Toast of Tenderness: The annual Ottawa Pride event creating space for Black femmes

For Queer and racialized communities, Pride can often come with a familiar question: Where are we in all of this? For Yamikani Msosa, the answer doesn’t mean fighting for a seat at someone else’s table; it means building your own.

That is the spirit behind Ottawa’s Dykes of Colour Brunch: Toast of Tenderness, a grassroots gathering created specifically for Black, Indigenous and racialized Queer women, femmes and Non-Binary people. 

Taking place in the morning before the annual Ottawa Dyke March, the yearly brunch offers something that can feel increasingly rare during Pride: a space to eat, tell stories, connect and simply be.

The brunch began in 2017, when Msosa noticed a lack of spaces that reflected the experiences of QTBIPOC femmes and Non-Binary people in Ottawa. Having grown up in the city and spent time organizing in Toronto, they wanted to create something that centred racialized Queer experiences while also offering a sober space during Pride.

“I’m so grateful to create a space that centres Blackness, that centres racialized experiences for femmes and Non-Binary folks on Dyke Day in Ottawa,” Msosa told Queer & Now. 

“I’m so incredibly grateful that community comes out to support and to cultivate a space that is for us and by us because we know that Queer spaces can sometimes feel predominantly white. So we need to take up space, and this is what Dykes of Colour Brunch is all about.”

An event focused on community care

Over the years, the brunch has become about more than representation. For Msosa, it is about community care and changing the way Queer organizing happens.

“I’m tired of always fighting and being like, hey, what about us?” they shared, explaining that instead they wanted to ask a different question: What would it look like to organize around love, care, nourishment and community?

That shift is at the heart of Toast of Tenderness. Msosa explains that their event draws on Indigenous African ways of gathering and being in community, with food, music and storytelling at its centre. Msosa describes the gathering, which is free to attend, as a way of cultivating care not only in the event itself, but in the organizing that makes it possible.

It is a distinctly Black feminist approach to community building: survival is not separated from joy, and care is not treated as an afterthought. Msosa points to the Combahee River Collective’s vision of liberation as an influence, connecting the brunch to a longer Black feminist tradition of collective survival and liberation. 

They explain that for racialized queer people, particularly those navigating multiple forms of marginalization, creating space can itself be an act of resistance.

“We gather, we eat, we tell stories, and that’s how we keep going,” Msosa explains.

Gathering as a form of archiving

This year, Indigiqueer artist, activist and community organizer Atlas Commanda shared stories with attendees, while last year’s event saw storyteller and Queer elder Lezlie Lee Kamjoind the brunch. For Msosa, bringing elders into these spaces is important because Queer history in Ottawa is often treated as though it began recently.

“There’s folks that have been here that have been organizing for a long time,” they say. “Let’s not Christopher Columbus our movement.”

The brunch is not simply a place to meet people. It is a place to remember that Queer communities have histories, and that those histories belong to the people who lived them.

That sense of connection can be particularly important in a city where finding community can be difficult. Last year, more than 40 people attended, including people who had never previously found a space explicitly created for racialized Queer people in Ottawa. Msosa recalls seeing older Queer people in their 40s and 50s alongside younger attendees.

For some, it was the first time they realized that a space like this existed. That matters because isolation can be its own barrier to community care. And for people experiencing racism alongside homophobia, transphobia or other forms of marginalization, simply finding a place where they do not have to explain themselves can be transformative.

Msosa describes the brunch as an invitation to stay soft. That softness is not about ignoring the realities facing 2SLGBTQIA+ and racialized communities, but rather about recognizing that constantly fighting those realities takes a toll.

“I think it’s really about survival,” Msosa says. “It’s really about pleasure activism. It’s really about all those things that sustain us.”

That philosophy also informs Msosa’s frustration with mainstream Pride institutions. Rather than continuing to demand recognition from organizations they feel have repeatedly failed to centre marginalized communities, they want to put energy into creating the worlds Queer and racialized people actually want.

“I’m not interested in fighting to sit at your table,” they say. “What I’m interested in is spaces that … allow for our folks to just rest and be cared for, and not have to explain.”

There is something powerful in that refusal. In a world where marginalized communities often find themselves repeatedly asking institutions to acknowledge their existence, Toast of Tenderness offers another possibility: stop asking to be seen and start creating spaces where people can see one another.

The result is a brunch, but more than that, it is a gathering rooted in Black feminist principles of nourishment, storytelling, pleasure and collective care.

For a few hours before the Dyke March, Black, Indigenous and racialized 2SLGBTQIA+ people can sit together, eat together and tell stories together. They can rest, they can be held in community, and in all of that, they can stay soft.