With over 30 events in 11 days, this year’s annual St. John’s Pride festival is bigger than ever. From July 9-20, the city will see a variety of community events and entertainment, including drag and burlesque performances, markets, panel discussions, community-based support. The festival will end with the Pride Parade, with local organization Trans Support NL as the Grand Marshals.
St. John’s Pride is a volunteer-run nonprofit organization, operated by a small Board of Directors composed of only 9 volunteers who make the festival possible each year. Eddy St. Coeur, Co-Chair (External) of St. John’s Pride sat down with Muse Editor-in-Chief John Harris for an interview at CHMR Radio for Muse News about this year’s festival and the queer community in St. John’s.
‘No Going Back‘
The theme of this year’s festival has been designated as “no going back,” a sentiment of resistance as governments and communities take steps to backslide 2SLGBTQIA+ rights.
Transgender people especially, have been a common target and political scapegoat recently, seeing erasure, a dramatic spike in transphobic rhetoric, facing dangerous or life-threatening situations, and actively harmful, regressive legislation.
The government of Newfoundland has not taken blatant legislative action against trans folks like some Prairie provinces have but barriers still exist socially and systematically, especially in terms of accessing appropriate medical care. On a worldwide, and even national scale, queer people are scared.
Trans Support NL, a community nonprofit organization that connects transgender people in Newfoundland with life-saving care and resources, has been designated as the Grand Marshals of St. John’s Pride Parade 2025.
“The board has gone back and forth [on the Grand Marshal and theme decisions] for a couple of months,” St. Coeur said.
“People said to us, ‘that must have come so easily.’ We said no it didn’t because every week there was something new hitting a headline that could have been its own theme because there was, and there still is a lot of politicization of the queer community.”
“We finally landed on this ‘no going back,’ and it made sense for us to reach out to Trans Support NL because that sector of the community, that intersection has always been further, like more disadvantaged than your average queer person,” St. Coeur stated, explaining the organization’s decision.
“[Trans Support NL] haven’t gotten enough focus and it just felt really timely for us to quite literally put the entire community marching behind this organization… to really underline the point that community is behind you and has to be behind you, and especially right now we’ve got to draw attention to that because they really need a lot of support.”
The Three P’s of Pride: Protest, Protection, and Party
When celebrating pride, it’s important to focus on joy, but while still acknowledging the roots of pride as primarily a political movement.
“We say all the time, at least with the current iteration of the board, that Pride follows three peaks. That’s how we root ourselves in everything that we’re doing,” said St. Coeur.
“First and foremost, it’s a protest. And it started as a protest, and it’s that protest for the right of a group of people to exist. We still don’t have all those rights. And we still don’t have all of that security for queer people in our society and society around the world.”
St. Coeur regarded this political focus, emphasizing that it’s inseparable from pride celebrations: “The protest element has to be first and foremost. Otherwise, what are we doing? We spend a lot of time pulling this together and there’s got to be something bigger than just a really fun party at the end of the day.”
“So the three piece, we’ve got protest, protection, so it in itself queer people being in larger numbers and being together, we create safer spaces for each other. Being in community gives people that protection. And then thirdly, it’s the party… the celebration element of it.”
“[The celebration] is a really important part of it because otherwise it would just be crushed under depression and that’s not conducive to anything. We’ve got to have that party and that celebration piece of it because otherwise what were all the struggles for?” the co-chair said, stating how these three things have to work together, creating balance to stay faithful to the origins of Pride here in Newfoundland.
Palestine Solidarity at Pride
Preparation for this year’s St. John’s Pride festival appears to be going smoothly so far, contrasting last year’s, which sparked controversy after Palestine Action YYT and MUN Students for Palestine were announced as the Grand Marshals of the 2024 Parade.
This led to some companies, most notably, Harvey’s Oil, to back out of the festival. St. Coeur stated that the situation to make Palestine-focused groups was made quite swiftly, but it was a needed decision, and the nonprofit does not regret it.
“The Pride movement is rooted in the right for people to exist, for the right of people to exist as they are in their place and in their communities. And what we were seeing in Palestine, was an attack on that,” St. Coeur said.
“There’s a bunch of other factors that are at play there, but the intersection is this pride, we don’t believe that any state should have people under occupation or should have people in hostage situations or prisoners of war … And surely as well as we can’t we can’t be complicit in a genocide happening.”
“When we know that if that can happen to that group of people, it’s just as easy for queer people to be the next scapegoat. So we felt really grounded in what we did in that and we had to have a lot of conversations with the community about it.”
This conflict with the sponsor posed many difficult questions regarding the ethics of corporations, and the political values and affiliations of Pride organizations.
According to St. Coeur, the Board tried to emphasize to broader community members employed by Harvey companies that it was nothing to do with them – simply the higher ups failing to take a clear stance against genocide.
“[Deciding the Grand Marshals] is something that we got a lot of community support from, we got a lot of positive response from. There’s still conversations that I have to this day where people want more information, they want to understand how we arrived at the decision and give their side of it.”
“Looking back a year now, and we say this all the time at Pride is we don’t regret our decision. Like I’ve slept soundly over the last year, knowing that the decision that we made knowing the magnitude of what it was and what it caused. And I think we handled it and navigated it to the best of our abilities.”
See the full St. John’s Pride 2025 schedule here, and check out the full Muse News interview on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Listen to future episodes of Muse News, Mondays at noon at CHMR 93.5FM or online.
