By Amira Benjamin

Disclaimer: This article discusses transphobic, homophobic violence and police violence.

Syrus Marcus Ware watches as an overwhelmed community member climbs a fence to use a restroom at a Blockorama stage—Canada’s largest Black Queer celebration—one of the biggest ever at Toronto Pride, in June 2017.

The young man, stressed and high on different substances, spots a Porta Potty through the swarms of people and tries to navigate through. But the police and Pride security spot him too.

Ware—a McMaster University assistant professor—and another attendee step in, assuring the officers that the person only needs a moment to use the bathroom. But the security officers pull on latex gloves and get prepared to tackle him.

After convincing the officers to back off, the group guides the person to a tent to use the restroom, get water and have a conversation.

Ware later learns the community member is living on his own and was attending Blockorama for the first time since being in care as a youth. But Blockorama had changed locations several times and he was trying to find where to go.

“He had finally made it to the parking lot, finally made it to the stage. He realized he felt a little overwhelmed, needed a moment. If this person had been grabbed and pitched down, it would’ve been disastrous.”

These kinds of interventions are just one of several ways Toronto’s 2SLGBTQ+ community are supporting one another, in attempts to curb or avoid police interaction.

Toronto Police Services (TPS) has been trying to take steps towards rectifying their turbulent and violent history with Toronto’s 2SLGBTQ+ community for years. In 2016, former Toronto police chief Mark Saunders apologized for TPS’ orchestration of the 1981 bathhouse raids, the same year Black Lives Matter–Toronto (BLM–Toronto) halted the Pride parade to call attention to their demands of accessibility, increased funding and addressing anti-Black racism.

TPS first raised a Pride flag over their headquarters in 2017, a move many called ‘historic.’ But only a year later, it was revealed that Saunders misled the community about the possibility of a serial killer in the Gay Village, falsely saying there was no reason to worry. Even today Saunders’ successor, Myron Demkiw, was one of the five male officers who participated in the Pussy Palace bathhouse raid in 2000—which saw plainclothes male officers enter a bathhouse where more than 350 nude or semi-nude women and non-binary people were present.

Beyond these high-profile actions, there have also been smaller attempts to mend relations. Every year, TPS gives $1,000 bursaries to Queer youth who are committed to creating change in the 2SLGBTQ+ community, according to TPS.

However this hasn’t eased the high levels of fear and discomfort members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community—especially those who are racialized—feel around police officers. As Pride continues to expand not just across the city but the world, community members are continually asking the questions: What is the purpose of police at Pride? And can we do without them?

Despite—or perhaps, because of—a violent history, some members of Toronto’s 2SLGBTQ+ community have been trying to establish an alliance with TPS for decades.

An academic article by Andy Holmes highlighted the first attempts of outreach to police by the 2SLGBTQ+ community in the aftermath of the 1978 Barracks Bathhouse raid. A group of activists created the ‘Right to Privacy Committee’ (RTPC) which aimed to provide legal aid for the arrested men and submitted a report to the Metro Toronto Police Commission, titled “Our Police Force Too! A Brief Presented on Behalf of Toronto’s Gay Community.”

However, it was only following the infamous 1981 bathhouse raids—in which over 300 men were arrested, 289 were charged and police inflicted tens of thousands of dollars in property damage—that Toronto City Council decided to readjust its course and attempts at progress were made.

But many believed these efforts were moving too slowly. For the 2SLGBTQ+ community, safety and self-defense had already been coming from themselves, protecting the community from both police violence and gay bashings—which were frequent routine violence from homophobic aggressors.

Then came the Pussy Palace raids in 2000.

Ware had regularly been to the Pussy Palace events but wasn’t there on the night of the raid.

“It rocked our whole community when it happened,” he says.

The Pussy Palace events only happened three or four times a month but Ware says they were incredibly popular.

“It was something to look forward to, it was something that you planned for…it was something that you would change and cancel all your plans just to make sure that you’d be able to go to,” says Ware.

“So to have this kind of violation sent ripples because then people, of course afterwards, were like, ‘do I go to the next one? Will it happen again? Will I be safe there?’”

Ware was a coordinator at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Women and Trans People at the time. He organized support for many of the Pussy Palace attendees. “There’s a lot of things that had to happen in order to get any sense of wrongdoing from the police,” he says.

