I lost my voice working in conservative media. The queer community helped me find it again
In the summer of 2024, thousands gather in downtown Toronto for Canada’s largest Pride celebration. The crowd surges forward, and for a moment I lose myself in the sea of colour, pressed shoulder to shoulder near Church-Wellesley Village. It’s then I see rainbow flags waving high in the air and hear the raucous cheers of spectators growing louder and louder. The parade has started. The air hums with excitement as performers in extravagant costumes twirl and dance on the floats. Food vendors and community booths line the streets, serving everything from rainbow popsicles to pamphlets on 2SLGBTQIA+ rights and resources.
Standing there, I’m a little choked up. It’s been an exhausting year for queer communities. Recently, there has been a noticeable global resurgence of hostility toward us in the media. Accusations of pedophilia, indoctrination, and “grooming” feel more commonplace than ever on social media. Once a hard-won achievement, 2SLGBTQIA+ visibility has been splintered by political divides.
At this moment, though, it feels worth it. The atmosphere is a mix of celebration and defiance, as if each of us is fighting to hold onto something precious. The crowd surges forward, and once again, I lose my footing. Only this time, the parade stops.
We were there as a collective, but each of us was in for a surprise that day. A few hours into the festival on June 30, 2024, protesters from the Coalition Against Pinkwashing (CAP) staged a sit-in. CAP refused to move until Toronto Pride organizers agreed to six demands made by Queers 4 Palestine TO, including that the festival boycott and divest from companies investing in arms manufacturers or supporting Israeli apartheid. People were cheering and chanting pro-Palestine slogans, but tensions mounted as some festival-goers, attempting to understand the sudden halt, could be heard arguing.
Kojo Modeste, Pride Toronto’s executive director, soon met with CAP. Modeste approached the protesters with the council of elders, a group selected to help with negotiations. Both groups claimed there was no room for discussion, refusing to sign off on the six demands. When they could not reach an agreement, Modeste shut down the parade. He insisted it was necessary for the safety of the protesters and parade attendees.
For many people, including myself, this was their first-ever Pride parade, if you could call it that. As a result of the cancellation, 67 of the 280 colourful delegations were unable to march. Over the weekend, we wanted to honour our true selves. Yet, it’s likely some of us left more confused than when we arrived.
Mo’ Problems
The same day, I met with Adam Zivo, a regular contributor to the National Post. I had just begun working as an editorial intern at the Post, Canada’s most conservative national daily newspaper. As a gay man, conservative media wasn’t my first choice. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the experience. I was treated well, and it felt like the publication valued my ideas. Still, I found it advantageous to seek a mentor who navigates queer identity within conservative spaces.
I found Zivo among the vendors and community booths lining the streets. He was accompanied by Harrison Lowman, managing editor at The Hub. The irony of seeing my first Pride with the elite of conservative commentary is not lost on me. But it could perhaps be excused. Despite years of public legitimacy, broad generational, sexual, racial, and gendered divides still exist in queer culture. Canadians at large fail to grasp queer communities’ ongoing struggle for equality when so many queer Canadians already feel, well, equal.
In 2011, Toronto writer Paul Aguirre-Livingston wrote a controversial cover story for The Grid. “The Dawn of a New Gay,” declared a new era of homosexuality where the “post-mo” (or post-modern homosexual) redefined gay identity, distancing it from traditional stereotypes and historical struggles. “By the time we were ready to take the reins, the post-mo had a different agenda: no agenda at all,” he wrote. “We simply arrived at the end of the fight to reap the fruits of another generation’s labour.” The day after publishing Aguirre-Livingston’s story, The Grid published a follow-up, “Why We Published Dawn of the New Gay,” by Matt Jackson. Jackson criticized the story for oversimplifying 2SLGBTQIA+ diversity and privileging a narrow, trendy, and predominantly white perspective while dismissing intersectionality and past activism.
The movement is rooted in protest, but it has increasingly evolved into a cultural and corporate phenomenon. It features institutions that co-opt 2SLGBTQIA+ imagery to obscure their involvement in social injustices, including Canadian banks linked to Israeli arms manufacturers. CAP’s protests during Pride were a fresh reminder of the inherent contradiction between a civil rights movement and corporate control.
