[LINK] "The naked truth about Pride"

[rfmcdonald]

Emma Teitel's MacLean's article says pretty much what I think about nudity at Toronto Pride marches.

Our elders don’t cling to convention; they run from it. And for good reason. In 1981, on a taxpayer-funded mission estimated to have cost a quarter of a million dollars, police carrying crowbars and sledgehammers raided bath houses in Toronto’s gay village, forcing nude and nearly naked men onto the streets, where more than 300 LGBT people were arrested. Bik describes the night as “terrible.” Anyone wondering why some gay people at Pride are so “in your face” should look to events like these for an answer. There was a time when we weren’t in anyone’s face, but everyone was in ours. Hence the naked marching: When you can’t express yourself safely in private, there is no act of civil disobedience more powerful, I’d imagine, than doing so in public.

Sotiropoulos has, besides nudity, “no other issue whatsoever with the Pride parade.” But, as he wrote to me in an email, “I don’t think we ought to allow the wilful actions of a few people to hijack and tarnish the image of the event as a whole.” The problem with this line of apparently popular thinking is its sheer shortsightedness. Without the “wilful actions” of those “few people,” the event in question would not exist. In this country, public opinion is on the side of gay rights. In my short life, public opinion has always been on my side. I am insanely lucky. There is no greater proof of how lucky I am than the ease with which I once winced at the unlucky: buck-naked old men who wear nothing with as much defiant pride as our veterans wear the poppy on Remembrance Day—buck-naked men, to whom I owe almost everything. This year, I won’t wince. I’ll salute.