The name “Mesopotamia” derives from a Greek term meaning “land between the rivers.” The Royal Ontario Museum’s latest major exhibit, which opens on June 22, takes this literally, as visitors flow between painted representations of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on the floor.

Presented by the British Museum and rounded out with pieces from institutions in Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, Mesopotamia: Inventing Our World covers 3,000 years of human development in the cradle of urban civilization. Most of the 170 artifacts on display have never been shown in Canada.

There are a lot of chefs in the kitchen for the Canadian premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, a triptych set in three time periods that tells the stories of amateur actors (played by real actors) involved in staging performances of the story of Christ. Three different Toronto independent theatre companies, all with reputations for innovative staging and creation in their past work, each tackle one of the three acts. Ordinarily, such a complicated arrangement would be to a show’s detriment, but not in this case. While you need to be prepared for a marathon of theatre (the show runs four hours, incluing two intermissions), you’re certainly going to get your money’s worth.

“A cross between Woodstock and the Algonquin Round Table,” is what Michael Redhill called it. Dorothy Parker grinding out an electric cover of “The Star Spangled Banner”? Well, not quite. Rather, Redhill, the literary curator for Luminato 2013, was describing A Literary Picnic, the annual festival’s celebration of storytelling, creativity, and the written word.

The 2013 Toronto Jazz Festival descends on the city this Friday with a huge “free for all” event. That means all of Friday’s programming at every Jazz Festival venue is, yes, completely free of charge. There will be concerts from local favourites Molly Johnson and Mary Margaret O’Hara, plus a show by Smokey Robinson and Martha Reeves, who will be launching the fest from its epicentre, Nathan Phillips Square.

Here’s a rundown of some of the shows worth checking out on Friday—and during the rest of the festival, when you’ll actually have to pay.

Folks who are planning on having a swim in the pool at Scadding Court Community Centre over the next few days may find themselves a little disappointed. Those who want to go fishing, however, will probably be ecstatic.

For the rest of the week, the Community Centre will be holding its annual Gone Fishin’ event, meaning its indoor pool will be an indoor fish pond. The pool has been drained, dechlorinated, and refilled with 2,000 rainbow trout, to be caught by local children and families.

Today, as they do every May 17, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) held ceremonies internationally to mark International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. The Toronto ceremony takes place at the flagpole on the rooftop podium at City Hall—today a more frantic place than usual. As the event unfolded PFLAG president Irene Miller spoke about love and acceptance; as she ended a moving address on acceptance of sexual and gender diversity, Miller urged those in attendance, “hug one another, do not leave without a hug today!”

Then she went directly over to Mayor Rob Ford and embraced him.

The mayor’s appearance at the flag raising ceremony was his first public event since news broke that Ford was allegedly filmed smoking crack cocaine and making homophobic and racist remarks. Ford has yet to respond to the story, except to characterize the reports as “absolutely ridiculous.”

After reading a proclamation to open the event, an extremely red-faced Ford stood off to the side, literally cornered near the flagpole on the east side of City Hall. Following his brief embrace with Miller, Ford marched back to a second floor entrance to the building, ignoring questions from the phalanx of reporters asking questions about his alleged drug use and discriminatory comments.

Miller had a message for people who face discrimination based on sexual identity: “You have people who love and support you. You have people who need to advocate for you…you never need feel alone again.” She also reminded the audience that the damage from homophobic and transphobic comments goes beyond their targets. “There’s a mum, a dad, a brother a sister, a friend somewhere in the vicinity who is also hurt by your ignorance and your homophobia and your bigotry,” Miller said to cheers.

Toronto Pride organizer TK, who is trans, also addressed the crowd, saying that the acceptance displayed at the event would have been unimaginable years ago. “Growing up, I couldn’t have imagined a day like today. I couldn’t have imagined so much love and support in a public square, at City Hall no less.” TK hoped that the million-plus number of attendees at annual Pride festivities would grow next year, as Toronto hosts World Pride 2014.

Many attendees had tears in their eyes during and after Miller’s remarks. Ford himself seemed agitated during the ceremony; he shuffled in place during speeches and whispered to his press secretary George Christopolous. As the ceremony ended and the media swarmed him, the sense of goodwill the event had generated quickly evaporated, and Ford was once again fleeing from cameras and questions.

