History on parade

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This article was published 20/06/2025 (410 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Even in the joyful, jittery atmosphere of a film première, a sense of gravity permeated the packed house at the Toronto opening of the documentary Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance on April 24 at Bloor Street’s Hot Docs Cinema on the opening night of the Hot Docs Festival.

The film justified the feeling. Director Noam Gonick’s movie — which has its local première at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights on June 28 — is an astonishingly cumulative look at Canada’s history of queer activism; the vibe in the house was undoubtedly enhanced by the presence of about 35 of the film’s interview participants, many of whom are famous (Svend Robinson, Canada’s first MP to come out as gay; Lorraine Segato, lead singer of the Parachute Club; filmmaker John Greyson) and many more who have toiled in relative anonymity in the trenches of the gay rights movement over the past 60 years.

“It’s a very unabashed, no-holds-barred love letter to the activists who step off the sidewalk, into the street to change the world they lived in,” Gonick said during an interview after the screening.

It is no coincidence that Gonick, the local filmmaker known for Hey, Happy and the Guy Maddin doc Waiting for Twilight, took the helm of the project with a former Winnipegger, producer Justine Pimlott, whose 2024 doc Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, won a Peabody Award last month for best documentary.

Winnipeg-based activism is in the blood of both Gonick and Pimlott. Gonick’s father is Cy Gonick, a one-time NDP politician and the editor of the socialist magazine Canadian Dimension.

“The apple didn’t really fall from far from the tree, it was just a pink apple,” Gonick says.

“My parents did teach me to question authority. I can remember my dad saying to me at an impressionable age, ‘Just because he’s wearing a cap like that doesn’t mean he can tell you what to do.’ So yes, all those little childhood lessons sink in on some level or another.”

Pimlott, too, is the child of activists, and she inherited the fire even in her youth when she took it upon herself to organize the first international women’s film festival, Film Furies, in Winnipeg in the early ’80s.

“My mom and dad were trade-union activists. They were part of the left in Winnipeg,” Pimlott recalls in a post-première interview.

Pimlott followed suit, and was even encouraged by her mother to join the Nellie McClung Theatre, a trade union theatre collective, when she was a teenager.

Combined with her early passion for movies, Pimlott took an activist approach to her film career, always amplifying voices under the National Film Board banner, as well as the shingle of her own company Red Queen Productions, co-founded with her partner Maya Gallus.

Her career reached a high point last month with the Peabody win for Any Other Way — a documentary about Jackie Shane, a pioneering, American-born trans R&B singer who found fame in the Toronto jazz scene of the 1960s — which Pimlott characterizes with just one word: “huge.”

“Particularly in these times, it’s even more huge,” Pimlott says, referring to the anti-trans sentiment that has gripped the United States since the 2024 election.

“To have that recognition with everything unfolding south of the border, it’s an incredible honour. It’s even more of a statement.”

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Parade promises to be a film with an impact that will ripple through and beyond the country’s queer population this summer. Teamed with editor Ricardo Acosta and thousands of hours worth of archival material, Gonick and Pimlott have made a movie that is simultaneously a crucial record of queer activism but also a shocking account of the violence and bigotry that the movement once inspired.

“What I’m hearing from young people is that there’s so much they didn’t know about the activists whose shoulders they stand on. I get the sense from hearing from the younger community that there is this great need to connect with who their elders are, to have that intergenerational conversation,” Pimlott says.

For the elders themselves, the film has the power of a family photo album, with attendant feelings that run the gamut from joy to personal tragedy.

“Flipping through a photo album can evoke many emotions, and it’s not always easy,” Pimlott says.

The CMHR showing will be followed by a Q&A with Gonick, Pimlott, Connie Merasty and Myra Laramee.

Prior to the film, ticket holders can explore the new exhibition Love in a Dangerous Time: Canada’s LGBT Purge and participate in an art-making activity.

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