Reigning on History’s Queer Parade “Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance” directed by Noam Gonick
Anyone who has been a professional film critic knows from receiving press kits—in both analogue and digital formats— that really bad films often have really good trailers. After watching them you know the story, who the heroes and villains are, you have a sense of the quality of the action (usually very good) and are able to discern the level of the acting (usually very bad). Seeing the trailer is seeing the film’s best moments. After that, all watching is loss.
The opening sequence of Noam Gonick’s Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance, a National Film Board-produced (NFB) history of the queer movement in Canada seen through an assembly of parades, marches and protests, is two minutes and 38 seconds long. Were I to parse every sequence and every second of every sequence, it would persuade you that this caring, generous, courageous and uncompromising film is an absolute triumph, and one of the most important documentaries made in this country in the last 58 years. That time reference takes us back to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the first person you see in the film, who famously said, as Canada’s minister of Justice in 1967, that “there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”
Gonick is a gifted filmmaker who has made roughly 16 films in a range of genres, including 1919, 1997, a short political satire in which he views the Winnipeg General Strike through the window of a gay Oriental bathhouse; Hey, Happy!, 2001, a feature-length film about a character who deals with a coming watery apocalypse by deciding to sleep with 2,000 men; a documentary about Guy Maddin called Waiting for Twilight, 1997; and, most recently, The Regulation of Desire, 2025, a dance film that is part of “Love in a Dangerous Time: Canada’s LGBT Purge,” an exhibition at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. He is also a photographer and sculptor whose 32-foot-long, 12,000-pound, Corten steel sculpture of an overturned streetcar called Bloody Saturday (a collaboration with Bernie Miller) was made to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike. Gonick is an artist for whom all art is political, and his political eyes are always wide open. What we see through them are versions of a world that might have been made better and a world that can be made better. Parade, his most recent documentary, measures both those negotiations with time.
He has to do two things. He is aware that he is making a film about an incredibly important social, sexual and moral history, but he is also aware that he is making a film. It’s in this double take that his ability to bring together politics and art becomes most apparent. Tracing the trajectory of a contentious and multi-layered history involved some necessary reversals and contradictions. The Reverend Cheri DiNovo, United Church minister and politician, remembers the utopian naïveté of the organizers of the We Demand protest march on Ottawa in 1971. Her playful intelligence and her Order of Canada pin tell us something about how religious values have changed. Nine years earlier in Montreal, Jeanine Maes was committed to the Hospital Saint Jean-de-Dieu, a psychiatric institution, to be ‘cured’ of lesbianism. The archival footage we watch of her description of what she calls her “nightmare” includes a priest walking through the wards, swinging an aspergillum, the “little sprinkler,” with which he dispenses holy water. Part of the nightmare was having her daughter taken by her husband and sent to France, where she was raised by her paternal grandmother. Maes could do nothing about it.
Early in the film someone remarks that “it was a beautiful thing to think about all the people who have stepped off of the sidewalk and into the road,” a commitment they name a “genealogy of resistance.” In 1971, when curator and writer Charlie Hill reads from the We Demand document in front of the Parliament Buildings, his reference to Canadian homosexuals who have been kicked out of their churches, who have had their children taken away and who are “being assaulted in the streets” is a list of grievances that Gonick skilfully weaves into the telling of his complicated story. Parade is 96 minutes long, its first cut was over three hours and some consideration was given to making it a two-part film. He is telling one large narrative with many smaller stories. He calls them chapters—there are 14—and they appear written on the screen like old-style interchapters: “We Are the Dykes,” “No More Slinking into the Night,” “Silence = Death,” “It Takes Balls To Be A Fairy” and “Self-naming Is An Act of Liberation.” Their scope is wide and they are designed to suit the subject. Gonick admits that each of the chapters could have been longer (he argues Svend Robinson could have fit into all of them) and that some issues he initially wanted to include never made the final version. But compressing information forced him to find ways to set up resonances between ideas and language. In that connection, Hill’s acknowledgement that gays were being assaulted in the streets underlines that other forces had stepped off the sidewalk and the new crowd on the street wasn’t all that friendly.
From the outset, the documentary’s central organizing event was what Gonick calls “the motif of walking” (Parade is dedicated to the memory of the activists who were sidewalk-steppers and road-walkers). Amy Gottlieb, one of Lesbian Organization of Toronto’s (LOOT) co-founders, remembers that 1977 was “a time that required that lesbians be on the street, that required us to be visible, that we take up space, and we did.” The acts of resistance in the cause of love that form the narrative core of this history originate in the compelling stories Gonick’s subjects share with pride, delight and an unmistakable friskiness. Yvette Perreault’s reminiscence of “having wild sex for the first time” with a “yummy” denim-dressed poet—“I’m a nice Catholic girl from the northern prairies and this is worth going to hell for”—is delightful.
