This week marked a time of celebration, remembrance and education as students gathered to celebrate Queen’s Pride Week, hosted by Queen’s Pride Project.
Pride Week, now in its third year, was previously organized by the Education on Queer Issues Project (EQuIP). Queen’s Pride Project Co-Chair Anna Fischer said it made sense to create a new club to manage the event. “In the past two years, the Education on Queer Issues Project has put it together, but their mandate is more education and they were finding it difficult to run both Pride and their regular programming. That’s why we created a separate club.” Fischer’s fellow co-chair Caitlyn Clark said the creation of Queen’s Pride Project has allowed Pride Week to grow and expand.
“This year the Pride Project is a newly ratified club with a student fee, which gave us definitely more space and a lot more volunteers. We had the budget to actually start making Pride Week a big event, something we hope can continue to be an annual thing on campus.” A highlight of the week was Monday’s Pride Prom, an event new to Pride Week this year.
“We’re really excited to host an event like that, especially for a community like the queer community, where a lot of students may not have had the prom that they wanted [in high school],” she Clark. “Maybe they couldn’t dress the way they wanted or take who they wanted, so this is an opportunity for them to do it over the way that everybody else got to in high school.
“It was probably the most talked about event in the Queen’s University queer community this year,” Fischer said. “By the reviews we got afterwards, I think if it doesn’t happen next year people will be really disappointed,” she added.
Clark said she was excited to include QCRED’s “Each One Teach One” seminar and the newly created Trans Day of Celebration.
“Each One Teach One is a really neat event because we’re going to be discussing intersections of gender identity and racial identity, something that’s not always discussed but which is really important,” she said. “And new this year is the Trans Day of Celebration. EQuIP always runs a Trans Day of Remembrance, but this year we decided to incorporate a day of celebration as well.”
Clark said the week was ultimately a great success.
“We’re really proud of this week’s events, and we hope people continue to attend.”
A full list of Pride Week events, including those still to come, can be found on Queen’s Pride Project’s Facebook page.
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