Outlaw Radio 1960: The Poison Pill of Corporate funding

The Toronto Star reported a few days ago that the Pride Parade was in Jeopardy because corporate dollars were pulling out. They are stating reasons for changing mandates within corporate structures.

This is the first of many hits I am sure will affect diversity and gains made through equity and affirmative action measures. For the conservative movements of late, this has always been a stump they have held close for several years. They call it reverse racism, discrimination, or any other set of buzz words one could possibly imagine, hiding the fact that what this truly can be defined as: misogynism, homophobia, racism, anti immigration, and integration. If you truly listened to a number of these people, the propaganda they use is like a flower to a bee. Now, the fundamentalist mainly Southern USA Baptist evangelical rhetoric is front and center in terms of what we used to deem public policy and has corporations so scared they are bowing down to the president and abiding by his will no matter which country they are in.

Canada certainly can not change public policy; however, its commitment to cultural events and festivals will be on the shopping list, where people cannot place any dollars. This is not a new story as corporate money over the past decade has become less and less available to cultural, public or ethnic events. Pride struggled with fundraising over this time as does things like the Santa Claus parade, or Caribana. It is not just a problem in the GTA this is widespread across the country. A little History might help!

When Karen and I were first married in the 1980s, we lived in the Village at 437 Jarvis Street, where, for the most part, most of the tenants in our building were from the LGBTQ community. We saw firsthand the treatment of the community as a whole because of people's fear and loathing of the LGBTQ community. The AIDS epidemic had just begun, and gay men especially were being ostracized, demoralized, swarmed, beaten, and killed only because of their sexual choices, and this intense fear that gripped society. This affected every level of our society, rich or poor. It would cost Richard Hatfield, Premier of New Brunswick, an election after he was outed. Those aspects still exist today, except these people now use terms like grooming to say that the communities are grooming children or woke movements to make these decisions in their lives. You would think we would be beyond all this, but as we now see, the idea of one step forward, three steps backwards holds very true.

The release of Everett Klippert finally in 1972, who is buried where I live, and changes to laws in respect to homosexuality sent the country and, surprisingly, the city of Toronto, which at the time was not as multicultural in the 1970s, into this moral crusade orchestrated mainly by churches and the homophobic mentality of the time. The LGBT community at the time was more along Yonge Street between Wellesley and Bloor. Now Yonge Street then was a seedy place with its New York mimicking of Times Square's litany of Body Rub parlours and sex shops. Pretty sketchy indeed, but with the brutal death of shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques this would change dramatically. The hardest hit was the LGBTQ community, with arrests and the bath house raids often destroying the reputations and careers of many within the community. These actions would make change as the LGBTQ plus communities rose up to fight the treatment of the community by governments, police, and the public at the time. These would be the first of what would become Pride marches.

Like any other marginalized group within our society, the LGBTQ community is ghettoized within the boundaries of what now is the village in Toronto. It provided the community some amount of protection from those who would possibly do them harm and become a thriving commercial and diverse part of the Toronto landscape. The police would still not be more of an ally to the community until the Santa Claus serial killer Bruce McArthur, himself a Gay man, murdered and brutalised eight men, dismembering them and burying them in large flowerpots around properties in Toronto. After this, thanks to Mayor John Tory, Things would change, and the Toronto police force began to play a more active and community-orientated presence in the village.

Pride marches have changed a great deal over the years. When Karen and I first started attending pride marches, they looked totally different from today's ones. In the eighties, you didn’t see the large amounts of corporate dollars at work; in fact, most people volunteered their time. Bands would gladly perform along the parade route at no extra charge, and things would run smoothly. The problem with taking the poison pill of the corporate dollar is that corporations still do this for profit and not because they affirm the cause which is being promoted. This is not new. Capitalism destroyed the hippie movement of Haight Ashbury, right up to Occupy Wall Street, which then became just a happening and then died, leaving the founders dumbfounded as to what had happened. The last time we walked the Church Wellesley village, all that could be seen were, yes, a ton of people but alongside those hundreds of pop-up shops selling everything from soap to mutual funds. My first words to Karen were: This will end badly, and now here we are. What started out as a celebration of the LGBTQ+ community reduced it to a popup shopping mall and a huge target for those who could then put a stranglehold on it.

The loss of corporate business endorsements to these events has now become the death blow as they have become over-reliant on these dollars. Instead, they should have stayed within the original framework from which they started. Now, the long spiral begins as corporate business responds to public and political pressure to play ball. This brings with it a looming shadow upon marginalized communities of a return to times most of us would rather forget.

Business and people make up a community, no matter how big, small, or diverse. With this pullback, one should remind corporations that it does have drawbacks because the start of the snubbing of diversification in society will also affect their bottom line. People vote at the ballot box, but everyone consumes with their wallets, principles, and ideals.