Black Lives Matter protesters stop Toronto’s Pride parade

Black Lives Matter brought the parade to a halt for about 30 minutes by staging a sit-in at Yonge and College streets. When Pride Toronto started in 1981 it was as a riot against 150 police officers who raided gay bathhouses and arrested more than 300 men.

“I had no idea that there were that many cops that march in this, from all different agencies”, he said, adding that he’d also had the opportunity to talk with and salute police chief Mark Saunders.

Activists with a Canadian offshot of the Black Lives Matter movement successfully hijacked a Gay Pride parade in Toronto this weekend and forced organizers to agree to a list of demands including removing “oppressive” police floats from future parades and prioritizing the hiring of transgender black females in the future. “But we have no desire to police the police in terms of whether they should actually be there or not when they’re LGBTQ-identified”.

“Pride should live up to their motto – ‘You can sit with us.’ You can’t throw police under the bus and to do that”.

The march was stopped for a half-hour while Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois and BLM members dialogued. He said the agreement to exclude police from future Pride parades had been “a slap in the face” to all police officers.

The president for the union representing Toronto’s police officers says he was outraged at the demands.

“We recognized that an intervention had to occur because what happened in Orlando is not separate from the systemic and structural issues that create homophobic and transphobic narratives that allow for that type of devastation to happen in the first place”, Khan said.

“I am confident Pride and its supporters, including me, will be successful in seeing this participation continue in the years to come”.

Janaya Khan, a co-founder of BLMTO, told CBC’s Metro Morning that Toronto police have a long history of “anti-black racism”, pointing specifically to carding and an increased police presence in marginalized communities.

Exclusion does not promote inclusion.

York Regional Police have been a part of Toronto Pride festivities for years, but it appears that run may have come to an end. And we continuously have many things that we attend over the year with all of our LGBTQS communities.

The festival offered up thousands of happy, smiley faces and a real sense of community and respect – not least for those lost in Orlando, who were commemorated by several of the walking groups. But some at City Hall have directed criticism toward the embrace of a spectrum of dissident cadres like Black Lives Matter and the irrational Queers Against Israeli Apartheid.

Khan pointed out the LGBT community’s lack of sensitivity to black issues. “Frankly, they could have sent me an e-mail and I would have agreed to all these things”, he said.

In 1969, a police raid in New-York’s gay bar Stonewall Inn descended into violence and triggered days of protests and riots in the LGBT community.