June is, at this point, far behind us, though for many municipalities Pride is still recent in the memory, or otherwise yet to come. Should you have had the pleasure or opportunity this summer of attending any pride parade marginally larger than that of our own beloved Peterborough, you’ll know that Toronto Pride, Fierté Montréal, and other such spectacles often attract the benevolence of any number of high-profile private and public sector sponsors.
While such cynical corporate shows of compassion often draw the ire of incensed queers everywhere, no one has yet, to my knowledge, seen fit to ask: what is objectively the best corporate, government, or otherwise in-poor-taste pride float?
I and Arthur have answered this call, and shall endeavour to answer this question to the best of our abilities with a rigorously-researched objective, quantifiable metric. Assessing each float for four criteria, they will be awarded points out of a total eleven—that being the same number of letters as the longest expanded “LGBT” acronym I could find.
These categories respectively seeks to appraise:
Activism. What material change does this group's inclusion at pride effect?
Intention. Regardless of whether or not they succeeded in said activism, did they mean well?
Duplicity. If not, did their presence serve to obfuscate something? Did their CEO donate to the Conservative Party? Are those rainbow t-shirts manufactured by child labourers in Laos? Each point for duplicity will be subtracted from the cumulative total!
Swag. The greatest staple of every good Pride Parade: Free shit. Do they have any? Is it good? A good freebie can easily excuse even the most cynical, ill-intentioned Pride appearance! The hypothetical “10” here is something which is both valuable and might implicate the company giving it out in a Twitter discourse—a Bombardier-branded rainbow vibrator, for instance.
The sum of Activism, Intention, and Swag will be tabulated and the Duplicity score subtracted, with the resulting number being divided by 3 to express, as a percentage, the Cummulative Upturn Metric (C.U.M.)—an objective measure of the quality of life improvement to queer people resulting from said group’s involvement at Pride. Like any queer-owned not-for-profit, we relish in using deeply inappropriate acronyms when discussing matters of serious importance.
Science rules!
The local Humane Society of any city is likely to be a hit at any pride parade by the simple expedient of them being the float that has pets with them. If anything helps to humanize a historically marginalized group it's demonstrating that they like heckin’ doggos too!
Sure, implying that all queer people are zoophiles might be the most recent of a series of far-right scare tactics, but then again, have you considered that catgirls deserve rights too? I get the whole litter box thing has made pet-play a little bit of a taboo topic, though while most gay people are content to insist they’re “pet parents” in a completely “normal” way, I make no apologies for the fact that my girlfriend wears cat ears, a collar, and sleeps in a crate at the foot of my bed!
She may still piss on the floor occasionally, but we’re working on it!
So, whether you’re looking to adopt or looking for someone to adopt you, remember that your local humane society thinks that love is love, especially if there’s leashes involved!
Activism: 4/11
Intention: 8/11
Duplicity: 1/11
Swag: 0/11
CUM Total: 33%
P.S. Remember to get your catgirl neutered! Someone’s gotta chop those balls off, and with the way the Ontario Public Health system keeps getting slashed it’s looking like that mobile spay/neuter clinic might just be the best option. The last thing we’d want is a sudden increase in the number of IDM producers or competitive Guilty Gear players.
Why exactly a company who is primarily known for cheap auto insurance is doing outreach to a demographic of notoriously inept drivers is beyond me, though to their credit, CAA generally dumps a bunch of money into their parade float (#ally).
Honestly, if you’re like me and had to have your ID changed, like, seven times because you did your name change, sex designation and birth certificate re-issue all at separate times, a CAA membership is a good investment purely for the fact they’ll take your passport photos for free.
Whether or not you get misgendered by the person taking them is another story entirely.
Activism: 2/11
Intention: 5/11
Duplicity: 3/11
Swag: 4/11
CUM Total: 24%
As much as the gig economy has furnished a new generation of queer people with the luxury to choose a hyper-niche profession best suited to them, it also generally incurs inescapable poverty by virtue of the fact that Etsy resin-earing artisans and dog mediums are not especially in demand in the current labour market.
Enter companies the like of Skip, who have centralized the once syndicated profession of pizza delivery driver into a nightmarish do-it-yourself multi-level marketing scheme where in exchange for buying into their tech infrastructure they get to take a 30% cut off the top!
Considering many working-class queer people are too poor to afford a car, or don't have a valid licence because of any number of structural obstacles, the inclusion of this particular delivery company somewhat sours the taste of Pride. If Skip the Dishes is for anyone, maybe it's for the nepo-baby bisexual OCADu students subsistting off their trust funds—they’re part of the community too.
Activism: 3/11
Intention: 6/11
Duplicity: 7/11
Swag: 0/11
CUM Total: 6%
Aside from somehow becoming a fixture of once-nascent meme culture by virtue of its insipid jingle (which has over 18 million Spotify streams, by the way), the Home Depot is probably best remembered for donating obscene amounts of money to the Republican party during the 2016 American Federal Election!
Probably not the best look when you’re trying to extole yourself as some bastion of gay rights, though in fairness, it was the American parent company that did so as opposed to the Home Depot Canada, which surely clears them of any and all culpability.
Be that as it may, were we to cancel Home Depot, lesbians everywhere would be bereft of good cruising spots. Whether Home Depot is woke or broke then—it’s impossible to say.
