Shawn Ahmed is a queer, Bangladeshi-Canadian Muslim activist who has been honoured by both the World Economic Forum and the Webby Awards.
The police won’t be marching in Toronto’s Pride parade again – and this time you can’t blame Black Lives Matter. On Monday, Pride Toronto asked the Toronto Police Services to withdraw their request to march in the coming Pride parade. The appeal came in the form of a letter co-signed by half a dozen prominent LGBTQ organizations and invoked the names of the victims of accused serial killer Bruce McArthur. Less than 24 hours later, police Chief Mark Saunders withdrew the request for the police to march in Pride.
As a queer South Asian Muslim living in Toronto’s Gay Village, not unlike the kind of person that Mr. McArthur allegedly preferred to target, I know that many in this community are fearful for their safety and upset at the police. There is much work to be done and, as many of our leaders point out, marching in a parade won’t solve that. However, in excluding the police from marching in Pride with us, it is not an institution that we hurt. It is ourselves.
I know this first hand as I called the police to save the life of my queer friend. He lay in his bathtub furiously cutting into himself worrying more about who will take care of his dog after he dies than for his own well-being. As an ethnic minority who couldn’t afford to live in the Village, my friend was used to being invisible to our community. In denying the institution that saved his life the right to march alongside him in Pride, we further that erasure.
For many like him, on the margins of our community, the police are there for us when our community is not. I learned this as I walked hand in hand to the police station with a former lover who mustered the courage to report the man that had abused him. I continued to stay by his side as many within our community sided with his abuser. As I’ve seen far too often, despite the impact #MeToo has had elsewhere, many within our community take a blame-the-victim approach to abuse. This is especially true for cases that include allegations of intentional transmission of HIV.
Those that I’ve been there for, when our community has not, has only been possible because the police saved my life at a time when I myself was suicidal. It was the police who were there for me when no one else was – when fellow Muslims were telling me that I deserve to die because I’m gay, when many in my family turned their backs on me, when an abusive ex-boyfriend continued to harass me, and gays in our community would shun me simply because to them brown isn’t beautiful.
I know that my good experiences with the police do not erase the bad experiences others in our community have faced. These cannot be fixed by marching in a parade nor can they be undone by barring police from marching with us. This is not a zero-sum game: We as a community can and must find a way to honour the police for the good they have done while being mindful of how much further they have to go.
Our community extends far beyond a few blocks along Church St. Not all of us are privileged enough to be living in downtown Toronto surrounded by progressives who will accept us for who we are. Our community includes those too poor to visit the Village and those too closeted to show up for Pride. They include those who face threats to their safety from within their family, from conservative ethnic and religious communities, from those they may date, from bigots and even from their own mental health. Sooner or later, someone who could have been saved by the police will assume that, if the police aren’t good enough to march in a parade, they aren’t good enough to call for help. And we will be the lesser for it.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne says she hopes Pride Toronto and police can rebuild their “strained relationship.” Pride Toronto asked the city’s police service not to march in its annual parade.
The Canadian Press