Accompanying the events for Canada Pride was the visual branding that Tourisme Montr\u00e9al used in an attempt to attract socially conscious travellers. For example, large advertisements were installed in the arrivals section of Pierre-Elliot-Trudeau International Airport advertising the city\u2019s impending birthday. Emblazoned with the slogan \u201cVive,\u201d one such advertisement features two young men walking with their arms linked. Here Montr\u00e9al is promoted as a welcom\u00ading and open city where gay (male) couples can walk down a street and show affection, though notably they face away from the camera\u200a\u2014\u200atheir facelessness renders them generic, representing a normalized form of gay male identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"Cormier_Boules](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO01_Glenn_Cormier_Boulesroses.jpg\")
Les boules roses<\/em>, St.-Catherine East, Montr\u00e9al, 2011-2016.
Photo: Marc Cramer, courtesy of SDC du Village, \u00c9clairage Public, Rig-Rite Productions, Les productions du Grand Bambou, les Services EXP
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Visible in the background are the well-known boules roses<\/em> (pink balls), a public art intervention installed every summer along the stretch of St. Catherine Street East that encompasses the Gay Village area of Montr\u00e9al. Local businesses build patios on the sidewalks and in the street and participatory art installations are erected. Down this closed-off portion of St. Catherine, large metal poles are fastened in place and strings of pink balls are hung across the street, to create an enclosed pedestrian mall. The installation has become synonymous with the area, both locally and internationally; in the words of the installation\u2019s designer, Claude Cormier, it represents \u201csomething wonderfully gay!\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Richard Burnett, \u201cMontr\u00e9al\u2019s Iconic \u2018Boules Roses\u2019 in the Gay Village,\u201d Tourisme Montr\u00e9al<\/em>, April 26, 2016, <http:\/\/bit.ly\/2srYxq8>.<\/span> This past summer, the intervention was slightly modified: the pink balls have been replaced by balls in eighteen colours, creating a gradient along the length of the street representing the stripes of the gay pride flag, and titled 18 Shades of Gay<\/em>. This form of aesthetic symbolism linked to the pride flag transformed the entire stretch into a visual manifestation of gay culture woven into the urban fabric of Montr\u00e9al. However, this raises questions about inclusion and exclusion: in this rarefied space of the Gay Village, where identity is linked to capitalist consumption and party culture, who is included within this figuration of pride writ large on the urban environment? And what forms of exclusion need to happen in order for such consumptive cultures to exist as officially sanctioned by the city?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n On the Fiert\u00e9 Montr\u00e9al website, a banner emblazoned with the winged angel from the top of the Monument to Sir George-\u00c9tienne Cartier in Mount Royal Park was represented with the rainbow colours of the pride flag transposed into its wings. This mapping of gay identity onto a piece of public sculpture dedicated to one of the fathers of Canadian Confederation was particularly striking\u200a\u2014\u200ahere, the mythical foundation of the nation, promoted with tourist dollars in mind, refigured the founding of the nation as aligned with LGBT identity. In effect, Montr\u00e9al branded itself as gay.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Of note, the monument also features an engraving with the words \u201cAvant tout, soyons Candiens\u201d or \u201cAbove all, be Canadian.\u201d See: \u201cMonument \u00e0 Sir George-\u00c9tienne Cartier,\u201d Art Public Ville de Montr\u00e9al<\/em>, <bit.ly\/2tjG6UH>.<\/span> The more pressing question here is how the coupling of LGBT identity to the formation of the nation-state promotes inclusion inasmuch as it is exclusive\u200a\u2014\u200anot all those who fall under the signifier of LGBT are incorporated. Integral here is the concept of homonationalism. In Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times<\/em>, Jasbir Puar locates homonationalism as sexual exceptionalism in which queer individuals are incorporated into the Western nation-state, in order to cordon off sexual citizenship to bodies that are properly defined as belonging, and thus demarcating the bodies that do not. Homonationalism, Puar continues, \u201ccorresponds with the coming out of the exceptionalism of the American empire. Further, this brand of homosexuality operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual subjects.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n This opposition falls between white, secular hetero- and homosexuals, on the one hand, and the racialized bodies that are placed under the frame of homophobia and religious extremism, on the other. For example, Puar observes that queer Muslims are caught between religious communities, which are designated as homophobic, and queer secularism, with its attendant racism.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Ibid., 13\u200a\u2014\u200a15.<\/span> However, she provides two major caveats with this formulation. First, homonationalism does not counter the daily existence of violence that queer people face. Second, homonationalism is not a homogeneous force; rather, homonationalisms \u201care partial, fragmentary, uneven formations, implicated in the pendular momentum of inclusion and exclusion, some dissipating as quickly as they appear.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Ibid., 10.<\/span> Although one might be tempted to map this formulation of homonationalism onto Canada Pride, Puar\u2019s conception of homonationalism came out of the U.S. war on terror and the presidency of George W. Bush and cannot so easily be applied in a Canadian or Qu\u00e9bec context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Returning to the idea of representation, LGBT liberation has been represented through artistic and curatorial interventions that are part and parcel of pride events. For example, What it Means to be Seen: Photography and Queer Visibility<\/em>, held at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto during the summer of 2014, coincided with the city\u2019s hosting of World Pride. Curated by Sophie Hackett, the exhibition consisted of archival photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, the early days of the lesbian and gay liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s (up to the present), and it focused on the politics of visibility.