In a conversation with us after the event, Councillor Kristyn Wong Tam (Ward 27, Toronto Centre-Rosedale) applauded the inclusion of two trans speakers, TK and well-known trans activist Enza Anderson. “It’s not often that trans people are able to share the stage publicly and express their pride,” Wong-Tam said. “They are really brave.”

Wong-Tam also expressed strong feelings about the mayor’s attendance at the ceremony. “I was fairly conflicted when I saw him,” said Wong-Tam. She said that while the queer community is constantly trying to reach out to Ford, he rarely responds. “It’s not good enough for someone to show up once a year and then just expect us to applaud him,” she said. “There’s more to being an ally than reading a proclamation prepared for you by staff.”

Marchers carry a giant rainbow flag during the 2012 Toronto Pride Parade.

Speeches were delivered, balloons were dropped, and drinks were handed out by a gaggle of shirtless men at the The Roundhouse on Thursday night for the official kickoff of the Countdown to Toronto WorldPride 2014.

Founded in 1997, WorldPride is intended to draw attention to LGBT issues on a global scale with a mixture of parades, cultural events, and symposia. The first WorldPride event was held in Rome in 2000. In 2009, Toronto was chosen to host the fourth edition of the festival, which will take place in June 2014.

WorldPride Toronto will coincide with the 45th anniversary of New York’s Stonewall Riots, which are considered to be the incident that started the modern gay rights movement.

Thursday’s kick-off event was meant both to raise awareness of WorldPride, and to start a series of announcements about programming. The first announcement was WorldPride 2014′s theme: “Rise Up,” inspired by the gay liberation anthem of the same name by early ‘80s Toronto band The Parachute Club.

Pride Toronto executive director Kevin Beaulieu thinks WorldPride will be noticeably different from Toronto’s regular Pride celebrations. It will include a broader range of events, more participation from the city’s cultural institutions and ethnocultural communities, and it will take place in more neighbourhoods.

“This isn’t something Pride Toronto is going to do on its own,” he said. “This is a one-time thing, and to make this the best event possible, we need to get everyone involved and engaged.”

Scott Mullin, Vice President of Community Relations with TD Bank, one of Pride’s major corporate sponsors, said that the level of support given to Pride Toronto from the city’s power structure was one of the reasons Toronto was awarded the event.

“In 2009 Pride Toronto bid for WorldPride, and I went down to Florida as part of that bid,” he said. “We had with us a banker and a Toronto Police officer as part of our delegation, and for some of the people who were there to vote on behalf of pride festivals from around the world, the fact that Toronto had a banker and a police officer as part of their pitch committee was an astonishing comment. If you came from Bucharest, the notion that there was a police officer and a banker working with Pride was amazing.”

Beaulieu said that sense of surprise from people in other countries shows why Pride is still very much a political event, in spite of the party atmosphere. Even today, not all countries are as LGBT-friendly as Canada. At WorldPride, Beaulieu believes the party will be bigger, but that the political scope will also be broader.

“We’re going to build on the Pride we already throw, and make sure there’s a call out to the world to have a dialogue about what’s going on in queer communities around the world,” he said, adding that the multicultural nature of Toronto was one of the things that appealed to InterPride, the international governing body responsible for awarding WorldPride.

“49 per cent of Torontonians weren’t born in Canada,” he said. “That is a really spectacular source of strength when you want to host an international event.”

Given the global scope of the event, Beaulieu hopes that Mayor Rob Ford, who has yet to attend Pride as mayor, will give his annual cottage vacation a pass to come to WorldPride. If he doesn’t, the party will go on without him.

“We have to have faith that the people of Toronto and their elected officials are going to continue to recognize the importance of Pride on a political, cultural and social level, as well as the importance of having an event that hosts 1.22 million people and brings $277 million into the local economy,” Beaulieu said.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

Since his election in 2010, James Pasternak (Ward 10, York Centre) has been sounding the alarm about Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, a small protest group that has been showing up periodically at the Pride events, attempting to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians living under Israeli rule. He hasn’t just done this by condemning that group directly, however: he decided to make Pride itself the target. In a series of requests and motions at City Hall, and with the support of several of his colleagues, Pasternak has been trying to make Pride’s annual funding grant from the City contingent on the non-appearance of QuAIA.

Some starting principles. No group should be victimized by discrimination, and no group should be immune from the consequences if they violate anti-discrimination policies. Certainly it’s reasonable for the government to withhold grants from any group that does so.

Here’s the thing: no group in this situation has.

