On Sunday, I was out by 1:30 lugging my 70-200mm lens, sometimes swapping with the 50mm Sigma art lens. I had a Hoya 4X ND filter on it to cut down glare because I had broken the lens hood and had no other way to shield the lens from glare. However, that was probably a mistake as it rendered things too slow for street photography and I ended up losing some excellent opportunities to blurriness. Starting out, the sun was bright overhead, which makes for high contrast, faces cast in deep shadows, generally not optimal for this kind of photography. But you work with what you have. Light reflected from buildings can produce interesting effects. Also, the brilliant weather tends to make people happier, so expressions are more exuberant.
I wandered down Church Street, a bit like a fish swimming upstream, as most people were walking in the other direction to Bloor. There, I discovered Wendy Williams Watt’s @bigloveball and photographed people writing messages on the ball.
At 2:45, I met Tamiko and the McCarthy Tétrault contingent at the Harold Town Park where they were gathering. I had no intention of walking with them, but wanted to take a few photos of them before resuming my own adventures. After that, I retraced my steps down to Church and Bloor, back to the marshaling area as that was the only way to cross Bloor Street, then worked my way along the south side of Bloor to Yonge. One of my first truly proud shots of the day happened in the parking lot on the southwest corner of Bloor and Church where a young black guy was watching the parade and wearing his shorts rather low on his hips, so low, in fact, that he was baring his ass. I didn’t check around the front to see what else he was baring. I pushed my way through the crowd down the west side of Yonge Street, sometimes ducking behind the buildings when things got too crowded. After the Raptors win and parade, I’ve had enough of throwing myself into densely packed crowds with nowhere to turn. At Dundas, I went left, then up to Gould and out to Church for another turn up Church to Bloor. The crowds on Church were almost as bad as on Yonge. Presumably, when people finished marching in the parade (or dancing or strutting or roller blading or whatever), a lot of them drifted over to Church for the after party.
As a side note, because of an incident in Hamilton perpetrated by yahoo redneck homophobic haters, there was concern expressed in media that there might be incidents here, too. However, I didn’t notice much of anything. Last year, people stood on Victoria and Dundas holding big “You’re all Going to Hell” signs, but those people and those sentiments eluded me this year.
Texting Tamiko on Church, it seems the McCarthy Tétrault group had moved to the marshaling area on Bloor but still hadn’t joined the parade. That was after 5 o’clock, more than 3 hours after the parade had started! There was time for me to join them. The upshot is that I got to march in the parade without having to stand around doing nothing for hours. So I repeated my walk down Yonge Street, this time on the other side of the barrier, shooting the crowd screaming at me. A funny thing happened. When I walked down Yonge the first time, all my photos were in black and white. But when I joined the parade and walked down a second time, all my photos were in colour. It was just like in the Wizard of Oz.
I find it difficult to lose myself in the moment. I don’t yell woohoo. I don’t whistle, cheer, chant. I don’t leap to my feet at concerts with spontaneous applause. No Bravos! No Encores! No breaking into dance. It isn’t that I don’t feel it. But the photographer in me watches wide-eyed in silence. By habit, I’m an observer, not a participant. The writer in me maintains a running commentary, the divided consciousness, standing both within and without the scene. So it came as a surprise when one of my fellow marchers told me I was beaming. The fact that I was enjoying myself was obvious on my face despite my ingrained habit.
As we approached Carlton, my friend, Ron, let out a yell. I turned to him and saw that he was pointing up. We were standing in front of the Marriott Hotel. I looked to where he was pointing and there was a mutual friend and his buddies all standing on a balcony, all shirtless and waving down to us. It was one of those odd moments when the universe takes a quarter turn to the left. There we stood, Ron and I, arms around each other, two straight guys in the Pride Parade, while overhead and cheering us on was a balcony full of gay men. Is this illustrative of the contention by some that Pride has been watered down to the point where it is meaningless? Or can we find something else here? Maybe this is an extension of the queering project that dissolves well-defined and socially constructed categories, and sets in their place uncategorizeable gestures whose only figure is generosity. I’d like to think so.
