When was the first gay pride parade in toronto
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During Edmonton’s first pride parade in the 1980s, people wore paper bags on their heads for fear of being “outed” as LGBTQ2S. In the same period, pride parades were founded across the country. Over 4000 people marched in Toronto’s streets to protest Operation Soap, and LGBTQ2S activists subsequently initiated Toronto’s first pride march in 1981 called the “Gay Freedom Rally” in response to police targeting and brutality and politicians’ neglect of LGBTQ2S people. Police officers inflicted violence, verbal abuse, and property damage and arrested 304 people (Guidotto 2011). In 1981, during Operation Soap, Toronto police targeted four gay bathhouses. Over the years, gay liberation and transgender revolutionary groups formed, demanding an end to the criminalization, incarceration and police abuse of LGBTQ2S people, basic human rights in terms of housing and healthcare, and the liberation of all people’s sexuality and gender from harmful heteropatriarchal systems. Over the next weeks, LGBTQ2S people rioted in the streets of New York. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera-were instrumental in initiating and sustaining a riot that broke out in the days that followed. The story of Stonewall is imbued with myths, but what is known is several transgender women of colour-including Marsha P. In June of 1969, the police again raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar that was frequented by gay men, sex workers, drag queens, and transgender and gender-nonconforming people. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people and drag kings and drag queens reported that the police were routinely violent in the raids and sexually assaulted many of the patrons they arrested. The New York police frequently raided gay bars and establishments in the city. The 1969 Stonewall Inn raids and riots are infamous in American LGBTQ2S history.