Is West Really Best?
Welcome to Pride in the Texas of Canada, where big companies convert profile pictures to multi-colour and the streets are adorned with chalk passages meant for walking on... or not walking on? I can never tell. Where the Ontarian experience takes on but a whisper, skips over the land of beef and cowboys, to find triumph by the ocean... I am missing home a bit more this month.
Pride is a feeling. Pride is community. Pride is living, loving, and laughing with titties out on Yonge Street, glitter in your hair, and smiles from cheek to cheek. It's not meant for quiet conversation and polite dispositions. It doesn't celebrate when political party members compare transgender kids to feces or when social debate asks if schools should always inform parents of their child’s gender pronouns in the classroom. It cannot believe that the map reads 38 orange, 49 blue. Pride is love is love in 1969 and this is bullshit in 2023.
In May, I took a budget flight to Vancouver: the magical land of Asians, gays, and gay Asians. My type—granola people—are abundant here too. It is the perfect self-gifted 22nd birthday. Time zones separate geography, while a mountain range seemingly splits homophobia in two: homo in the year-round flags on people and streets and phobia of the rain. But rain brings new beginnings, and I feel like I can breathe for the first time in a year.
Does water always bring acceptance? Nova Scotia—with an emphasis on the new—brings equal parts Canadian, Indigenous, and Queer to a holiday in need of rehabilitation. Every maple leaf is half red and half a multi-colour of rainbow, pastels, and shades of acceptance. Still, the Albertan body knows only how to bleed bright red in celebration. I can’t help but wonder, which soldiers are truly wounded?
Happy nine years to my gay day—at least from what I know. A happier three cheers to my father for not kicking me out when it might just be a phase, and to my mother for dropping her towel from her naked body because I like women anyway. The happiest anniversary to the people I used to know and who they have become: they taught me that culture and commandment can learn to walk different roads.
I would like to thank the all-girls catholic school pipeline (the local, lovingly named Dyke Dome) for bringing me queer women, a sleepaway university, and my first girlfriend. If I could go back in time, I would tell Dalena (circa. 2019) these three things: your secret six-month relationship branches off into better things, therapy is free at Queen's, and look forward to a drive in May 2021 when Mom and Dad will promise to be there no matter what. I would tell her how things will get better, and she will live to understand the order of Pride in the provinces: BC > Ontario > East Coast > everywhere else > Alberta.
I used to believe I could hide away, sweep Pride under my living room rug and keep it all to myself. All I needed were my allies and #Pride to remind me that I belonged. But as Joni Mitchell reminds us, we often fail to appreciate what we have until it's gone. I just didn't realize how much my heart would long to be heard amidst the country music and western-less-western-world culture.
Welcome to Pride in Alberta, Canada: the land of bigotry, beef, and cowboys. Sure, West is Best may make the perfect rhyme, but I’m done writing poetry.
Header: Valerie Letts
