Director: Noam Gonick,  Producer: Justine Pimlott 

Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance captures pivotal moments that sparked Canada’s 2SLGBTQI+ movement, honouring the activists and elders whose resistance led to the rights we have today.

Through rarely seen archival footage and first-person accounts, audiences are brought to the frontlines of the struggle. From police raids to early drag shows, community organizing to the House of Commons—the complex history of the country’s diverse communities is brought to life. Key milestones illustrate the power of taking it into the streets and underscore how easily the rights we’ve fought for can be revoked, making the documentary essential viewing for all Canadians.

Unflinching, bold, enraging, hopeful; Parade is a vital new chapter in the queer canon.

Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance spotlights the activism that sparked the rise of Canada’s 2SLGBTQI+ movement.

Unflinching, bold, enraging, hopeful. Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance is a vital new chapter in the queer canon, capturing pivotal moments that sparked Canada’s 2SLGBTQI+ movement and honouring the activists whose resistance led to the rights we have today.

With the attacks that trans people and other members of our rainbow collective are once again facing, it is urgently time for a refresher on the activist movements that got us this far. Queer archives shouldn’t be allowed to get dusty; those snapshots, video clips and film reels ought to see the light of day—so that we can give flowers to those who made a difference. With Parade, we wanted to put viewers on the street where our rights were won. To hear, see and feel the invigorating protests that moved the needle and opened up Canadian society. May this film act as a guidebook, lest those phalanxes need resurrecting in the days to come.

Some films take a lifetime to make because the story you want to tell unfolds over one’s lifetime. Parade is such a film. The trajectory of the last 50-plus years of activism and gains for 2SLGBTQI+ people has taken place over my lifetime. Not only have I been a witness to these events, but I also took part in many of these activist moments.

But this is a history that many people are not even aware of, both among the general Canadian public and within 2SLGBTQI+ communities. So, my intention in bringing this film to the screen was to ensure that these histories are documented and that they’re also told by the activist/witnesses themselves, in their own words. It’s important to know whose shoulders we stand on and to pay our respects to them.

We are now living in such chilling times, experiencing direct attacks on our community, especially aimed at our trans sisters and brothers, and the attempts at revoking our hard-won rights. So, our fight, our resistance, is not over; there is still much work to be done. My hope is that our film serves as an inspiration and a call to action, not only for the 2SLGBTQI+ community, but also for our allies.

What did you learn about gay rights, growing up in Canada? Has that changed in any way you know of over the years, in official school curriculums?

There was no formal curriculum when I was in school, other than some safe-sex pamphlets. Sadly, the emergence of AIDS and puberty were concurrent for me. School affinity groups were not yet happening. The Rainbow Resource Centre in Winnipeg had (and still has) a gay youth group, with a help phone line. There was also a lending library, and they sent a few of us to an international gay youth conference in Berlin when I was a teenager. My education was extracurricular.

There are so many incredible old photos and video clips in this film. How did you approach and source archival materials? Were there any “jackpots” of materials you unearthed or got access to (footage, photos) that hadn’t been shared with the public before?

We knew about activist Jearld Moldenhauer’s early ’70s Toronto Pride footage, but in his interview with us he alluded to also filming the We Demand rally in 1971 in Ottawa. He generously allowed access to a shoe box of Super 8 reels, had them digitally transferred and found his documentation of that first national rally in Canada, unseen for over 50 years.

How were relationships built with people from different queer communities, and how did you reach out (or ask them to be involved, if they were already colleagues or friends)? How did different interviewees feel about making Parade in general, and at this particular point in time?

We cast a wide net. Our archival process unearthed some subjects, like Jeanine Maes, who really came to us when our Archival Consultant Rebecka Sheffield discovered Maes’ groundbreaking 1968 CBC French interview. Similarly, Mirha-Soleil Ross’s interview came out of the research we did in the ArQuives—the 2SLGBTQI+ Canadian archives—which houses her fond. Nancy Marcotte, our Archival Researcher, is deeply embedded in the Montreal community and was critical in sourcing those interview subjects. Producer Justine Pimlott has deep roots in the Toronto activist community, and many of the artists and filmmakers in Parade are also friends and people from the community whose work we have known of for years (comic Robin Tyler is actually a distant relative, although we only met on this film). Having been part of HOLA (Homosexuals of Latin America), editor Ricardo Acosta, originally from Cuba, brought the HOLA participants to the film. And I have been friends with some of the Two Spirit organizers in Winnipeg for decades. This is how stories from the community get told by people from the community—years-long relationships that are built with trust over time.

We as a team really felt like it was “now or never,” and certainly many of the subjects did as well. Since filming, sadly, two of the participants we interviewed (Amy Gottlieb and Ron Rosenes) have passed away.

There are a lot of things to be shocked by or angry about in this film, but it’s also funny and hopeful and entertaining. How did you approach the tone, and how did you find a balance that felt right? 

It was about remembering that even though many chapters were dire, with so much anguish and violence directed against us, it’s also uplifting to realize what was achieved with grassroots organizing; and, like the saying goes, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” In so many ways the parades are about that invigoration and resuscitation, and we wanted viewers to be transported into the street, to feel the energy of those activists who did change the world.

You must have also had to leave out some stories and voices here, due to constraints like time, budget, access, etc. (including activists who have passed away, or records that were never kept). What was that like, knowing you can’t tell every story in one film?

There were some chapters we couldn’t include because there was no record or visual archival documentation. And other chapters have already been documented in other films. This isn’t intended to be a definitive history of Canada’s 2SLGBTQI+ movement; subjective choices were made, and there is a politic and our filmmaking team’s perspectives, which shine more emphasis on some themes than another team might find noteworthy. I hope more Canadian docs will come out to expand on the topic.

Parade ends by connecting all the past progress to very pressing issues around LGBTQ rights in Canada today. Does the film contain a specific call to action? What do you hope viewers do after watching the film? On a personal level, or on a community level?

When we started this project, it seemed like LGBTQ rights had been “put to bed,” i.e., it wasn’t controversial, everybody agreed on it. But that changed over the course of production, and by the end of the film we saw that these rights we celebrate having won started to be under attack. So the stories in the film do act as a kind of blueprint for how things have been fought in the past—to revive that edgy, sloppy and dangerous history when we had to fight and in some cases “die-in” on the streets to move the needle. This is definitely one of those plus-ça-change moments.