Pride Goes Digital

Loneliness, like eating ice cream by the pint, is a familiar reality in the age of Coronavirus and it hits especially hard this June. Where every year for the last 50, LGBTQIA+ pride month has been a force to assuage those feelings, to shake them loose on rainbow runways, or down them in cocktails with neon friends in wigs, this year, for the first time, pride is cancelled.

This year NYC Pride will not hold a parade down Fifth Ave commemorating The Stonewall Inn and the birth of the modern pride movement. Toronto Pride will not hold in-person workshops featuring vibrant community organizers and their stories of hard-won legal battles. This is undoubtedly a good thing, no parade is more important to a community than the health of its members – but it’s easy to get lost in particulars: to fantasize about the smell of bars and the comforts of closeness.

What Pride will have however is the internet. For the first time many cities are reaching out to the creatives that have long been touch points of the LGBTQIA+ community to host digital events, which, although unable to display the community in its full glorious multitudes will certainly be enough to catch a glimpse.

On June 28 NYC Pride is bringing together the glitzier side of the community, featuring popular singers like Janelle Monáe in a staged telecast hosted by ABC journalists and Carson Kressley of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame.

But it’s the organizers of Toronto Pride that have embraced the digital space most fully. Over the month of June it will hold 69 separate events, including those famous workshops, now digital, through its Twitch page. Rather than just move their pre-planned events to an online space however, Toronto Pride has rebranded their 2020 festivities Virtual Pride, and plans to use their events to emphasize the new perspective the internet affords of recognizable members of the community.

Events like Queer Shopping Channel, airing mid-day on a Wednesday (when else would you watch the shopping channel?), bring the pride experience into sync with the every day – reorganizing the festivities into an alternate view of what life could be – a world where inclusivity is banal, seamless with the infinite landscape of a day stuck inside.

So too Toronto Pride’s largest events, like the Drag Ball, which in years past have drawn thousands, take on a new light – performed in bedrooms and hallways, providing glimpses into the private transformations that create the performers’ very public personas.

It’s in stripping away the slick artifice of years past that Virtual Pride has the potential to bring about something altogether different - a Pride that brings communities together not through a distant connection to thousands, but connects us one by one, a community of individuals celebrating our uniqueness together.