There are also occasions when Gonick’s poetics of connection between words and pictures carry a poignant message. In the opening voice-over section, he collages a series of observations from people whose faces we will see later in the film. Their comments constitute a portrait of how queers were viewed—by themselves and by straight society—in the ’50s and ’60s. Activist Tim McCaskell says we were seen as “the most shameful disgusting kind of thing that anybody could possibly be”; two-spirited Albert McLeod says, “Being gay was a sin, a form of spiritual corruption”; Hugh Brewster adds, “Homosexuality was essentially illegal, you could get eight years in prison or a mental institution”; and Susan G Cole from LOOT comments, “We paraded in secret. And then we were paraded through prison corridors and the courts.”
The pictures that cover this memory collage show children, old ladies and cigar-smoking men watching a parade, an aerial view of soldiers exercising in a field, a full-dress military dinner where everyone makes the sign of the cross just after we’ve heard that being gay was a sin, and a young man being locked in a prison cell by a pair of policemen. In the middle of these memories Cheri DiNovo says matter-of factly, “We were invisible. The straight world wanted us to be invisible.” The perspective we get when she says this is a sky view of people walking in a plaza and we see them and their shadows. A shadow is a person made invisible. Gonick picks up her thread much later in the film. Yvette Perreault, who became an AIDS caregiver, talks about her “baby lesbian fantasy” where she imagined growing old and grey with her friends who would be cared for “by cute little people wearing French maid’s outfits.” Her testimony is like an anti-prayer: “And all those people I went dancing with when I came out, they’re dead. Not just one or two. They’re all dead. All dead.” For three years, she admits, she stopped going to Pride events “because I would only see the ghosts.” The AIDS pandemic became the embodied realization of DiNovo’s invisible shadows.
Parade refuses to blinker its telling by avoiding problems that came up inside the queer community itself. The most contentious event occurred in 2016 when the police were invited to march in the Pride Parade. The harassment of Blacks in Toronto by the police was well known, so their presence in Pride was an affront to the queer Black community. Rinaldo Walcott’s incredulous, controlled rage at what he saw as a police takeover has a special eloquence.
One of the film’s many strengths is the way that it combines content from the 40 interviews Gonick conducted with a treasure chest of archival footage from The ArQuives, Canada’s LGBTQ2+ archives, the Indigenous Archive/Counter Archive at York University, and the huge resources of the NFB, as well as independent films and personal collections. There are moments when the archival footage fits the memories of the subjects so perfectly that you assume they supplied their own material. When the comedian Robin Tyler remembers her love affair with Sherry Bernstein in Banff, we see a group of women taking and posing for “arty” photographs in the mountains. The words and pictures seem to have been made for one another, but the pictures are from the NFB archives and have no connection whatsoever to Tyler’s amorous adventure. When various men who were arrested during a co-ordinated raid on four Toronto bathhouses in 1980 talk about the drama of their experience, we see police bursting into spaces and corralling men wearing little more than towels. Combined with still photographs of smashed doorways and walls, the video sequences are extraordinarily revealing. But what we see in the moving images didn’t occur in the way we are seeing it. Gonick and his editor worked with footage from three different networks and constructed a version of what happened that duplicates what their interview subjects are describing. The code name for the raid was Operation Soap—the police wanted to ‘clean up’ the city’s gay community—but the overwhelming grassroots response resulted in a kind of reverse catalyst. More than 80% of the men were acquitted.
History is a work-in-progress, and the time in which we live is a startling reminder that much remains to be done. As filmmaker John Greyson remarks, the movement’s visibility also made it vulnerable. “History matters because of what it can do for us today. The fights may be in different places than they were 50 years ago but the necessity to fight is as urgent now as it was then.” In 1981 Svend Robinson, then an MP from Burnaby, put forward an amendment to the Constitution of Canada that would include sexual orientation in the Charter of Rights. The response from other members of parliament was shocking. One MP rose in the House of Commons to say, “Madame Speaker, this is not an amendment on sexual orientation. This is an amendment on sexual deviation.” But he was outflanked by a member from Quebec whose reaction started out as a complaint about society’s permissiveness but quickly zeroed in on homophobia: “We’re at a point where sodomites, pedophiles, people who practice bestiality are becoming our children’s guardians.”
It would be some consolation if we could view these positions as remnants of the past, but spend a small amount of time online or listen to politicians in any number of current governments and decide if there is reason for optimism. Or watch the footage of the 1 Million March 4 Children in Winnipeg in 2023, the final time in the documentary when people parade their politics in the streets. When he filmed adults screaming at transgender rights activists at the Manitoba legislature, Gonick knew that history’s cycle of repetition had provided him with his dramatic finale. The confrontation enacted the pattern that Parade traces: gains made followed by ground lost, vengeance flowing into the slipstream of victory. Tom Hooper, the queer and level-headed cultural historian, has recognized that the fight is never over. The need to step off the sidewalk and into the street is a constant. One parade, or another, is always imminent.
Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance had its world premiere on April 24 at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto. It was the opening film of the 32nd annual festival.❚