The legacy of violence and discrimination—both institutional and interpersonal—continues to affect police relations with the 2SLGBTQ+ community to this day.

Many are hesitant to report crimes of harassment and discrimination, according to a 2021 Journal of Gender Studies article, which can be fuelled by cycles of police mistreatment—which furthers underreporting.

This becomes increasingly worrying as hate crimes and targeted violence against the 2SLGBTQ+ community begin to increase. In 2024, Statistics Canada reported that hate crimes targeting sexual orientation rose by 388 per cent between 2016 and 2023.

Bad experiences with or negative perceptions of the police can be heightened for those who are racialized or gender-diverse.

Ware is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter–Canada, which was formed a year after BLM–Toronto stopped the 2016 pride parade to protest police brutality, according to their website. Ware was a core team member of BLM–Toronto at the time. Their demands included a “removal of police floats/booths in all Pride marches/parades/community spaces” and a commitment to “more Black deaf and hearing ASL interpreters for the Festival.”

Ware says the demonstration was organized with “a large set of communities,” such as Blackness Yes—who curate the Blockorama stage—and members of Black Queer Youth Collective. These groups collaborated to create demands that would address the way anti-Blackness was playing out at the festival as well as wider issues of abolition and racism in the city.

“At that point in the parade, there was more police, prison, bailiff trucks…it was a prison road show. There were more police officers with their rainbow leis, uniforms and guns than community groups,” says Ware.

The discussion of TPS presence at Pride has been a back-and-forth between the often-conflicting interests of festival organizers—Pride Toronto—the city, members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community and advocacy groups like BLM–Toronto.
Then-executive director of Pride Toronto, Mathieu Chantelois, signed off on BLM–Toronto’s demands before backtracking on the agreement.

Following BLM–Toronto’s disruption, TPS did not participate in the Pride parade in 2017 although Pride Toronto issued a statement inviting police officers out of uniform. Former chief Saunders withdrew their bid to march in the 2018 parade as well, due to increased feelings of mistrust among the community following the Bruce McArthur killings—which saw eight men murdered in the Gay Village between 2010 and 2017.

Pride Toronto’s membership voted again to ban the presence of TPS at their 2019 parade, although they have been in parades since then.

But Pride Toronto is one of the biggest 2SLGBTQ+ celebrations in the world, with major funding to boot. According to the Toronto Star, Pride Toronto raked in nearly $8 million in revenue in 2024 with 64 per cent coming from corporate sponsors, while other funding sources shrank.

O Stecina, a 2025 graduate of RTA’s media production program at Toronto Metropolitan University, is opposed to cops at Pride Toronto and believes that “if anything, the cops are there to protect the money,” they say.

“I’ve seen how it’s been going down in [the U.S.] where the moment there’s even the tiniest drop in public support for the Queer cause, all of these money sources panic and run away.”

Stecina also acknowledged the “complicated balancing act” that Pride Toronto may manage, between attracting major sponsors and visitors while managing different floats and events for a growing number of community groups.

In 2025, a dozen corporate sponsors—such as Google and Home Depot—revoked their funding to Toronto Pride, leaving the organization with an approximately $900,000 shortfall right before June.

Stecina recalls their first major Pride celebration being “really exciting,” but was discouraged by the “ads everywhere.”

“We know that if we force ourselves to become reliant on that [corporate] source of income, that comes from us becoming the product, then we’re just going to have to morph into something that, to me, feels unrecognizable to the original Queer community,” they say. “That’s something I don’t want to do. A lot of aspects of my life are not advertiser-friendly at all.”

There have also been major discussions about returning Pride to its activist and political roots, in opposition to major corporate sponsorships.

For the past two years, 2SLBGTQ+ activists across the country have been holding demonstrations to encourage Pride organizers to divest from Israeli companies and organizations in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In 2024, Pride Toronto ended their parade early due to a disruption from the group Coalition Against Pinkwashing, who demanded Pride Toronto cut ties with sponsors like TD Bank and Google. In 2025, protestors blocked Ottawa’s Pride parade for similar reasons, resulting in the organizers ending the parade shortly after it started.

Ware says it’s not “hyperbolic” to say the first Pride, even in Toronto, was a riot.