Queer communities remain hostage to media interpretations of their existence as a metric for moral good—and it’s getting bleak. Visibility and acceptance of queer Canadians are on the downswing. According to the Ipsos LGBT+ Pride 2024 survey, only 54 percent of Canadian respondents supported inclusive, anti-discrimination laws for 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, guaranteeing equal employment, housing, and educational support for all.
As a journalist, it was my job to find the truth. But working in a conservative space, I wrestled with difficult questions. Is the gay liberation movement too radical or not radical enough? Who among 2SLGBTQIA+ communities can genuinely embody both conservatism and queerness? Is their vision a betrayal of the movement or a new way forward? More critically, can these two freedoms coexist, or will their tension hasten our collapse as public acceptance and visibility in society and media deteriorate?
Say hello to the National Post-mo.
Queer Media
In 1974, Tim McCaskell found himself in front of the suburban home of Toronto Star publisher Beland Honderich. He recently joined The Body Politic (TBP), Canada’s first queer, activism-based monthly magazine. A year prior, TBP submitted an ad to the Star’s classifieds. The Star refused it, citing a policy against advertising related to homosexuality. For Toronto’s chief newspaper to claim values of tolerance and free expression while making decisions based on homophobic bias was hypocrisy.
For TBP, this was a battle for the heart of the movement. TPB viewed Canada’s media and business community preference for incremental change as deeply conservative. Patriarchal authority was fundamentally unjust, and gay liberation needed to challenge and overthrow it, not seek reconciliation. Homosexual liberation constituted a revolutionary force, necessary to dismantle oppressive societal structures. But they couldn’t do it alone.
In December 1977, Toronto police raided the offices of Pink Triangle Press (PTP). Obscenity charges were laid against the organization’s directors for publishing a controversial article in TPB by Gerald Hannon. The raids were viewed as part of a larger effort to shift public opinion and discussion to the right. Using the enforcement of “bawdy house” laws against queer communities and the Immigration Act against Asian and Black communities as a pretext, the police sought to criminalize large segments of the population.
By targeting gays and lesbians, as well as Black and Asian communities, the authorities aimed to create scapegoats for broader economic and societal crises affecting everyone. Conservative media amplified these efforts, prioritizing social issues over economic ones and reacting against an imagined cosmopolitan, urban, liberal elite and its individualist and egalitarian values. In contrast, the new right revived traditional conservative ideals of family and nation under the authority of God and patriarchy, ideas that resonated deeply with groups most affected by the economic crisis, including the declining middle class, non-unionized workers, small business owners, and the rural poor.
The raids not only transformed the internal politics of these communities, but the focus on the police as the enemy strengthened alliances. Queer activists, in the fight to see sexual orientation protected under the Ontario Human Rights Code, aligned with other protest groups to address shared oppression based on race, gender, and class. The idea of supporting minority rights was necessary—systemic inequality and police harassment hindered racialized communities’ participation in the movement. The fight for civil rights broadened the agenda and scope of the movement, penetrating the media and advancing the re-education of the public on the subject of homosexuality.
Reconciling privilege I realized that media do not cover stories equally across race, class, and gender–liberation is far from over
Over the next decade, Canada’s news media turned a corner. In the early days, the lack of human rights protections for 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals meant queer journalists often faced the risk of losing their jobs, discouraging them from coming out. Over time, however, unions played a pivotal role in changing this dynamic. “By virtue of being part of the union—paying dues, attending meetings, voting, and actively participating in union organizing—you inevitably started to change your views,” says Andrea Houston, managing editor at Ricochet Media and professor of queer media at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Win or lose, by the mid-1970s, lesbians and gay men were coming out in unionized workplaces and asking for solidarity. “At a certain point, the Globe and the Star recognized the bath raids going on at the time as an attack on the community,” says McCaskell. “That was totally new, especially after the Star refused to run the ad.” Yet institutional recognition, especially in media, primarily validated the white, male-dominated class, sidelining the intersectional struggles that defined earlier activism. McCaskell says queer communities were probably imagined as largely white, because the compounded discrimination faced by racialized queer people—sometimes inflicted by the white people in their communities—left them with a lower public profile.
