![\"Ron](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/0b93d0fed05827eaa13c425551685735.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\nFrom protests to parades, Edmonton has celebrated Pride for the past 40 years.<\/p>\n
Ron Byers, a queer historian and Pride promoter with Pride Edmonton, spoke to CBC\u2019s Edmonton AM on Friday to go through the history of these celebrations and why they\u2019re still important.<\/p>\n
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
How did Pride get started in Edmonton?<\/p>\n
A lot of people think they go back to the Stonewall Inn riots in 1969. But here in Edmonton, we really didn’t start celebrating Pride until 1980, when our local Roman Catholic queer group \u2014 Dignity Edmonton \u2014 started having some picnics out at a little camp just east of the city.<\/p>\n
Then in 1981, our first visible appearance of Pride happened after the Pisces bathhouse raid.<\/p>\n
Local celebrity and former city councillor Michael Phair and a bunch of friends entered a raft in the Sourdough Raft Race.<\/p>\n
Phair and his friends built the raft with big pink triangle sails on it. The pink triangle was a symbol of the gay community in those days. It dated back to when the Nazis identified queer people by putting pink triangles on their jackets.<\/p>\n
Then in 1982, we actually had our first formal Pride celebrations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Historian Ron Byers worked at the Pisces Health Spa at the time of the raid. (Radio-Canada)<\/p>\n
How have Pride events evolved over the years since that first parade in 1982?\u00a0<\/p>\n
At first, it wasn\u2019t a parade. They were just gatherings and evolved in different ways.<\/p>\n
They started out as a day, and then became a weekend. In 1983, there were actually 10 days of events scattered throughout the city.<\/p>\n
The first parade happened in 1991, when a group of people led by Phair and the late Maureen Irwin, a lesbian activist, marched informally down Whyte Avenue.<\/p>\n
They were joined by some folks who actually put paper bags over their heads because they didn’t want to be outed. You could actually be fired for being gay, so they had to be very protective.<\/p>\n
That was done over the next 16 years until 1998, when another local organization that spearheaded these events branched off and created a new organization called the Edmonton Pride Festival Society. They held their first Pride in 1999.<\/p>\n
Then the Edmonton Pride Festival Society evolved and put on events which gradually communed into one big celebration in a central location. The parades became more formalized until 2018.<\/p>\n
LISTEN | Historian Ron Byers breaks down Edmonton’s history of Pride:<\/p>\n
From 2018 to 2025, there wasn\u2019t a Pride parade in Edmonton. What happened?\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2018, a group of folks decided to protest because they felt the Black and trans communities weren’t being fairly represented in Pride celebrations.<\/p>\n
That year, the parade was going down Whyte Avenue. The protesters stopped the parade. They would not let the parade continue until the Edmonton Pride Festival Society agreed to their demands.<\/p>\n
Over the following 10 months, they spoke with the two groups involved and some of their demands were just legally incapable of being granted.<\/p>\n
The Pride Festival Society gets grants from the province, the city and the Government of Canada to pay the cost of the festivals. They wanted some of that money for their organizations, which is not possible.<\/p>\n
The Pride Festival Society is legally bound by their commitments and their funders to use the grants for what they applied for.<\/p>\n
The groups said they could not move forward unless they got that money and they could not guarantee that the parade would not be stopped again. In 2019, Pride was cancelled.<\/p>\n
As a result of that, local groups stepped up to the plate. In particular, Evolution Wonderlounge, which was in downtown on 103rd Street at the time, blocked off 103rd Street and had a great big street party in 2019 and again in 2020.<\/p>\n
Why do you think it’s still important to have pride celebrations today?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Look at our political scene right now, in particular here in Alberta. We are unlike any other province. Not only do we want to separate from Canada, but we also want to put our transgender people back in the closet. Unfortunately, our government is now doing their best to take away our rights.<\/p>\n
When I came out in 1968, it was illegal to be gay. People who were gay like me could be arrested and put in jail. I have seen our rights evolve.<\/p>\n
In 1998, Canada ruled we should be included in the Human Rights Act, but the province was lagging behind. They didn’t include identified gender identity and sexual orientation until 2015. Here we are again, rolling things back to what was happening 40 years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From protests to parades, Edmonton has celebrated Pride for the past 40 years. Ron Byers, a queer historian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":721150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[49,48,23752,260698,260697,33829,260696,260699],"class_list":["post-721149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-edmonton","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-edmonton","tag-edmonton-pride","tag-michael-phair","tag-pride","tag-pride-celebrations","tag-pride-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/721150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}