“The first real coming together in Pride happened after the bathhouse raids and happened in the years following that. There was the night after the bathhouse raids when people gathered in the streets, marched down to the police station and up to the police headquarters [on College]…there was riotous rage that led to our gathering,” he says.

“It just seems outrageous that we would be in a moment in 2026, where we’re limiting what kind of political conversations we can have as Queer and trans people in a parade that was actually a march.”

The current director of Pride Toronto, Kojo Modeste, told Global News in an interview after the event that he was “very disappointed” in the pro-Palestine protestors’ disruption, claiming protests at Pride “can happen at any time,” but should be “done respectfully.”

A.C.*, an educator and member of Queers 4 Palestine (Q4P), sees Pride Toronto as the depoliticization of an event that is inherently political.

“We need that politicization to actually advance our rights and not just get trapped in the structures that oppress us,” they say. “We want to break those structures down and build alternatives. And if you normalize Queerness in that way that Pride Toronto does, then you take away our teeth.”

A.C. says for Q4P, Pride is “not only to advance the rights of Queer people, but then also to advance the rights of everyone who’s on the margins of society, because those are our kin.”

Despite many calls for the police to be removed from Pride, there’s still some level of trust in the institution for safety. A 2022 research study in Current Issues in Criminal Justice found that 2SLGBTQ+ folks were less likely to view the police as ‘legitimate’ authorities, but only less than half of respondents would report future hate crimes to the police.

“I think I have always found it interesting that there is a cohort of people that are glad that the police are there because they can prevent interruptions to the parade and to events and stuff by other [political] causes,” says Stecina.

“I think that [they] are just causes. I think that these are conversations that we do need to be having. I think it’s important that we have a chance to celebrate, but it’s also important that we acknowledge that there is a need for solidarity between communities.”

Yet definitions of ‘safety’ under the police look different for different people, says Samantha Peters, a lawyer and co-founder of Black Femme Legal, a community-based initiative that provides legal information, advocacy and care-centred support to Black women, femmes and gender diverse folks navigating harm in the workplace.

“Do I believe keeping TPS at Pride is sustainable? It depends on who you’re asking,” they say. “Is it sustainable for Black Queer and trans communities? I mean, there will likely be a very different response than if you were to ask that question to non-Black Queer and trans communities, right?”

Peters believes that institutions like TPS and other police forces cherry-pick success stories to “absolve themselves of accountability for the systemic harms that have been ongoing.”

They call this “systemic gaslighting.”

“I think that what we have shoved down our throats is that the police equal safety and that’s our only option. But as Black Queer and trans and nonbinary and gender-diverse folks, we know that there are other ways in which to get safety.”

TPS does not necessarily need to remain a strong presence at Pride. Many other major cities, such as Vancouver in 2020 banned police officers from their Pride events indefinitely. Pride Toronto has listened to its members and BLM–Toronto to bar uniformed officers from the parade.

Yet many are opting for alternative means of Pride celebrations and education that exclude TPS, such as Abolition Pride held by the No Pride in Policing Coalition.

A.C. first attended Pride Toronto in 2019 and felt disillusioned by the corporate sponsors. They later joined Abolition Pride as a marshall and enjoyed it much more.

A.B.*, another member of Q4P, says they believe Pride would still happen without corporate sponsorships and Pride Toronto’s board and staff but with a more grassroots approach.

“The tourists would still come and people would still have all the parties and you know, we could still close off Church Street or whatever…Pride would happen. It would just look a little bit different,” they say.

Ware highlights that Pride Toronto already has hired security and alternative measures of community safety that don’t require the police. “The kinds of things we need to build that would really create safety are the kinds of things that are really easy and fun to implement,” he says. For him, this includes free and accessible spaces for young people that don’t include alcohol as well as safe places for people who use substances.

“There could be all sorts of things we could invest in that would just be about investing in our communities,” says Ware. “Imagine we took the millions of dollars, or [however] much they spend on Toronto policing and invest it into our communities. Think of the amazing things we could imagine that we could absolutely do that would make the Pride festival safer.”

A.C. echoed similar sentiments. “I mean, this is a common chant, but we keep us safe…it’s not the cops that keep us safe, it’s not the state that keeps us safe—it’s each other.”

*These sources have remained anonymous for privacy reasons. The Eye has verified these sources