Pride month dawns as Southwestern Ontario wave of anti-gay ...

Those dedicated to growing LGBTQ Pride efforts in Huron County have needed exactly what every cash crop farmer in the area needs for success – patience, nurturing and time.

And there have to be plans to ride out the rough patches.

The organizers of Huron County’s first Pride festival – in June, which is Pride month – have been methodically planting seeds to give the gay community a voice and to soew the planned events into the fabric of the largely rural county north of London.

But like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, the LGBTQ community, particularly in rural Ontario, has grown accustomed to backlash, discrimination and a lack of understanding. It’s something the organizing committee has been tackling ever since three members cooked up the idea for a Huron County Pride festival in a living room last summer.

They started with a bingo night, then organized a town hall in Goderich that attracted 65 people. That encouraged them to have similar town halls in other Huron County communities to offer resources and “create this bridge and a voice between the community and the LGBTQ people,” said Tim Damon, Huron Pride’s chair.

The results were encouraging. But there is, he said, “still a conservative, older way of thinking” and “a lack of education or awareness that is really forming the decisions being made at the government level.”

That might be an understatement amid what appears to be an alarming surge in anti-LGBTQ efforts, erupting in pockets of Southwestern Ontario even after decades of Pride celebrations and laws protecting the gay community.

“It’s ridiculous to think that, one day a year, people can actually come out and be proud of who they are and not live in fear of who they are, and even that’s being taken away from us,” said Helen Kennedy, executive director of Egale, a national LGBTQ advocacy group.

The uptick in pushback, formal and otherwise – small towns banning Pride flags, London students staying home on days of inclusion – has been “horrendous,” she said.

“(It’s) a lot more overt and it’s quite ugly,” she said. “Honestly, I really feel that our community is feeling hunted at the moment in terms of some of the backlash and the hate that is being spewed in our directions.”

Myer Siemiatycki, a professor emeritus of politics at Toronto Metropolitan University, said there’s no one cause to pinpoint, noting anti-gay backlash is showing up in both urban and rural settings and cutting across many demographics.

There’s a spillover from U.S. politicians into Canada, Siemiatycki believes, and that’s feeding into a “populist backlash against people who are different and who are wanting to claim rights they’ve been denied for a long time.”

But what may be new here, Siemiatycki said, is the pushback is “being expressed in our Canadian context by institutions of education and institutions of local community, meaning local government.”

A Progress Pride banner hangs outside a Home Hardware on Stover Street in June 2022, in Norwich, a rural community east of London. The banner is one of two that were reinstalled after several were stolen in May 2022. (Calvi Leon/The London Free Press)

Across Southwestern Ontario, municipalities have stoked recent Pride controversies. That includes:

One council member resigned in protest after politicians in Norwich Township banned all flags, including Pride flags, on municipal property as critics pointed to the outsized influence of a local church. Chatham-Kent council debated a similar motion, which was rejected and resulted in death threats, according to the politician who proposed the ban.

Absences from several schools as the Pride flag was raised at Thames Valley District school board schools and a call by the anti-abortion Campaign Life Coalition for a national Pride flag walk-out day on June 1.

Huron County politicians debated Pride patches on paramedics’ uniforms, and directed municipal staff to draft a policy banning all special shoulder patches. In northwest London, vandals sprayed anti-trans graffiti on rainbow-coloured doors intended to show support to the LGBTQ community.

The hottest flashpoint is Norwich, where the flag ban has drawn national attention and led one of two pro-Pride politicians on its five-person council to resign in protest.

And it continues to flare in parts of Huron County. One of its municipalities, South Huron, won’t fly the Pride flag this month, having quietly passed a Norwich-style ban a year ago. The municipalities of Central Huron and Bluewater also rejected requests to fly the Pride flag or declare June as Pride month.

In nearby Goderich, though, they’ve embraced upcoming Pride celebrations, including a June 10 festival. For Damon, Huron County’s maiden Pride event is both overdue and perfectly timed.

Politicians and other groups embracing anti-gay efforts won’t deter them, he said. “Maybe it’s a no (from them) right now, but we’re here, we’re not going anywhere.”

[email protected]

Another area municipality says 'no' to flying Pride flags Rural politician quits in protest as colleagues approve ban on Pride flags