The fight for 2SLGBTQ+ rights in Canada is a story of love and resistance

Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by director Noam Gonick focuses on his film Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance.

We wanted Parade to be a call to arms: powerful, emboldening testimonies from dozens of radical queers combined with unearthed activist films, video art, NFB stock shots, news clips, personal archives and audio interviews — all interwoven into a kind of history of Canada's 2SLGBTQ+ movement. 

How do legacy films like this get made? It took a gutsy producer like Justine Pimlott — herself a queer filmmaker — to get us green-lit with enough time and space for editor Ricardo Acosta to craft the story. This was a deeply collaborative project. (During the process, there were a few experiences — you won't find them in the film — that I conjured to help me tackle the task.) 

While the title, Parade, speaks to Gay Pride in all its political and apolitical manifestations, for me, Parade is a subtle nod to the mystifying gay multi-hyphenate Jean Cocteau, whose ballet Parade inspired the first written use of the word "surrealism." Cocteau was addicted to opium, and his influence, sometimes scandalous, on the subsequent generation of French writers is the stuff of legend. 

So perhaps it's appropriate that Parade delves into problematic corners of the Canadian queer journey. One of the darkest was the 1977 murder of 12-year-old shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques — a crime which was used to tarnish the gay community. This was one of the trickiest chapters in our film to get right. My family spent that summer of 1977 in Toronto. As a kid, I'd spend my days wandering the Egyptian collection of the ROM, unaware of the killing on Yonge Street's "Sin Strip." In the Annex's Jean Sibelius Square, down the street from where we were staying, I was briefly kidnapped by a woman in a wide-brimmed hat. She took me to her apartment and asked me if I knew what love was. I surprisingly encountered Lilith years later while in film school. She immediately remembered the incident. She thought I said my name was "Name." 

Several chapters in Parade could easily be entire films on their own. One of these was "SILENCE = DEATH." When Queer Nation fought back during the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, my boyfriend at the time, Mark Turrell, and I found ourselves in an angry mob that threw peanuts at then-federal health minister Perrin Beatty in the Hotel Vancouver. I remember feeling sorry for Perrin — he looked so dejected, his shiny head shaped like a peanut. Mark would later die, surrounded by his parents and friends as we read passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He was a young artist who wanted to be the next Aubrey Beardsley. 

Pondering which milestones to include in Parade wasn't easy. Some stories didn't have enough archival visuals to support them, others had full films about them that Ricardo had already edited. One such story was that of Jim Egan (the subject of Jack & Jim), whose letters to the editor of various publications in the early 1960s and late-in-life Supreme Court challenge were groundbreaking. Shortly before he died, I found myself on the edge of Vancouver Island waltzing with Jim at a party alongside his partner, Jack; also present were a closeted lumberjack and a flamboyant hairdresser. The music was big-band swing, and I was a rave promoter, so our dancing was awkward. I held on to his thick polyester suit, trying to follow his back-and-forth steps while Jack looked on, laughing. Some of Jim's energy might have rubbed off on me that night. They lived in a house full of teacup chihuahuas. I regret not immortalizing those dogs on film.

After film school, I returned to the city of Winnipeg (Treaty 1), where I was born — not sure where one went to apply for a job as a filmmaker. I fell in with a crowd who were organizing a gathering of gay and lesbian Indigenous people in Beausejour, Man. They were about to change the world's lexicon with the introduction of the term "two-spirit." These were the people I played pinball with at Giovanni's Room, the local gay bar in Winnipeg: Connie Merasty, with the inimitable voice and extra-wide-rimmed glasses; Francis, who was born on the same day in the same year as me; Dave, who smiled all the time; and Dorlon (RIP), a Cher impersonator who scared me but looks great dancing in Parade in a vintage clip from David Adkin's Out: Stories of Lesbian and Gay Youth. 

I have a lesbian comic cousin named Robin Tyler. We met while researching Parade. She organized the March on Washington in 1987, was a friend of Harvey Milk and was one half of one of the first same-sex couples to get married (then divorced) in California. She tells great jokes in Parade.

Some of the visual material in the film came from my own archives. Elle Flanders commissioned me to make a Jumbotron video for Toronto Pride in 2008. No Safe Words was supposed to be about Abu Ghraib and the hazing homoerotics of conquest, torture and war. But the piece transitioned into an exposé of police in Pride. When I filmed documentation of the installation from the vantage point of Alexander Chapman's apartment overlooking Yonge Street, we were gobsmacked by the presence of squad cars and men in uniform. Alexander is also in Parade. 

Some of the interviews in the film feel like you're eavesdropping on conversations we've been having for years. Others, like the one with Rodney Diverlus from Black Lives Matter Toronto, were with people I met two seconds before the interview began, walking through the studio door. 

While conducting interviews, it's your fevered memories that enable you to sit across from formidable world-changers and ask them to share their own incandescence.

Parade screens at Hot Docs 2024 on April 24, 26 and May 3. More information is available by clicking here.