BLMTO
In 2016, Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) was the honorary group heading the Toronto Pride Parade. BLMTO members marched, flanked by a truck with bejewelled and bedazzled drawings of Black queer and trans ancestors from Toronto. Cheers erupted from the crowd as they passed, but the festive mood shifted abruptly. When BLMTO reached the intersection of College and Yonge, they came to a sudden halt and sat down, stopping the parade, whose slogan that year was, “You Can Sit with Us.”
BLMTO called for greater inclusion within the 2SLGBTQIA+ movement and aimed to expose the anti-Blackness and over-policing within the festival. For 30 minutes, the parade stood still as BLMTO led a series of chants. Syrus Marcus Ware and Janaya Khan spoke about Black queer and trans justice as rainbow-coloured smoke bombs went off. The group presented its list of demands, created in collaboration with Black queer and trans elders. The protest called for greater inclusion within the 2SLGBTQIA+ movement and aimed to expose the systemic racism often overlooked in its spaces. At the heart of their demands was the removal of uniformed police officers and police floats from the parade, which they argued created an unwelcoming and unsafe environment for communities that have endured systemic violence at the hands of law enforcement.
After what felt like an eternity, Pride Toronto’s executive director at the time, Mathieu Chantelois, eventually met them on Church Street. In a stunning move, he quickly agreed to their list of demands. There was, once again, cause for celebration. However, according to BLMTO, Chantelois later flip-flopped on his commitment. While the demands were supported by some members of the public, others framed BLMTO as outsiders imposing changes on the festival.
Privilege
BLMTO’s actions forced a reckoning—what Rinaldo Walcott, director of women and gender studies at University of Toronto, described as a “Queer Civil War”—challenging Pride to live up to its origins as a protest movement for radical change. The incident left many in these communities grappling with difficult questions about its commitment to addressing the struggles faced by its most marginalized members. As I came to terms with my sexual identity, I—along with the rest of the world—had to reconcile with privilege and realize that the media do not cover stories equally across race, class, and gender—and that liberation is far from over.
However, the group was widely criticized. Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente called them “bullies.” Sue-Ann Levy of the Toronto Sun wrote that Black Lives Matter showed disrespect by hijacking Pride, saying that an event for gay rights was not the place to be talking about Black people’s rights. Robyn Urback of the National Post argued the protest did more harm than good, serving as “a textbook example of the left’s penchant for accidentally eating itself.”
While the advancement of 2SLGBTQIA+ rights generally exists across political lines, internal divisions exist regarding how to achieve results. “Within the community, there was usually a smaller number of people who may take a more progressive view,” says Ed Jackson, a queer activist and early member of TPB. “And then there are those who are assimilationists, who just want to assimilate. It’s always been a disagreement within the queer movement.”
Perhaps we have become too distracted and forgotten that the right to be gay is not something we should be taking for granted
In speaking with queer conservatives, I’ve learned that their goal is to assimilate, not revolutionize. “I come from a new generation of gays in Canada who have not experienced being denied marriage or having to worry about police barging into the bedroom,” says Élie Cantin-Nantel, a 22-year-old journalist for The Hub, who identifies as a gay, “little-c” conservative. For Cantin-Nantel and other conservative-queer Gen Z Canadians, the present fear is radical activism undermines the fundamental freedoms previously fought for. “I worry about where this will go if it continues,” he says. “We can’t take anything for granted.”
In the first week of my internship, Zivo wrote about how 2SLGBTQIA+ communities are suffering from a PR crisis. He argued the style of activism demonstrated by CAP was giving queer communities a bad look, and the strategy ought to pivot.
It’s true that at a certain point, both the gay and feminist movements began to recognize there would be no immediate fundamental reorganization of society. Instead, they opted for vertical alliances with the state to ask for protection. As activism evolved toward a legalistic approach focused on enshrining rights, it often lost the intersectional ethos of earlier efforts. Marriage equality—a major milestone in the broader queer rights movement—allowed many to obtain solidarity and drift away from activism. As time went on, the movement became less political and more cultural. For many, assimilation became not just a political necessity, but the goal.
As their sense of unity waned, social movements became fractured by the pursuit of personal gain, often at the expense of meaningful, organized change. McCaskell says we now live in a culture of complacency, where the emphasis is on individual words and actions as markers of progress. “There’s this lack of generosity that comes with not really making any progress. People just get so angry that they don’t take it out on the structural and social forces that are actually making their lives difficult,” says McCaskell. “They take it out on people who are close by.” Rather than organizing, our culture prioritizes visible actions and performative gestures over sustained structural efforts.