Activism: 5/11
Intention: 5/11
Duplicity: 8/11
Swag: 0/11
CUM Total: 6%
Can I level with you guys? I used to work at Loblaws. Yes, it did suck, but as much as I didn’t like it, employment at this particular food cabal did afford me the opportunity to partake of the time honoured gay tradition of gossiping with your co-workers.
That job was unionized, which I liked, and it also had a no chase policy, so I got to let people walk out of the store with several hundred dollars in merchandise.
That said, fuck Galen Weston and all his underlings and shareholders. NoName© soup should not cost $14.99 or whatever the fuck it costs now. We used to be a real country—a fucked up deficit-running colonial hellhole of a country, but a real one nonetheless.
Activism: 6/11
Intention: 3/11
Duplicity: 9/11
Swag: 0/11
CUM Total: 0%
Remember the thing I mentioned earlier about queer poverty and the gig economy? Well the military don’t half make Skip the Dishes look like a charity.
If Skip merely enables poverty, the army and its sistren tendrils downright prey upon it. Sure you’ll get a free education if you enlist, but don’t forget that it comes at the expense of two years’ service and a little thing called “Your Soul."
Just because you think whatever country our “Peacekeeping” forces are currently occupying stone gay people to death or whatever doesn’t mean it's right for us to drone strike their kids. Go listen to Skinny Puppy and start bike locking yourself to the US Embassy or something.
Activism: 5/11
Intention: 3/11
Duplicity: 11/11
Swag: 0/11
CUM Total: -9%
In a world of pinkwashed labour extraction projects and rainbow-painted stinger missiles, Justice Canada is not the most evil, but they’re not the least evil either.
Considering I’ve only ever seen two episodes of Orange is the New Black, and I was rather more preoccupied with fingering someone at the time, I’m not as invested in the Justice system as your average queer woman.
That being said, I do enjoy a good ol’ doomscroll of @mugshawtys, so maybe queer incarceration ain’t such a bad thing after all.
Activism: 2/11
Intention: 4/11
Duplicity: 7/11
Swag: 0/11
CUM Total: -3%
Listen, for all everyone says about how there shouldn’t be any cops at Pride, I think they’re missing the bigger picture. Pride has always been about cops.
The Stonewall Riots—what most people mean when they invoke “the first Pride”—was literally about trans women throwing bricks at the NYPD.
Now because of wokeism and the other things this is no longer allowed to happen—cops instead are relegated to walking in a parade that is no longer about them, or else standing by the side of the road scowling, while trans women are basically non-existent at Pride unless they’re walking with the Communist Party or DJing for TD Bank. All that because they stoned some pigs—Goddess forbid women have hobbies!
I for one think it's really sad that queer people have become so down on the idea of cops at Pride, and if elected Grand Marshal of any local pride committee next year I promise to add competitive Cop Stoning to the Twinks vs. Dolls Olympics schedule.
Activism: 1/11
Intention: 2/11
Duplicity: 9/11
Swag: 0/11
CUM Total: -18%
As Pride floats go, those belonging to Banks are usually the biggest. It's interesting that as the poverty rate increases in the so-called first world still feeling the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis, the Banks seem to make more money despite everyone else having less.
Some business textbooks claim this is a result of a phenomenon called the “Sonic Inflation Rule,” wherein after a cataclysmic debt crisis some sort of invisible hand intervenes to assure an equitable distribution of wealth, causing inflation to skyrocket in the interim. This is a totally normal thing and has nothing to do with billionaires hoarding wealth.
Anyway, in the last three years this phenomenon has conspired to cause inflation to rise in some cases as high as 34%. I’m not an economist, so I’d recommend you google “sonic inflation rule 34” to learn from a source more reputable than I.
Anyway, RBC was a massive sponsor of that MLM the Kielburger brothers ran and also have huge financial stakes in the tar sands. The people burning the planet have names and addresses, and at least some of them are attached to RBC Directors!
Further, the exorbitant amount of fees they charge just to maintain a chequing account with a real shitty interest rate only serves to compound the endemic queer poverty certain aforementioned parties are already complicit in! At this point you might as well take out all your money and buy gold bullion. That, or just stuff your mattress with cash.
Three cheers for debt slavery!
Activism: 0/11
Intention: 1/11
Duplicity: 11/11
Swag: 2/11
CUM Total: -24%
Most video games conspire to, in their boss fights, present you with a series of bosses escalating in both plot significance and difficulty as you approach the final, cumulative “Big Bad.” This storytelling device has also been popularized by such television series as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, and the one season of Sherlock people think is good.
Readers, I’m here to tell you that the Liberal Party is the Big Bad of Pride Parades.
Basically everything on this list is, to some extent, their fault—they’re literally the government in power right now! If Justin was serious about gay rights he would take suggestions from me personally, but he’s not now, isn’t he?
Personally, it feels a little bit patronizing for a political party to force flyers upon me proclaiming how progressive their voting record is when trans people are simultaneously being legislated out of the public sphere in three provinces. Maybe, uh, work on that guys?
Basically, the only positive change the Liberals have effected is the fact that I can read yaoi fanfiction about Justin’s dad and Fidel Castro. How’s that for business in the bedrooms of the nation?
Activism: 1/11
Intention: 0/11
Duplicity: 12/11
Swag: -2/11
CUM Total: -39%
Editors’ Note: Arthur regrets the resemblance to any other commonly-used abbreviations, acronyms, or vernacular the acronyms in this piece might be construed to imply or resemble. The original author has been fired and the by-line re-ascribed to a deserving queer student.
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