Celebrate Pride Month with a collection of queer stories as Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance marches onto streaming. The documentary directed by Noam Gonick opened this year’s Hot Docs film festival and serves as POV’s cover story with a spotlight on its producer Justine Pimlott. Parade pays tribute to a generation of LGBTQ+ activists who took to the streets and advocated for queer rights.
As the talking heads revisit pivotal episodes that helped galvanize a movement, the film emphasizes triumph over trauma as interviewees recall a wave of solidarity that rippled throughout Canada. A collective mobilization turned the queer community into a reality, rather than an idealized term, but even among advocates and allies, the fight wasn’t a unified front.
The interviewees recall how the push for gay rights initially centred on people to whom that term more exclusively applied as men, mostly white ones, were the focus of the campaigns. In turn, voices marginalized in their own community took up the challenge by filling gaps and drawing in like-minded people. Parade builds these pockets of activism into a queer quilt with lesbians, Two-Spirit, and QBIPOC voices joining the fray. It charts a rocky road that ultimately leads to a collective. Gonick’s attention to intersectionality expands the talking points as Parade speaks to a spectrum of diverse experiences.
“Parade is a moving film, tracking well-known events and some wonderfully surprising discoveries and characters (disclosure: including myself) who, bolstered by a trove of archival footage, help trace some of the key moments in Canada’s 2SLGBTQ+ history,” wrote Susan G. Cole in our current cover story. “The doc also makes vivid the ways creating communities—lesbian, Latinx, Black and Indigenous, for example—empower identities that lead to life-changing political action.”
