A look at Pride in Calgary

Sarah Palmer, Contributor | 

Calgarians welcomed September with a kaleidoscopic exhibition of colour, representative of the freedom to publicly celebrate gender and sexual diversity during Calgary Pride’s 34th annual pride festival — a demonstration made possible by decades of fighting for the acceptance of queer identities. 

Since 2009, the non-profit organization has held their pride festival on the last weekend of August due to Calgary’s unpredictable weather in June, the recognized pride month. This year, Calgary Pride provided the city with a unique variety of queer-inspired activities to honour the occasion. 

Pride ‘24 – A Year of Ever-Growing Inclusion

Bringing back the two-day festival, Saturday, Aug. 31 marked the beginning of a prideful weekend. Showcasing queens Argie and Jizz Elle, attendees aged 18 and above gathered at Prince’s Island Park to watch a scandalous selection of drag performances from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Kicking-off the parade at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 1, more than 100,000 attendees and participants marched West-bound on Fifth St. and headed down Ninth Ave. toward Prince’s Island Park, where pride festivities were being held from 12 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Calgary Pride implemented a number of new procedures for this year’s activities, including larger beer gardens, more headliners and a designated family-friendly area intended to give queer families a safe space to connect with one another. 

“Something that I think is unique to our organization is [that] we’re not afraid to adapt and change and do what we can to really represent our community in its truest form,” said Anna Kinderwater, manager of communications for Calgary Pride.

Another new activity was the Queer ‘Sober’ Garden — a ‘beer’ garden that only offered non-alcoholic beverages, such as coffee, to ensure that alcohol-free individuals could experience a social atmosphere akin to a beer garden without “having the stress or threat of relapse,” said Kinderwater.

Strutting their sequins and sass, drag performers entertained guests all throughout Sunday, notably including Canada’s Drag Race 2024 winner, Venus. Also performing was an All Ages Drag Troupe led by teacher and performer Shane Onyou, a drag king whose success was bolstered by Calgary Pride’s annual dedication of contributing a portion of their generated income to supporting queer, local talent. 

“Our primary reason for being here is to celebrate our sexual and gender diverse community,” said Kinderwater. “We do our best to support the community.”

Today, pride exists as an event that rejoices the ability one has to openly express their honest identity, but just over 30-years-ago, pride existed as a political rally where attendees often had their personal and professional statuses compromised upon participation.

A Brief History of Pride in Calgary

The late-1980s signified a period of mass-expansion in terms of the growing number of pride organizations appearing city-wide. So much so, Project Pride Calgary (PPC) was established in 1987 and served as an umbrella group which included many of Calgary’s gay and lesbian advocacy groups, who all shared the common mission of hoping to “advance LGBTQ2S+ visibility and rights,” according to the University of Calgary. 

By 1988, PPC held their first pride festival and hosted activities like music concerts, workshops, community displays, dances, and family picnics. 

Making the record books, Svend Robertson, British Columbia’s former Member of Parliament for the New Democratic Party, named himself as Canada’s first openly gay MP that same year — a statement later impacting the course of Calgary’s queer history.

Coming from 30 different countries, 7,250 athletes registered for Vancouver’s International Gay Games — making it the largest sporting and cultural event in 1990.  But, organizers struggled to receive funding from the government which caused a lot of athletes to have to generate funds themselves, according to the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity. 

The Calgary Lesbian and Gay Political Guild (CLAGPAG), a group under PPCs umbrella, organized Calgary’s first political rally on June 18, 1990. The rally doubled as a fundraiser which sought to generate income that would allow Calgarians to compete in the Gay Games. 

One-hundred-forty participants gathered at the ‘Old Y’ building to pick-up Lone Ranger masks — black eye masks with the pupils cut out, identical to the mask worn by actor John Hart in the 1950s television series ‘The Lone Ranger’. 

Encouraged by rally organizers, the masks are said to have symbolized the discrimination experienced by LGBTQ2S+ peoples and the stigma associated with their community. 

“When we look back at our archival footage, there’s still a lot of folks who are masked when they’re at the protest,” said Kinderwater. “There’s a lot of expression of fear for losing jobs, housing or family members from the exposure of being in a protest like that.”

Calgary’s First Pride Parade

Organized by the CLAGPAG and PPC, Calgary’s first official pride parade was a 400 person gathering at City Hall and Stephen Avenue on June 16, 1991. Attendees listened to Svend Robinson’s speech addressing the nation’s lack of acceptance toward citizens identifying as members of the LGBTQ2S+ community.

“We are here to remind political leaders [that] it is wrong in Alberta that it’s still legal to fire us from jobs, throw us from homes, and deny us goods and services because of who we love,” said Robinson during the speech.

Responding to the demonstration, Calgary’s former Mayor Al Duerr proclaimed June 16 to 22 Gay Rights Week in 1991. Quickly, aldermen and anti-LGBTQ2S+ Church groups expressed their disapproval toward Duerr’s motion, bringing him to revoke the proclamation notably after “angry fundamentalist Christians flood[ed] the mayor’s phone lines,” according to archival text from the University of Saskatchewan.

Yet, the PPC declared their own Gay Pride Week in 1993. From June 20 to 27, dances and rallies were hosted advocating for the acceptance of LGBTQ2S+ personalities city-wide. 

Pride in the 21st Century

In 2009, the CLAGPAG and PPC merged to form Calgary Pride. The organization switched from being a grassroots group and declared non-profit status which intensified their growth in the early 2010s. Despite these changes, their mission remains the same today as it did decades before. 

Being Canada’s third largest pride organization, Calgary Pride continues to celebrate gender and sexual diversity by advocating for the queer community when working with the municipal government to ensure that Calgary’s policies foster environments that promote equality. 

“Our history is still very recent,” said Kinderwater. “We encourage people to really reflect on and to also never take for granted that it was not that long ago.”