As a result of concerns regarding QuAIA, the City of Toronto reviewed its anti-discrimination policies, and staff proposed some updates to them. According to both the original and new versions, the phrase “Israeli Apartheid” does not violate any provisions. It is hurtful to some. It is—and is meant to be—inflammatory. But it is not hate speech. It does not reflect animosity to a group of people because of their identity but to a policy, because of its consequences.

That didn’t stop the executive committee from passing a motion in September, asking City staff to report back on the viability of making Pride’s 2013 funding contingent on “Israeli Apartheid” not appearing at the event. That is, a certain number of councillors are willing to make Pride vulnerable because a separate, outside organization has violated not our policies but their sensibilities. As we wrote earlier this year:

If council votes to defer Pride’s funding, to make it contingent on the appearance, or not, of QuAIA, the message it sends to Pride—and by extension to Toronto’s LGBTQ community—is that its role in the city, its place in the city, its participation in the life of the city, is likewise contingent, not on compliance with a set of well-founded principles but on on ad hoc exception created because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a mess and we’re not particularly good at talking about it. It privileges one group’s sense of belonging and acceptance over another’s.

We are not required to support community groups at any cost, but if that support is to have any real value we cannot decide to withdraw it at the first sign of tension, either. Threatening Pride’s funding on the basis of what amounts to hurt feelings, with no violation of any principle anyone has been able to point to, is a grossly disproportionate response that belies Toronto’s claim to be a city that champions diversity. It opens the door to other ideological litmus tests for cultural and community groups. And it fails to properly acknowledge the importance of Pride to Toronto.

Sue-Ann Levy Using her position to deride instead of reason.

Michael Bryant An astonishingly tone-deaf response to a tragic death.

Frances Nunziata Treating her colleagues like wayward schoolchildren.

Unsubstantiated “Safety Concerns” Using race as an indicator of crime.

Yunel Escobar   Homophobic slurs and frustrating non-apologies.

Doug Holyday   Trying to turn an already divided house even more against itself.

Ford Fest 2011. Image courtesy of {a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Toronto-Mayor-Rob-Ford/142577519126992?sk=info"}Rob Ford's Facebook page{/a}.

The group outing is a response to Ford’s avoidance of events related to Toronto’s LGBT community. He has famously dodged Toronto’s Pride Parade two years in a row, pleading family obligations at his Muskoka cottage. He has also refused to attend other Pride Toronto events. He did, however, make a surprise appearance at a flag-raising ceremony for the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia in May.

Leigh Williams, a 24-year-old social-service worker who is one of the three creators of the Facebook group, says her intention isn’t to goad Ford and his family into an angry reaction.

“I think that our message from the get-go has been pretty clear,” she says. “We’re not there to protest or cause a disturbance of any kind.”

Meanwhile, the Facebook invite takes a more combative tone. It says: “Well, since Robby was too busy to come to any Pride events this year we are going to bring the Pride Parade to his backyard.” The Facebook group is not affiliated with Pride Toronto.

Ford Fest usually takes place not in the mayor’s backyard, but in his mother’s, at 15 Weston Wood Road, in Etobicoke. It’s a meet-and-greet event that in past years has been intended primarily for Ford’s supporters. This year, Ford invited the “whole city” to attend during an interview on Newstalk 1010. He expects between 3,000 and 4,000 people. We were there last year and can confirm that the hamburgers and beer were free. It was a good time.

Williams says she wants an LGBT contingent at Ford Fest this year as a sort of compensation for Ford’s lack of contact with Toronto’s queer community. “It would be great to attend the event and have some representation of our community there,” she says. But her hope is that LGBT attendees will behave respectfully.

“We don’t want to be recognized as separate from the other attendees at the event,” she says.

She expects that about a quarter of the people who have responded to the Facebook invite will show up on the day. “Definitely we’ll draw a large crowd,” she says.

CORRECTION: August 31, 4:28 PM We inadvertently published an earlier draft of this article, which didn’t reflect changes made during editing. Those revisions have since been restored.

Toronto may be covered from head to toe in rainbows for Pride Week, but a series of short videos just released by Pride Toronto and Google+ proves that black and white can get the message across just as well. Each of the beautifully shot one- to two-minute videos profiles a member of Toronto’s LGBT community, including a drag queen, a gay man who spent decades in the Canadian Forces, a femme lesbian, an older couple who took part in the very first pride march in 1972, and a gay teen who just came out to his dad days before the video was shot.

