability conquering the unskateable half-spots hidden amongst the mid-downtown Toronto Gay Village. Conquering it to become gay, for the first time, all over again. Not so, say the authorities and business owners that deemed me as a taboo among a celebration of taboo.
There were a few mutual understandings scattered throughout the displacement. Returning to my preferred Church Street restaurant I was accommodated with a hook beneath the table to hang my backpack and skateboard. The server treated me amicably as I vented the vaguely traumatic food poisoning that had almost impeded my arrival at the event. I had a temporary refuge from the bad karma I’d received on first encounter.
Mingling about with the Pride-goers the energy was enjoyable but occasionally jumbled by over-cautionary instances of knee-jerk response to my spatial awareness among the densely congested crowds. This was not a new phenomenon, but anxiety was seemingly a bit more tense than usual. It all grew to a nauseating climax of 4th dimensional anomalism whereby I was refused service from any Church Street club or bar during the golden hour of post-parade festivities. The lineups were competitively entangled with each establishment vying to have the longest wait list of patrons. The previous year I’d found my way into The 519 backyard dance party. Despite my inclination to not do Pride the same twice in a row, I wish I’d have settled for that.
At what would be my local venue The Well on Church Street (a chain restaurant bar started in Hamilton) I was met with patronization at my friendly request nearing towards the door entry after waiting 20 minutes. I’d requested they stow my skateboard in a safekeeping front door hideaway point. This was condemned entirely unreasonable. They instructed me to basically leave my skateboard on the street, and said they would take no accountability of it being lost. Thanks so much The Well!
Then I proceeded to Woody’s Bar, hopeful but expecting the worst. They might accommodate my skateboard storage request; they had done so in the past. To this request I was met with dismissal by the front security. I said, “No problem, I’ll go somewhere else.” This was immediately rebuked with upfront ignorance as I’d turned my back and deemed the exchange completed. “Yeah, we don’t want you here!” Woody’s is supposed to be a safehold amongst other drama in the gay community. When I’d heard this, I had no choice but to demerit the reputation of the establishment with a negative online review and never return there again.
“Woody’s doesn’t love wood” I thought, lamenting on instances where my skateboard has been my accomplice sitting across from me in a diner or happy to be thrown and hockey temper destroyed when my first-try attempts just aren’t happening. I also learned that wasabi doesn’t belong on sushi. I’d had so much. It was bound to make me sick. I foolishly believed it was improving of flavour. No more.
Sushi is best served plain with minimal soy sauce or wasabi. I never anticipated how people being so antagonist about something that was not meant to be made into a thing would become a learning on sushi consumption. Pride Toronto 2024 was my unlearning of sushi eating. It was my relearning of how business handlings, inclusive or not, mistreat those who are a 4th dimensional anomaly. Me and mine were cooler heads that had prevailed, but you still tried to get in the last word.
恥を知れ.
