Canada’s first Pride, a president telling a human rights fair that gay people have none, a tribe outpacing its own state, and two states at midnight.
1971
Canada’s first Pride was a picnic on an island
Canada had only decriminalised homosexual acts two years earlier. Bill C-150 passed the House of Commons in May 1969, the bill Pierre Trudeau had introduced by telling reporters there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.
Being legal is not the same as being visible. On August 1, 1971, around three hundred people took the ferry out to Hanlan’s Point on the Toronto Islands for what historians call the first Pride event held in Canada.
Three groups put it together: Toronto Gay Action, the Community Homophile Association of Toronto, and the University of Toronto Homophile Association. This wasn’t the massive party that Toronto Pride would eventually become. Just a day at the beach for three hundred people where they could feel free and proud to be who they were in public. Some travelled from Detroit and New York to be there. A long way to travel for a picnic on the beach, but well worth it for a community used to having to hide themselves out of fear for their safety.
Four weeks later, on August 28, Canada’s first gay rights protest took place on Parliament Hill in Ottawa: a ten-point brief handed to the federal government, delivered by one to two hundred people standing in heavy rain. The “We Demand” brief included calls for the government to amend the Immigration Act which barred homosexuals from entering the country, remove “buggery” and “gross indecency” as grounds for being declared a dangerous sex offender, decide child custody based on parental merit, not sexuality, for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to say whether it had been spying on gay public servants, and to stop.
1995
A president opens a human rights book fair by saying gay people have none
The theme of the 1995 Zimbabwe International Book Fair was Human Rights and Justice. Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) had booked a stand. Under pressure from the government, they were forced to withdraw it before the fair opened.
On August 1, Robert Mugabe opened the fair with a speech attacking them. He called it “extremely outrageous and repugnant to my human conscience that such immoral and repulsive organizations… should have any advocates in our midst.” Homosexuality, he said, was alien to African tradition, and gay people had no rights at all.
The fair did not recover. Four of its eighteen trustees resigned. African writers, human rights organisations and the foreign governments funding it protested publicly, and its standing never returned to what it had been.
GALZ tried again the following year, they booked a stand at the fair. This time a mob ransacked it.
The fight for equal rights for all people in Zimbabwe continues to this day. Same-sex marriage is banned in the constitution, and human rights groups face pressure and censorship from the government.
2011
A tribe legalised same-sex marriage sixteen months before its state
Heather Purser was twenty-eight, and she had been asking for four years.
She came home to the Suquamish reservation in Washington State after college in 2008 and asked the tribal council to recognise same-sex marriage. They agreed to consider it and assigned a lawyer to help her. Three years later, almost nothing had happened.
In March 2011 she stood up at a general council meeting, in front of dozens of tribal members, told them she was a lesbian, and asked her people directly. The leadership said they would continue to consider it. As she began to sit back down, the people around her told her to ask the room instead.
“Everyone said aye,” she said afterwards. “No one said nay.”
“I was expecting a fight to be ugly. But I was so shocked. I guess I was expecting the worst out of people. I was expecting the worst out of my people.”
The council held a public hearing in June, and on August 1, 2011, adopted the change unanimously. The Suquamish became the second tribal nation in the United States to recognise same-sex marriage, after the Coquille of Oregon.
Tribes are sovereign; their marriage law is their own and does not wait on the state around it. Washington State did not perform its first same-sex marriage until December 6, 2012 - sixteen months later, and only after putting it to a public referendum.
2013
Two states at midnight
Nine months before Minnesota legalised same-sex marriage, its voters were asked to ban it permanently.
On November 6, 2012, they were presented with a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. The people of the state rejected it. This was the first time anywhere in the United States that this kind of ban had been defeated not by a court, but by popular vote.
Less than a year after the defeat of the ban on same-sex marriage, a new law allowing it took effect on August 1, 2013. There were already couples waiting at Minneapolis City Hall when it did. The first ceremonies were held at midnight, only minutes after it became legal.
Rhode Island’s law allowing same-sex marriage took effect the same day.