Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance (the opening film of this year’s Hot Docs Festival) is a dutiful and personal look back at the historical struggles and mobilizations of Canada’s LGBTQ2S+ community. Like many films that try to cram a lot of history into a minimal amount of time, this latest work from veteran filmmaker Noam Gonick could stand from a bit more breadth, but the stories contained within are ones that bear repeating and remembrance.
Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance spends most of its time in the era between the 1950s and the 1990s, looking at various progress and setbacks in the fight for LGBTQ2S+ equality. In interviews with a wide array of artists, writers, performers, academics, historians, activists, filmmakers, journalists, and other witnesses to history and oppression, Gonick looks at major moments that shaped queer visibility. Montrealer Jeanine Maes, now 83, talks about being the last women institutionalized for being a lesbian. The We Demand marches on Ottawa and the establishment of the collective gay liberation newspaper Body Politic are given their flowers. Burnaby’s Sven Robinson recalls what it was like to become the first openly gay member of Parliament. The Sex Garage raid in Montreal and Toronto’s infamous “Operation Soap” bathhouse raids are exposed as governmentally sanctioned acts of homophobia.
All of the interviewees and subjects profiled throughout Gonick’s film hold major pieces to a larger puzzle of queer liberation, but the playing field isn’t exactly level. When moving into talking about the current moment of queer struggles, Gonick does make sure to talk about the indigenous two-spirit community and the way Black Lives Matter changed the how Torontonians view police involvement in Pride parades, but transpeople (and trans-youth, in particular) are given maybe only a minute or two at the end, almost like an afterthought. Considering the current climate and how historically minded the rest of the film is, this slighting of an entire section of the queer community feels like a majorly missed opportunity.
But despite leaving a lot on the table both contemporarily and historically, Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance is a solid primer on topics that are vital to Canadian history and culture. And it also isn’t meant to be entirely bleak, sorrowful, and angry. There are moments of heartbreak, depression, and sadness, but the film also illustrates how much love and warmth was at the heart of these equality movements. It’s both critical and uplifting at the same time.
