Building Our Own Power: Five Years After The Brawl At Hamilton Pride

From Embers

Five summers ago on June 15th 2019, a group of homophobic “street preachers” and their white nationalist allies attempted to enter and disrupt the annual Hamilton Pride celebrations at Gage Park.

Based on experience the previous year at Hamilton Pride and elsewhere in southern Ontario, anarchists and radical queers were expecting this and had organized to counter them. Wearing pink t-shirts over their faces and carrying a 30’ wide 9’ tall black banner nicknamed the Black Hole, the Pride Defenders confronted the bigots and formed a wall between them and the Pride festival.

The situation in the park quickly escalated into an all-out brawl, with several Pride Defenders sustaining serious injuries. Despite the chaotic scene, the banner held and the haters accepted a police escort out of the park.

Much of the fight was captured on right-wing livestreams and it created an immediate political scandal. The Pride Committee blamed the police for failing to intervene and the Police Board announced an independent investigation. For their part, the Hamilton Police attempted to frame the anarchists as outside agitators, attempting to link the (relatively popular) Pride Defence to the (very publicly unpopular) Locke Street affair from the previous year, where anarchists had smashed windows of gentrifying businesses along Locke Street.

Anarchists who were still on conditions related to that earlier demonstration were targeted and arrested in the days following. Our guest today, Cedar, had her parole pulled ostensibly for participating in the fight – when it became clear that she wasn’t even at Gage Park that day, the narrative changed to one of “incitement.”

The police strategy to regain control backfired and the repression kicked off a month-long campaign to #FreeCedar and drop the charges against all Pride Defenders. The city was covered in graffiti and posters and there were several rowdy anti-police demonstrations, along with solidarity actions around the world. For in-depth analysis and coverage during this time, see our show notes for links to various statements and reports on North Shore as well as our two previous episodes on the topic.

Today we’re sharing an interview with Cedar for the five year anniversary of the brawl and its aftermath. We discuss some of the ways anarchists in Hamilton have tried intervening in Pride over the years, the independent report and police recuperation, the problem with hate crime legislation, the worrying increase in anti-queer and anti-trans attacks from the post-Convoy far right in Canada, a predicted wave of reaction following the next federal election, and what we can do now to start preparing and practicing community defence.

With music from Deep Sixed