Google+—a new corporate sponsor this year for Pride Toronto—funded the videos, and award-winning L.A.-based documentary director Jeff Feuerzeig (best known for The Devil and Daniel Johnston) was recruited to shoot them. “Toronto’s always been on the leading edge of gay rights and gay activism,” says Feuerzeig. “It wasn’t that hard to network to find interesting and unique stories under the different categories of LGBTQ.”

Feuerzeig found his stars through a combination of casting calls, word of mouth, and hanging out in the right place at the right time. For instance, he met Jonathan, a drag queen whom we see transform into Judy (inspired by Judy Garland, of course), by hanging out at the well-known gay club Goodhandy’s, on Church Street.

Jonathan/Judy’s video is an example of the positivity that shines through in this series. As Jonathan is shown making his transformation in front of a mirror, he talks with ease about the moment he realized he was different: “I started thinking that I might not be like other boys when I was about 13,” he says in the video. “There was a scene in Terminator where Arnold Schwarzenegger was naked, and I was like, that looks interesting!”

Even the video series’ opening and closing music reflects a playful, queer-positive vibe—the song is a cover of the quirky 1926 tune “I’ve Never Seen a Straight Banana,” recorded by gay musician Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields.

“There’s so much focus on negativity with reality TV in everybody’s face all the time, and I think what’s interesting about the films is they have really positive stories—and we didn’t spin them that way, they just turned out that way,” says Feuerzeig. “People are clearly much more open and accepting in 2012, whether it’s their children, or their husband, or their dad coming out as gay.”

To watch the entire video series, visit Pride Toronto’s YouTube page.

The rainbow flag at Toronto City Hall.

Though the buildup to today’s debate about whether to grant Pride Toronto its annual funding was long, the debate itself proved brief. James Pasternak (Ward 10, York Centre), concerned about the participation of protest group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in the Pride parade, had initially suggested that council should defer funding until after the parade, and make it contingent on QuAIA being kept out—earlier this week he told us he planned to move a motion to that effect. A compromise was developed among councillors over the past few days, however, and today no such motion materialized. Instead, council voted to

reaffirm its recognition of Pride Toronto as a significant cultural event that strongly promotes the ideals of tolerance and diversity, but condemn the use of the term ‘Israeli Apartheid’ which undermines these values and also diminishes the suffering experienced by individuals during the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

“The real, real battleground is revising the anti-discrimination policy,” said Pasternak just after the vote was taken. Those revisions, he hopes, will preclude the term “Israeli Apartheid” figuring in future debates at City Hall, by rendering it in clear violation of a new anti-discrimination policy. Last year, City staff researched the subject and concluded that “Israeli Apartheid” did not violate the existing policy, triggering a request for revisions to it. Those proposed revisions came from staff within the past week, however, and they contain no specific mention of the term nor any clauses that seem to render it discriminatory.

When asked whether or how council could ensure that “Israeli Apartheid” was specifically captured by an anti-discrimination policy, Pasternak said he believed that it would be covered if the policy looked at the “intention and phraseology” in language use. (He maintains that “Israeli Apartheid” is a term that promotes hatred.) “We don’t want world conflicts here; people come here to avoid world conflicts,” he added.

Judging intent is, of course, very tricky territory: as soon as he made those remarks, reporters immediately began asking Pasternak if this was leading down to road the censorship. If the City denies a cultural organization funding it would otherwise receive any time material (even if not directly commissioned by the organization) offends another group in the city, have we gone too far? He denied that he was advocating for such restrictions, maintaining that the City’s mandate was to fund cultural organizations, not “demonstrations.”

Pride Toronto, along with other major cultural organizations, did receive its funding today; after passing the above motion councillors passed the grant allocations unanimously. Notably, that funding is not contingent: Pride will get it whether or not QuAIA shows up. It will take a bit of time though, to see whether the issue has been put to rest.

The rainbow flag at Toronto City Hall.

This morning Toronto city councillors will, as part of their monthly agenda, consider a standard funding motion. It comes before them every year and has the technocratic name of Major Cultural Institutions Allocation; it calls for the disbursement of grants to some key organizations in Toronto: the Toronto International Film Festival, Luminato, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and so on. Also on the list: Pride Toronto, which is slated to receive $123,807.

