1974 – Toronto’s first Pride which ended with a march to Queen’s Park.Here’s a short list of Toronto’s journey from it’s humble beginnings to this year’s WorldPride: Participants brought signs and banners and used the gathering as a small public display of gay solidarity.
GAY PRIDE DAY TORONTO 2014 SERIES
Not bad for what started out as a series of small picnics at Hanlan’s Point and Ward’s Island in 1970. The festivities feature many activities such as a street market, open-air concerts and of course the Pride parade that in recent years had over one million people lining the parade route. Toronto has a long history with its annual Pride week. This is the fourth WorldPride, with the first held in Rome (2000), then Jerusalem (2006) followed by London (2012). “I’m hearing lots of great things from people on the street who pass by and recognize it,” said Andrew Dunn, the general manager of the Churchmouse, who volunteered his bar’s roof for the project.This June, Toronto invites the planet to celebrate WorldPride. There have been other, more mundane challenges, Schroen said, like compensating for the vagaries of the wind or a last-minute scramble the night before setting up the flag after the computer failed entirely.
To refine the program, they changed it so it began looking for groups of associated keywords to try and avoid false-positives. Or you can use homophobic slurs in a positive way, because a tweet is about anti-homophobic slurs, but you end up using it in the course of a tweet,” he said. “It can’t really tell if you’re being sarcastic. One of the challenges has been teaching the computer to tell the difference between nuances of language. “This gives Toronto PFLAG a way to showcase that there is some negative – but there’s tons of positive out there as well.” “People think that what you say on Twitter exists in a vacuum,” he said. It needs to be understood that it’s simply not acceptable, because those words have power,” she said.įernandez-Concha said the project was a tangible way to distill the discussion on the vast expanse of social media. We need to get there with homophobic language. Now if you say a racist thing, people get fired. “It used to be that if you said racist things, people accepted it. It’s really an unfortunate part of today’s common slur,” Creighton said. “If you want to be really mean to somebody, you use a gay word. and advertising agency JWT Canada, is on behalf of Toronto Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG).Īnne Creighton, the president of Toronto PFLAG, said the flag visually demonstrated the prevalence and impact of homophobic language. The project, a partnership between creative collective ShantyTown Inc. “If anyone says something positive using positive keywords, including LGBT, pride, gay pride, stuff like that – as well as our hashtag – then the flag moves up,” he said, watching as the flag rose from half mast. “Homophobic slurs and stuff that we want to stop moves it down,” explained Patrick Schroen, standing on the sweltering asphalt roof of the Churchmouse bar at the corner of Church and Maitland Sts.
The computer is hooked up to a small motor and pulley which raises or lowers the flag a few feet in real-time based on whether the tweets are positive or negative. It works like this: a small grey box fixed to the base of the 18-foot flagpole houses a small computer connected to the internet which hunts for tweets containing LGBTQ-related keywords. “It’s just basically monitoring the entire conversation around things that affect the LGBTQ community,” said Santiago Fernandez-Concha, one of the developers behind the project, dubbed #RaiseThePride. High above the WorldPride festival, the rainbow flag flapping on a rooftop in the heart of Toronto’s gay village is moved by more than just the summer wind: it’s buffeted by the tone of online chatter.