John Jeffery’s teammates wore rugby gear to Starry Night, a glitzy fundraiser for the 519, a non-profit agency devoted to Toronto’s LGBTQ community.
The men stood in Barbara Hall Park on Church Street as thousands milled about under the trees, listening to music and handing them coins.
“Some of the guys dressed up in their rugby kit, [which makes] guys tend to give a bit more,” Mr. Jeffery, 58, said with a smile.
The 519 helped Mr. Jeffery get the all-gay rugby club off the ground in 2003 by lending space to the team for meetings to plan the season.
But the 519 isn’t the only place to find such help and services these days, Mr. Jeffery says, as Toronto evolves into an inclusive city.
While he calls that shift “wonderful,” Mr. Jeffery questions the relevance of LGBTQ spaces, including the 519, in that context.
“For those that are already very comfortable in their skin, and in their lifestyle, I’m finding a lot of them don’t need the village any more,” he said. “We’re seeing a devolution of the neighbourhood. … The rest of the city is a lot more accepting.”
A good example of that acceptance is the presence of Toronto Mayor John Tory at the Starry Night event, after four years of mayoral absence from Pride.
But even without former mayor Rob Ford’s presence, Toronto hosted World Pride in 2014, which drew LGBTQ people from around the globe and put the city on the map as a global destination for being out and about. Toronto Pride has also become one of the city’s most popular events of the year.
Pride Toronto co-hosted Starry Night; an appropriate partnership given that the annual celebration and outreach agency have paralleled one another throughout the past 35 years.
In 2015, the 519 is working with Citizenship and Immigration Canada to help refugees flee countries where homosexuality is punishable by law.
It’s a far cry from the tenor of the times in 1975, when the City of Toronto bought the 519’s space on Church Street to help the neighbourhood.
Matthew Cutler, the 519’s director of strategic initiatives, says 200,000 people are helped annually, but demand for services is transitioning as it becomes acceptable for people to do the same.
“The specific issues that we’re wrestling with … have certainly changed,” he said.
While there are still free counselling services – the result of systems set up to help victims cope with Toronto’s 1980s bathhouse raids – organizing primarily happens around violence on the street and aims to help those involved in sex-trade work, homelessness and street-level drug trafficking.
On stage at Starry Night, Panti Bliss, a drag queen from Ireland, called attention to the plight of LGBTQ refugees. “They are living in countries where you are beaten, imprisoned, tortured and even murdered simply because you are us.”
For a Toronto audience, extreme forms of intolerance are mere memories in 2015, although they are difficult to forget: Before Pride Toronto was a celebration, it was a protest in the aftermath of Operation Soap.
In 1981, Metro Toronto Police entered bathhouses by force, smashing mirrors that lined walls, showers and narrow carpeted hallways as detailed in a story published in The Globe and Mail. A total of four raids took place on February 5, 1981.
On Sunday, it will have been 35 Toronto pride festivals since officers arrested more than 300 men in the raids. This year, the Toronto Police Service hosted a pride reception at its headquarters and have actively been involved in celebrating over the years.
Ms. Bliss is pleased with the advances made by the LGBTQ community, but sometimes finds it tiring to show up year after year.
“When you get to my age, and you’re looking into another long day under the sun wearing a lot of nylon on your head and your big feet are squeezed into bone-crushing high heels, an old queen like me can be tempted toward cynicism,” she said, adding she often asks herself: “Why am I still marching?”
The answer to that question includes Shirley MacLeod, 65, who sat in Barbara Hall Park on Thursday with her fine-boned fingers clasped around crossed legs. Wearing eyeglasses and no makeup, she stood out from the young, glittering men and women around her.
“When I came to Toronto in 1972, at the corner of Parliament and Gerrard it was the first … at that time they called it a drag parade. I had my newborn, Sarah, then,” she said.
Years later, Ms. MacLeod recalled, when Sarah was in her second year of university, she was at home, washing dishes “and I was thinking in my head, ‘Why is my gorgeous daughter, who is like, kick-ass, to-die-for, very popular, why isn’t she bringing any guys home?’”
She made a phone call to find out. “Will you please come home? We need to have a cup of tea.”
When she arrived, Ms. MacLeod asked her daughter if she’d met any new guys lately. She said no.
“Have you met any new girls?” and dead silence followed, Ms. MacLeod said.
Ms. MacLeod comes to Pride, sometimes alone, as she was on Thursday, simply to observe. She wants to understand her daughter’s reality.
Back on stage at Thursday’s celebrations, Ms. Bliss says she continues to show up to marches because there’s always someone new to welcome.
“Each year, I will look down from some float … and I will see a young lesbian on the sidewalk, and she is at her very first pride,” Ms. Bliss said.
“If you bump into [one] on Sunday, give her a hug and say ‘Welcome home.’”