In the documentary Parade, Gonick takes viewers on an emotional journey through time, exploring the moments that sparked Canada’s 2SLGBTQI+ movement…
By Stephan Petar
After making its world premiere at the 2025 Hot Docs Festival, Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance is now available to screen across Canada on all National Film Board (NFB) platforms. The documentary spans decades of queer activism, examining the moments that sparked Canada’s 2SLGBTQI+ movement and honouring the activists and elders whose resistance led to the rights we have today.
For the film’s writer and director, Noam Gonick, the documentary is a resource for activists of all ages. “I look at the film as a guidebook: easily accessible history of how these battles were fought and won,” he tells IN Magazine. “We may need to fight them again. So, it is a refresher on what was done in the past and what strategies worked.”
The film is a mix of rarely seen archival footage and images, as well as first-person accounts by individuals like Jearld Moldenhauer (founder of Glad Day Bookshop), Jeanine Maes (the last woman in a psychiatric hospital for lesbianism) and Dr. Myra Laramee (an Indigenous Elder whose vision revealed the term ‘two-spirit’). It covers activism across the 2SLGBTQI+ spectrum and those of queer Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities in Canada.
While it may seem impossible to express such a wide perspective of stories in 90 minutes, Gonick and his team crafted a film that takes viewers on an emotional journey that illustrates what happens when people take a stand.
We spoke to the writer and director about searching the archives, crafting the narrative and what he hopes people will take away from it.
Digging into the past
When Gonick was asked by producer Justine Pimlott if showcasing the history of queer Canada was too big for one film, he took some time to think about it. “The next day I said, ‘I think we should try,’” he says. From there, they embarked on a journey into archives, personal collections and the works of artists and filmmakers in various media in search of the stories to tell.
To locate these materials, his team turned to Rebecka Sheffield, executive director of The ArQuives at the time, who has spent decades cataloguing queer history. “Rebecka knows where every queer film clip, photo brochure, graphic, text piece, button and T-shirt is,” Gonick explains. “Rebecka knows every archive of every university, of every city, of every township in Canada.… Rebecka knows where everything is.”
Sheffield, along with other researchers and people on the project, helped identify key visuals and searched for the individuals at the centre of those defining moments. “We had to go overseas to find the last lesbian to be in a psychiatric ward [Jeanine Maes] – using a long-distance ex-lovers’ network,” Gonick says.
The array of visuals used will make viewers emotional. They’re beautiful and heartbreaking, evoking feelings of love, hope and power mixed with fear. They feature handmade signs reading “Gays Demand Equal Rights” and “Out of the Closet. Into the Streets.” They showcase landmarks that are still present and central to protests today, reminding us that most of those demonstrations were not that long ago.
One story that stuck with Gonick from this research was related to the Sex Garage Raid in Montreal, where police instigated an attack that injured dozens and led to several arrests. While he was not there during the raids and subsequent protests, he visited the city often in that period and had friends there. He recalls watching the footage in the editing room and not realizing what a huge moment it was. “Our lead visual archivist found all-new raw camera tapes of the police attack on this demonstration in broad daylight,” he shares. “It was such a vicious assault, and I remember leaving the edit suite quite shaken.
Crafting a full-bodied narrative
Taking over the walls at the NFB offices, Gonick and the crew posted dozens of colour-coded flash cards examining the content they had. The decisions on what milestones would make Parade wasn’t easy. He got input from Sheffield and other researchers but, in most cases, it came down to what they had. “Sometimes there was a great story, fabulous storytellers, but no footage,” he says. “We weren’t doing re-creations. We were only relying on archival. So, if it didn’t exist, then we couldn’t tell that story.”
Gonick also wanted to highlight stories not often told and introduce Canadians to new queer activists. “Chris Bearchell, who is dead, didn’t have a film about her, and we felt that she was really important and that people needed to learn about her,” he explains about the activist and only woman on the editorial collective of The Body Politic, Canada’s leading gay liberation periodical in the 1970s and ’80s. “Those are the kinds of editorial decisions you make: trying to tell the history in a new way with some new people.”
Viewers will likely know many of the stories, such as the Toronto Bathhouse Raids, the rise of The Body Politic and the HIV crisis. But while they are stories often heard, Gonick weaves new voices into those pivotal moments, making them fresh.
While the film can be heavy at times, especially with visuals of police brutality, Gonick is able to balance it with humour and love. “Everywhere I could, I tried to get that gay humour, camp sensibility put into the story,” he says.
This light-heartedness allowed the director to create a full-bodied story, taking viewers on an emotional journey. “When people read about a gay history documentary, they might immediately go to the sad stories,” he says. “There are a lot of them in this film, but I think it’s important to take people to heights of giggles and laughs as well as tears.”
The fight today
The film concludes with footage from the recent 1 Million March 4 Children, described as a parental rights movement protesting the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in curricula. While this warns of the next threat for 2SLGBTQI+ people, specifically trans youth, it is also a moment of hope, showcasing the counter protests and the next generation of queer activists. “I felt we needed to put our focus there right now,” Gonick says about the decision.
Parade is not just a retrospective of the battles queer people have fought – it gives the community inspiration to encourage voices to speak out and suggests strategies that can be adapted to the current context to fight misinformation. These are powerful tools, and also remind us of why history is important to document, share and make accessible to the masses. As filmmaker John Greyson says near the film’s conclusion, “History matters because of what it can do for us today.”
You can stream Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance on all National Film Board (NFB) platforms.
STEPHAN PETAR is a born and raised Torontonian, known for developing lifestyle, entertainment, travel, historical and 2SLGBTQI+ content. He enjoys wandering the streets of any destination he visits, where he’s guaranteed to discover something new or meet someone who will inspire his next story.
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