So, like, I still have an excess of glitter and resin, and I have a supreme amount of bills to pay. As some of you may know, my mother was recently hospitalized. She passed out at work and had to go to the ER by ambulance. Those rides are Expensive, my friends. My Christmas gift to my mother, if I can swing it with your help, is to help alleviate the burden of her ambulance bill.
It’s $450, and if I can pay even a portion of that, I will be ecstatic.
Right, so my Etsy returns! I don’t have many listings, but I hope that in keeping the amount of product I have to offer to a minimum, I can push it out super fast in time for everyone’s holiday gift exchange.
The federal government announced a $450,000 grant to help Pride Toronto develop strategies to make LGBT communities in Canada live more securely.
“For too long, the [LGBT] community has encountered injustice from various institutions in our society in ways that have prevented people from living their lives more fully and contributing their strengths to our country,” said Bill Morneau, federal finance minister and MP for Toronto Centre, home to the city’s Gay Village.
“We know that we have to do better.“
Morneau was joined by Olivia Nuamah, executive director of Pride Toronto, at an afternoon news conference on Saturday to formally commit the new money.
The funding will be used for the creation of a new initiative, run by Pride Toronto, that seeks to address “institutional and systemic barriers that lead to negative outcomes for [LGBT] communities, especially those that they have when encountering the criminal justice system.”
1. thats not a lot of money for, ideally, their goals 2. we have orgs doing this. not just in Ontario, but across Canada. why on earth is this money being given to Pride Toronto – for consultations, and to erect a project that other orgs exist and need funding for 3. it’s like the federal government has appointed Pride Toronto with some umbrella authority or spokesmanship over “LGBTQ agencies and leaders” across Ontario
I do not need to explain to you why the Toronto police should not march in Pride.
You are a decent, rational, compassionate person. You of course recognize that, the individual foibles and allowances of individual officers aside, the Toronto police have been the historical, habitual and ongoing antagonists of Toronto’s LGBT community.
Perhaps you remember Operation Soap, the malicious bathhouse raids that destroyed people’s lives — and subsequently triggered Toronto’s first Pride march as a passionate anti-police protest. If not, you still know about the decades of harassment and attempts to destroy the village’s institutions like the Glad Day Bookshop. You probably saw the footage of HIV-phobic insults hurled at a homeless person in the village. You likely remember 2016’s Project Marie, which descended on anonymous and closeted men in a park and publicly humiliated them in droves. You certainly saw the cheerful police photo op just a few weeks ago with neo-Nazi mayoral candidate Faith Goldy.
You know about the people we lost while begging the police to do something for decades, though perhaps their names escape you; there are, after all, so many of them: Majeed Kayhan, Selim Esen, Skandaraj Navaratnam, Andrew Kinsman, Dean Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi, Abdulbasir Faizi, Kirushna Kanagaratnam. The decades of grisly cold cases, now reopened, despite the mockery they once gave us for suggesting there was a killer; the blame the police chief tried shifting to us when the killer was caught too late.
Alloura Wells, left to rot in a morgue while her community searched everywhere. Tess Richey, left in an alley stairwell for her mother to find.
to anyone who is a member of pride TO, this is reason to vote out your board. a board is beholden to their membership and if they go against their members they can be removed. they aren’t allowed to do this kind of shit.
we now have to deal with puritan gay-conservative shits who don’t want queers to wear their leather and kink outfits to pride anymore, because “that’s not about sexual orientation, it’s about sex and doesn’t belong in public”. What the fuck.
LGBT and queer struggle has always been deeply intertwined with the struggle for sexual liberation. Being visibly queer and visibly sexually deviant has always been two parts of the same same ‘fuck you I’m queer’ to homphobes. Celebrating our sex lives and celebrating our existence has always been inseperable. The leather scene is a highly visible bit of queer culture and queer history.
So much of the movement was build by these communities. So many of our heroes and queer elders wear leather.
You do not get to take that away.
No minor at pride is gonna be scarred because they see a gay guy in chaps dancing on a float. Get real. Everyone has seen naked buttcheeks on tv a thousand times before their 12th birthday.
Your desire to desexualize our identities has nothing to do with protecting anyone. It’s just internalized homophobia.
[Image: A series of pin mockups on a black background, with a shadowed ‘NK’ behind them. Each pin depicts a raised left fist. The fingers, thumb and wrist of each pin are separated to show the colors of the Pride flag in question, with the top of the flag corresponding to the left side of the wrist and thumb, and the bottom corresponding to the pinky and right side of the wrist. The More Color More Pride pin is the only exception, with the black and brown stripes clutched in the palm section, actively protected by the rest of the fist. The pins depicted, from left to right, are: Intersex, Asexual, Bisexual, More Color, More Pride, Aromantic, Pansexual. Bottom row: Genderqueer, Genderfluid, Rainbow, Trans, NonBinary, and Lesbian. In the middle, white lettering reads: NerdyKeppie Forever In Solidarity Enamel Pins.]
The Early Bird options, which include an exclusive pronoun patch that will never be offered anywhere else, are only available for the first twenty-four hours.
I am so, so excited to finally get to launch this Kickstarter; we’ve been working on this project for literally months. Making the art, looking for the right pin maker, getting all of our ducks in a row, and it’s finally, finally here.
All of my love forever to @dadhoc, who made the project’s video in absolute record time.
Got questions? Please see our FAQ!
Thank you so much to everyone who helped us get this project off the ground. We literally could not have done it without you.
Pride Narwhals are now available! I know I’m a little late, but Pride month is a big thing for me and I wanted to do something fun for it with our shop! Get yourself a gay snuggle friend to celebrate Pride with 💖
Pride month is almost over, but these friends will be available for another week!
Happy Pride Month Eleanor Roosevelt was queer, the Little Mermaid is a gay love story, James Dean liked men, Emily Dickinson was a lesbian, Nikola Tesla was asexual, Freddie Mercury was bisexual & British Indian, and black trans women pioneered the gay rights movement.
Florence Nightingale was a lesbian, Leonardo da Vinci was gay, Michelangelo too, Jane Austen liked women, Hatshepsut was not cisgender, and Alexander the Great was a power bottom
Freddie Mercury is well known for his attraction to men but was also linked to several women, including Barbara Valentin whom he lived with shortly before he died. Friends have talked about being invited into their bed and walking in on them having sex (documentary Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender)
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are two of the best-known activists who fought in the Stonewall riots
Queer Fiction Writer 