Councillor James Pasternak (Ward 10, York Centre) is expected to raise objections to that allocation today—specifically, to call on council to defer a decision about whether to grant that money until after the Pride parade is held on July 1. The reason is that he objects to the presence of a group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid at Pride; Pasternak contends that Pride Toronto should not receive its annual budget allocation if QuAIA marches in the parade. He is not the only one with concerns, and this is not the first year Pride funding has been put at risk—last year the controversy grew so fierce that QuAIA withdrew from the event. It is a collision of identity politics, constituent relations, and community protectionism in which most of the participants have lost all sense of proportion.

Let us attempt to restore it.

That Pride Toronto’s funding will be debated in this way, for this reason, is preposterous. That Pride Toronto’s funding is conditional in this way, for this reason, is preposterous. Pride is one of Toronto’s great cultural organizations. Barring financial incompetence, a drastic change in its mission, or a drastic change in the City of Toronto’s approach to funding cultural organizations, its grant shouldn’t be up for negotiation at all.

Toronto is a city which likes to congratulate itself for being the most welcoming, the most open, the most inclusive in the world. Formed by generation after generation of immigrants, populated by residents speaking the greatest variety of languages, an international champion for diversity and human rights.

It’s a nice story, and sometimes it really is true. But not always—and certainly not if we tell Pride that its legitimacy as a City-supported celebration is conditional; that it is nice to have around, but it’s not essential.

Pride Toronto did not spring up last week or last year, and the Pride parade is not some novelty we’ve yet to incorporate into the fabric of the city. This is a cultural entity with a long history, and whose contributions to the city aren’t—shouldn’t be, at least—in question. Pride Toronto has been instrumental in pushing Toronto to be better at what it says it is—welcoming and open and inclusive. Pride is a celebration of and for one particular community, but it contributes to the health and vitality of Toronto as a whole. It makes us a better city.

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, by contrast, is a small group of political protesters which does not violate any anti-discrimination policy and gives no indication of being motivated by hate. It is prone to ill-informed sloganeering, but this is an offence against reason, not human rights, and certainly not an offence so grave that a third party should be punished if QuAIA shows up at their party.

“Apartheid” is a word in Afrikaans. It means “separateness” and it describes a policy of racial segregation that was enforced in South Africa for the latter half of the 20th century. Which is to say, it is a proper name: it describes a particular circumstance and place and time. Exporting it to other circumstances, in this case to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is an intellectual shortcut that yields no benefits. It does not shed light on what’s happening in the Middle East and it obscures what did happen in South Africa: it mutes the particularities of one nation’s experience and turns it into some sort of stand-in for nationally imposed ethnic segregation at large.

Let us agree that what happened in South Africa, and what continues to happen in Israel/Palestine, is tragic. Surely these tragedies each warrant their own language, merit their own names and vocabulary. (There is already a term, widely used by Palestinians to decsribe their situation: Nakba is the word, and it means “disaster.”)

The problem with the term “Israeli Apartheid” isn’t that it is discriminatory, or that it is hateful. It’s that it’s ahistorical. Last year City staff, on instructions from council, reviewed the issue and concluded that “the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid’ in and of itself does not violate the City’s Anti-discrimination policy … [and] has not been found to violate either the Criminal Code or the Human Rights Code (Ontario)” [PDF]. Unsatisfied with that, council asked City staff to revise the anti-discrimination policy. The draft of those revisions came out this week, and as far as anyone can tell, “Israeli Apartheid” still won’t be in violation. The only way we’re going to get “Israeli Apartheid” listed as discriminatory, it seems, is if council decides to do it directly, an ad hoc addition to the books that isn’t backed up by the literature on the subject or an assessment of how we actually use these words.

And that is precisely the problem. If council votes to defer Pride’s funding, to make it contingent on the appearance, or not, of QuAIA, the message it sends to Pride—and by extension to Toronto’s LGBTQ community—is that its role in the city, its place in the city, its participation in the life of the city, is likewise contingent, not on compliance with a set of well-founded principles but on on ad hoc exception created because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a mess and we’re not particularly good at talking about it. It privileges one group’s sense of belonging and acceptance over another’s.

Toronto is a city that prides itself precisely on shunning that sort of divisiveness. We hope city councillors remember that today.

UPDATE 12:12 PM: In response to past controversies with QuAIA, Pride Toronto has set up a formal dispute resolution process to consider complaints from the public about groups that have registered to participate in the Pride parade. We asked the chair of the dispute resolution panel, Douglas Elliot, whether anyone had lodged a complaint with Pride regarding QuAIA’s intended participation in the parade this year. As of this morning, nobody has.