When someone does the gay community a favour, even if unintended, he should be sincerely thanked. This is especially true as some quarters have interpreted Shinder Purewal’s recent thoughtless and very tacky remarks on the gay Pride parade as homophobic. As we all know, in the face of a storm of criticism and with the able assistance of a columnist from the right-wing National Post, who helped him massage his message, he retracted his initial statement that the parade be banned to say that it was too “vulgar” to take his family. Too many bare bums perhaps?

So why thank him at all for this display of intolerance? And why do so now? I can think of a few good reasons. One has to do with what he said. Such comments cannot be ignored and it seems appropriate for another faculty member of Kwantlen Polytechnic University forcefully to respond to them. Thankfully, the university quickly distanced itself from his remarks and rightly pointed out, as I know from my own experience there for the past two decades, that Kwantlen is a very accepting place. And, as someone involved in education at Kwantlen, my purpose is not to trash Purewal but to educate him through this eminently teachable moment. Another reason to respond is that he made his careless comments via social media. Once they’re out there, they stay there indefinitely and won’t go away.

Yet another reason to respond to him relates to people’s reaction to his comments. A lot of people attacked him, and I probably would have too, but the medium only allows for a short burst of (usually angry) comments. I have to admit that if I could tweet or Twitter, I would also have posted something short and nasty at the time that I would have had plenty of time to regret, like I imagine Purewal himself must be doing. But on this issue we need to take the time to be more thoughtful. Who needs more invective than we already have?

Finally, many people also expressed their support for the gay community and we should at least thank Purewal for giving our friends the opportunity to speak out so massively in our defence as they have done. Also, if we take him at his word that he did not intend to attack the gay community (jeez, the guy said he supported gay marriage after all), but only that he objected to “vulgarity” in the parade—those remarks bear a strong resemblance to what I’ve heard a few people in the gay community say. They too, very wrongly I would argue, interpret some elements of the parade as being vulgar.

But the vulgarity argument is a bit of a red herring. I don’t get the impression from Purewal’s remarks that he ever even attended a Pride parade. If he had, he might also have noted, as I did once again this year, the supportive inclusive spirit and the incredible diversity of the spectators and participants walking together on Denman Street and Beach Avenue: families, young people, older people, people of every cultural community in our multicultural country, gays, non-gays. In short, everyone. However, in the past I’ve noticed that when the TV news carried a brief clip of the parade, they seem to focus on the bare bums and flashy costumes. If a brief TV news clip is where Purewal got his information on the content of the Pride parade, I’d suggest that this is not the research methodology one would normally expect that a social scientist would employ before making public statements, even if they are only Twitters or tweets.

Still, if those bare bums strike various people, including “respectable” members of the gay community itself, the wrong way, should we have a more toned-down parade that shows we are just like everyone else and to which Purewal can feel comfortable enough to bring his kids? Less flaunting of sexuality and possibly more real estate agents and politicians? Would those hundreds of thousands of people who now watch the parade continue to come to the West End for that? Personally, if that’s the choice we have to make, I’d prefer the bare bums. They at least make Vancouver seem a little more open, joyous, and sexually liberated like Rio, and a little less like (fill in your favourite repressed location). The other reason is that the first people to stand up for gay rights and against oppression in the iconic Stonewall riots of 1969 were not the respectable real estate agents and politicians, who joined us much later when others had paved the way, but the less accepted drag queens and their embarrassing friends who sometimes flash a little more flesh than some are comfortable with. Today’s GLBT community should never ever forget that they stood up for us first.

The other thing about the parade is that it is about flaunting the diversity of the gay community. “Flaunting” is a dear old term in our community that means we do not feel the need to hide the diversity of who we are, but that we should celebrate it. Sometimes that makes a few people within and outside the gay community uncomfortable, but for a long time it had a serious purpose that we should not forget. The first Pride parade, more accurately a small demonstration, I participated in was in Toronto in 1972. A number of people covered their faces with paper bags because there was a very real fear that they would lose their jobs or face other forms of retribution by publicly standing up for their rights. We must have seemed like an exotic bunch to the few people in the streets who took notice of us. Did I only imagine they were thinking, “You can have your rights, but don’t remind us of who you are”? Recently I saw a retrospective slide show of early demonstrations in Vancouver. Beach Avenue was far emptier for Pride in the early ’80s than it was this year. We have come a long way in the past 40 years. Now we have the rights we demanded and some my husband, Richard, and I once imagined we’d never get. While we celebrate, it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves what it used to be like not so long ago, and to resolve that it won’t be that way ever again.

And it especially doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves that if our friends outside the gay community—our families, colleagues, unions—had not stood by us over that past four decades, we still would not have these rights. We did not get here alone. Although they did not have to face down the demons in their heads that told them there was something fundamentally wrong with who they were, as gay people routinely did and some still do, people in our other cultural communities must also remember, all too well, the sting of past prejudice. We in Vancouver, and in Canada as a whole, now have a hard-won reputation for acceptance of each other and we don’t need voices raising those intolerant messages from our not-too-distant past, even if they say they were unintentional. The main message in the body language of the people who came out to see the Pride parade this year, not to mention the one lesson of our history that bears repeating, is that we’re all going forward together. For all of our sakes, we need to keep it that way.

Frank Abbott teaches in the department of history at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

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