But in Canada, where roughly 70 percent of the population identifies as white, the presence of queer, trans, and racialized individuals challenges deeply rooted cultural and societal expectations while navigating both systemic racial bias and state oppression. The reaction to queer militancy in the media is to demand 2SLGBTQIA+ communities and their allies not complain or try to dismantle current systems. Instead, they should trust civil services, even if inclusion for many community members comes incrementally. “There’s this kind of Rousseau-ian notion that ‘man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains,’ and I totally disagree with that,” says Kelden Formosa, a gay conservative contributor for The Hub. “I would go the other way. Our freedom is found in institutions. Our freedom is found in norms.” While Formosa has an appreciation for queer rights activists, “the liberationist approach—which I totally disagree with—is to turn it all over and start from scratch. I just think that’s a disaster.”
The problem with assimilation is that, historically, queer people and other marginalized communities often don’t seek respectability, nor do they feel the need to prove they are “normal” in a culture that repeatedly denies their rights. Why should they?
Bite the Hand
“The struggle is clearly not what it was. It’s something different. Of course, the fight for equality will never fully be over,” wrote Aguirre-Livingston in The Grid. “But for my generation, the big question has shifted from the right to be gay to the struggle over the right way to be gay.”
Writing for the National Post under the guise of conservatism offered a reprieve from the burdens of identity politics, yet it exposed how privilege operates within our communities. Cisgender, white, gay men like myself exist with vastly different levels of safety and concern, immune from potential harm that our more visible queer and trans peers face daily. The disparity in our experiences underscores the need for solidarity among those with more privilege to amplify and protect the voices of those who remain most vulnerable.
I don’t know if there is a right way to be gay, but perhaps we’ve become too distracted and forgotten that the right to be gay is not something we should take for granted. Hard-fought battles for equality did not happen in a vacuum—they were the result of relentless activism that continues to shape our present. Yet, we do forget, particularly when we reject the notion that the fundamental rights of racialized and trans communities are vital to the movement. Ignoring these struggles weakens the broader fight for justice, reinforcing a hierarchy that leaves the most vulnerable behind.
Frustration is to be had with the lack of tangible results in social movements, but the “return to normalcy” narrative, a line drawn in the sand of 2SLGBTQIA+ activism, fails to acknowledge that things have not always been normal for everyone in the queer community. For many, assimilation is not an option, and “normalcy” has always meant exclusion, marginalization, and systemic discrimination. It’s time the media recognizes this to be true.
Beyond simple disagreement, Canada’s right-wing conservatism increasingly flirts with anti-human rights and fascist messaging. Creeping extremism thrives on division, using 2SLGBTQIA+ identities as political battlegrounds rather than accepting them as integral to a just society. Queer conservatives, who owe their liberties to the radical politics of the early movement, know this. Without the activism they now denounce, they would not have the rights they freely enjoy today. By amplifying reactionary rhetoric, these voices attempt to frame basic dignity and recognition as controversial issues rather than fundamental rights. But there’s no left-wing version of anti-human rights. Human rights are not a partisan issue; they are the foundation of any democratic society. While debates on policy and strategy exist across the political spectrum, our commitment to human dignity should remain unwavering.
Pride is a very queer word. It’s the devil, they say. Sure, it can look like that—like self-congratulation, a display of superiority cloaked in joy. But to feel pride, you must first feel seen. As dangerous as it may seem to some, Pride is a celebration of 2SLGBTQIA+ communities and their personal and collective achievements. It’s rooted in the knowledge that while not all of us feel it equally, some are more familiar with pain, struggle, and survival than others. Pride is not a celebration because our side won the battle, but because we realize our shared antagonism is the true enemy. As the saying goes, “No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.” Pride is beautiful, but it’s often more complex than the media allows. It isn’t easy to define or experience. Pride isn’t just one thing, yet each summer, it’s supposed to mean everything.
About the author
Matthew is in his final year of the Master of Journalism program. He has written stories for The National Post, THIS Magazine, The Bureau, and White Wall Review, among others. He is interested in writing stories about social justice, art, and culture.
