Pride came to Owen Sound Saturday, June 17, as more than 400 showed some love – and some rainbows – supporting the Grey Bruce 2S-LGBTQQIAP+ community in the annual parade.

Pride decorated downtown Owen Sound Saturday with rainbows and love as the annual parade gathered together a diverse community, uneasy under pressures from politics and pandemic, reeling with internal tensions about inclusion, for a display of affection and celebration from its stalwart allies lining 2nd Avenue.

More than 400 paraders, corralled pre-parade on 2nd Avenue north of 10th Street East, took the stroll from the historical Coach Inn to the historical Farmers Market, a journey that serves today as a contemporary comparison of the Owen Sound class structures that echo in the Grey Bruce community of 2S-LGBTQQIAP+ peoples.

Expressions of care and welcome from onlookers, and perhaps a bit of we've-got-your-back resolve, seemed to lighten the shadows – exactly the opposite reaction that flew from the sidewalks of the early Pride protest marches.

It wasn't just words of hate and violence that came through the air at those early gatherings – there were the eggs, and the feces, and the rotten vegetables, that served as punctuation.

The punctuations from the sidewalks this weekend, here in Owen Sound, felt more like warm and fuzzy emoji, and they were sounding like a promise.

Celebrations such as ours in Owen Sound, a communion of care and concern, may be the future of Pride.

Big city Pride parades have become month-long commerical enterprises, dependent on ever-increasing government subsidies, largely run by the same corporations which until just over a decade ago had historically rejected their gay and lesbian customers and workers, with lucrative Pride governance fought over by the community's alphabetized factions.

The main-day parades usually take four hours to run, and although it truly is a joy to see Pride events very much enjoyed by city-clogging throngs of partiers, it seems as if they're mostly unaware of Pride's origins, and necessity.

The random elders, shell-shocked survivors from a previous generation's viscious and brutal battle to exist, with their slow progression of unwiped tears for a handful of old people shoehorned in the parade between a hundreds-strong corporate float and a thousands-strong political throng led by its body-guarded senior elected official actively holding court along the route, are just a fleeting curiosity to these young celebrants and their allies.

The young are engaged in their own battle for existence, a returned war that's darkening the very light that made our Pride rainbow a possibility, and then an inevitability.

Today's Pride, our Pride, brings hope for our future, that today's youth will fill the Pride sidewalks of their golden years in joyous throngs, and not as the inevitable lone survivors from a previous war they barely won.

Owen Sound's Pride month celebrations are organized by Grey Bruce Pride. Their leadership and inclusive care fill an urgent role in our community, exemplified by member Rachel Paterson, whose eloquence gives added meaning each year to the Pride flag raising ceremony.

Grey Bruce Pride works to create a safe community for 2S-LGBTQQIAP+ people and their families, friends and allies.

Community churches have made a point of reaching out to the queer community in Grey Bruce, including the Owen Sound Lutherans, an "affirming congregation that seeks to be actively inclusive and radically welcoming", as well as the congregation and minister of the Annesley United Church, below.

The Owen Sound Pride Parade is largely a communtiy effort, hugely dependent on enthusiastic and well-organized volunteers who work hard to allow the event to run smoothly. Grey Bruce Pride is all ready to take your name to add to the list of helpers for Pride 2024.

The après-parade street fair filled up the market area with live music, local vendors, and hundreds of celebrants.

Apprentice Kain blocks out Pride distractions as he concentrates on one of The Admiral's Barbershop's free haircuts given during the Pride street fair.

Just about everyone was looking fabulous, especially Hub editor Anne Finlay-Stewart, very happy that our popular button-making machine caused line-ups at our booth.

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– by Hub staff
David Galway