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Paul Roth reinforces this theme of visibility when he remarks, \u201cJournalists, artists, amateurs, and activists have used photography to build and sustain social bonds by sharing private experience, recording and preserving history, and celebrating sexuality and gender identities constrained by dominant social mores and legal prohibition\u200a\u2014\u200ain other words, revealing what might otherwise be hidden from sight.\u201d Paul Roth, \u201cDirector\u2019s Forward,\u201d in What it Means to be Seen: Photography and Queer Visibility\/Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases<\/em> (Toronto: Ryerson Image Centre, 2014), 1.<\/span> As Hackett states in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, \u201cBasement parties and street demonstrations, police mug shots and intimate portraits of couples, battered or diseased bodies and parading exhibitionists\u200a\u2014\u200athese images express joy and rage, they forge impressions of depraved illegality or benign normality, and they situate gayness in attitude or in the flesh.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Sophie Hackett, \u201cWhat It Means to be Seen: Photography and Queer Visibility,\u201d in What it Means to be Seen: Photography and Queer Visibility\/Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases<\/em> (Toronto: Ryerson Image Centre, 2014), 9.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n What is important to highlight in Hackett\u2019s statement is the ways in which histories of liber\u00adation are often accompanied by histories of violence. Although it is tempting to reflect on these images as examples of the past, complacency, particularly in the face of the inequalities and marginalization that queer and trans people of colour continue to face, is particularly dangerous. This raises the question of visibility: when can making oneself visible be politically potent and when might it lead to potential violence? In her 1993 book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance<\/em>, Peggy Phelan explains: \u201cVisibility and invisibility are crucially bound; invisibility polices visibility and in this specific sense functions as the ascendant term in the binary. Gaining visibility for the politically under-represented without scrutinizing the power of who is required to display what to whom is an impoverished political agenda.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance<\/em> (London: Routledge, 1993), 26.<\/span> In queer artistic praxis, the power of, and right to, representation is repeatedly served up for critique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By reflecting on this year\u2019s sesquicentennial anniversary of Canadian confederation, Kent Monkman\u2019s paintings from his series Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience<\/em> stand as a potent challenge to mythmaking, both of Canada as a nation and of the place of queer Indigenous identity. In The Daddies<\/em> (2016), <\/em>Monkman portrays his alter ego, Miss Chief, perched on a Hudson Bay Company blanket and posing for the attendees of the Charlottetown Conference of 1864, directly mimicking Robert Harris\u2019s 1884 paint\u00ading The Fathers of Confederation<\/em>. The title, like many in the series, plays on gay slang for older men, while placing the drag figure of Miss Chief front and centre. Pointing to Miss Chief\u2019s ambivalent position in the room, Monkman notes, \u201cShe\u2019s trying to get a seat at the table, or she could be a hired entertainer.\u201d13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Robert Everett-Green, \u201cKent Monkman: A trickster with a cause crashes Canada\u2019s 150th birthday party,\u201d The Globe and Mail<\/em>, January 7, 2017, <tgam.ca\/2ipVB7A>.<\/span> The retroactive insertion of Miss Chief into a key moment in Canadian mythology points to the structuring absences in this national story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Likewise, returning to Montr\u00e9al\u2019s hosting of Canada Pride this summer, the question of the structuring absences in the homonational frame of the nation remains in question. The promotion of Canada as a \u201csafe haven\u201d is inevitably tied to \u201cthe erasure of violences and on benevolent colonial practices\u201d14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - Suzanne Lenon and OmiSoore H. Dryden, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d in Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging<\/em> (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015): 11.<\/span> that has structured the nation from its very beginnings. If inclusion under a lib\u00aderal framework of human rights is what Canada Pride\/Fiert\u00e9 Montr\u00e9al is supposed to represent, its cursory acknowledgment of the location of Montr\u00e9al on unceded Kanien\u2019k\u00e9ha:ka territory on its main website,15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 15 <\/a> - \u201cFiert\u00e9 Canada | Canada Pride,\u201d Fiert\u00e9 Montr\u00e9al<\/em>, <www.fierteMontr\u00e9alpride.com\/en\/>.<\/span> perhaps represents a small step toward a much larger conversation, one that has been thrown wide open through Monkman\u2019s critiques of Canadian nationalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, there is a danger in not taking such critiques far enough. If one is to heed the critiques of queer theorists such as Lisa Duggan who argue against an assimilationist mode in an LGBT politics of human rights,16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 16 <\/a> - See Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy<\/em> (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).<\/span> the systems by which such rights are gained need to be \u00adchanged wholesale. Likewise, the nationalist project into which Canada Pride has assimilated itself needs to be continually called to account: nation\u00adalism is inevitably tied to who does and does not belong, and in allying LGBT identity with a neoliberalism under the nation state, those inclusions and exclusions are amplified. <\/p>\n![\"PrideMontreal\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO01_Glenn_PrideMontreal.jpg\")
Canada Pride<\/em>, screenshot, 2017.
Photo: website of Montreal Pride<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Fiert\u00e9MTL_Banniere_aeroportPET\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO01_Glenn_FierteMTL_Banniere_aeroportPET.jpg\")
Banner, Pierre-Eliott-Trudeau Airport, Montr\u00e9al, 2017.
Photo: \u00a9 Instagram Fiert\u00e9 Montr\u00e9al
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Monkman_The](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO01_Glenn_Monkman_TheDaddies-scaled.jpg\")
The Daddies<\/em>, 2016.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n