With Pride Week stretching into Pride Month for the first time, Pride Toronto has been working overtime to beef up the festival. Thanks to that, there have been some notable additions: a launch party at the AGO, a first-ever family Pride Day at Centreville and a cabaret at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, plus a slew of parties, performances and other grassroots community events revolving around themes of gender, sexuality and identity.
There’s also a smidgen of food programming – ostensibly great news for hungry queers. But look closer at the three food events on Pride’s calendar of sanctioned events: two contain zero queer content.
From a food perspective, last weekend’s Taste Of Toronto fest wanted for nothing. I downed rotisserie lamb from Mamakas and fried chicken from the Drake, shopped for cheese and craft soda and luxuriated in the wealth of elbow room and fabulous lack of lines. Everywhere I looked, I saw tasty eats. But from a Pride perspective? Not even a rainbow flag.
Next up is Toronto Ribfest, presented by the Etobicoke Rotary Club Thursday to Sunday (June 30 to July 3). For Jack Fleming, the club’s president, the Pride connection has more to do with the club’s message of inclusivity than with Ribfest itself.
“Rotary values and principles are around fostering world peace and understanding and inclusion. It just made a lot of sense for us to have that affiliation,” Fleming said.
Tanja-Tiziana
Another standout eat at Taste of Toronto was the rotisserie Ontario lamb from Mamakas.
“The whole emphasis is on raising visibility, attracting visitors to the city, showing inclusion and having a good time. Our event is basically geared as a family event – fun, good food, entertainment, celebrating the beginning of the summertime. That it happens to overlap with Pride is sort of a coincidence.”
A third event series, held from June 27 to July 1 at Loblaws’ Maple Leaf Gardens store, invites Pride attendees to Come Eat With Us, a free dinner hosted by Anokhi Media personality Daniel Pillai. Place cards at each table ask icebreaker questions like “What does pride mean to you?” and “What’s your take on diversity?”
From the perspective of Pride’s status as a major tourist draw, these partnerships make sense. Cross-promoting with other local events happening at Pride’s peak helps sell the city as a fully fleshed-out travel destination, which means more attendance across the board. But Pride, underneath all the glitter, parades and rainbow-swathed ads, is at its core a political event concerned with queer visibility, safety and reclamation of space.
Some changes to bring these events more closely in line with the mission and message of Pride are fairly simple: create all-gender washrooms and ensure that volunteers are given gender inclusivity training, as suggested in Pride Toronto’s best practices for affiliate events adopt an official anti-harassment policy collect donations on-site for an LGTBQ-affiliated cause.
These changes can be instrumental to making queer people feel welcome in a space – though many businesses need to be made explicitly aware that they’re necessary.
“People want to be welcoming and inviting, but they don’t know the importance of putting that out there,” says Grant Lehmann, the founder of Queers For Dinner (queersfordinner.com), a group that organizes meet-ups at local restaurants for LGBTQIA Torontonians looking to make connections.
Before each event, Lehmann works with the host restaurant to ensure that they understand what goes into making a queer-inclusive space, whether that’s all-gender washrooms, training staff not to use gendered terms with guests or providing management with literature on how to be welcoming of queer staff.
Queers For Dinner
Queers For Dinner held a picnic in honour of Pride this month, but found promotion difficult without the backing of Pride Toronto.
“A lot of them want to be accessible but just don’t know that it’s important to let people know that they are, or how to do it, and that it’s not something super-expensive.”
To make its events as affordable as possible, Queers For Dinner collects no dues. But that tight budget left the group out of the Pride-affiliate catalogue. Though the group’s drop-in picnic in honour of Pride earlier this month had a healthy turnout, Lehmann had a hard time getting it promoted.
“One of the challenges of Pride is that the festival needs to be financially self-sufficient, so to be an affiliate event costs money,” he says. “I would love to have a booth at Pride, but unless you’re a registered charitable organization the price tag is large, and I think that’s a shame.
“It would be useful if Pride Toronto looked at their model differently, because then people who can’t afford to pay could participate and contribute to a really vibrant, dynamic, diverse festival.”
Food is exploding as a sphere of entertainment in Toronto, but thus far it’s been largely unexplored by Pride. The possibilities are huge: How about turning its scattershot, lacklustre street food offerings into a food street fair? Or organizing a panel discussion with LGBTQIA cooks and service industry workers? Or taking a page out of Luminato’s book and turning the 519’s Fabarnak café space into the hottest food pop-up this side of the Hearn – and maybe even hiring disadvantaged LGBTQ youth to help out?
Taste Of Toronto, for its part, could hold an edition of its Chef’s Table discussion series to talk about the issues queer chefs face. Ribfest could take a lead from Centreville and implement its own Pride Day.
Lehmann, for his part, would love to see a Pride street fair with restaurants and food trucks. But, he adds, it’s crucial that the businesses selling food at Pride – or those hosting parties or hanging rainbow flags in their windows – ensure that their commitment to the queer community continues year round.
“Pride is political, right? Pride is about creating space,” he says. “Especially in light of what happened recently in Orlando, it’s important to let people know that spaces are safe. It’s important for businesses to say, ‘This is a conscious decision we’ve made to create an inclusive, welcoming experience.'”
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nataliam@nowtoronto.com | @nataliamanzocco
