0:05  
Victoria Prince Edward Island is almost a parody of what people would consider P.E.I.  to be. I ts governmentally mandated heritage homes, the paint colors matching exactly what they would have back in the Victorian era. The streets, although full of tourists are also full of quaint bookstores and shops and children playing in the street still. It's a quaint town, but Rachel McLeod considers that the queerest place on P.E.I.

0:32  
And then like, there's another person, they just lived on the street. Okay. And it was just very, everybody was like, well, everyone's gay, so.

0:40  
Now, of course, not quite literally everyone who lives in Victoria is gay, but McLeod grew up in a smaller community outside of Victoria called Bertalbum. But when she turned about 16, she got her first summer job. She worked in the chocolate shop in Victoria, and the staff parties and community gatherings, she started to experience started teaching her a lot about her own queer identity.

1:05  
I mean, this whole community like it's every time, like a new person moves here, someone new starts working here. It's not like a, it's not clicky. It's not like, oh, who's this new person, it's always just like, they should probably come over for some drinks. Like,

1:16  
On the outside Victoria looks like a very traditional community. Its a bookstore smells like mothballs, it's got an old theater built into the historic town hall. But Rachel was drawn to the way that new people were absorbed into the fold. W

1:31  
We need to find out what they're about, we need to hang out and get to know them. And, and you only see communities like that anymore. Like it's it's very rare and to be such a small place. And just such a such a it's just it's like one of the few communities that I see that have like kind of withstood the test of time. And they've just stayed the same. It's like, you know, the 1800s, when you have to kind of rely on your neighbors and they feel like that here, you know what I mean? They're just like, you know, you want a cup of sugar a shot of whiskey, like, we're are you for you,

1:56  
Rachel started taking people up on those offers. She attended staff parties, and what she was discovering were small, queer pockets of people who were role models to her. So she decided that she needed to create those spaces for other queer people on PEI. What she did was create the smallest Pride parade on PEI.

2:16  
So it is kind of just a celebration of, you know, queerness, really in rural communities. And it started with just a friend of mine being like, we need to do something like we need to showcase how accepting this, this community is, and that, you know, there are queer people everywhere. And we can't just keep, you know, pretending that cities have pride and everywhere else doesn't.

2:37  
So this year was the third iteration of the Victoria Pride Parade. And for the very first time in its history, it had a firetruck. The parade was shorter than a George Michael song. Quite literally, Freedom 90 started playing at the top of the hill in Victoria and by the time they had reached the bottom, George Michael hadn't stopped singing yet. But no matter the length, the point is McLeod wants to get people knowing that queer spaces should be everywhere on P.E.I.

3:15  
Like the pride is fun, but it's always more of a party. Like it's more of a, you know, we're doing fun things and you know, but honestly, like, we should be having more resources and more queer friendly spaces and more safer spaces.

3:28  
Because to McLeod well, queer people are everywhere on P.E.I

3:33  
You're starting to be like, oh, there's, there's queer people here because like, look at you know, this, my neighbor's here, my neighbor has is, is coming to this parade or, you know, the person down the street is coming to this parade. And, and it's kind of bridging like, maybe a generational gap too. So there's, like, you know, there could be young queer people or older queer people. And this is a way to like, bring them together, and they start, you know, networking, they start seeing each other, they start realizing, Hey, you know what, we actually have quite a queer community, just in this small place.

3:57  
Rachel knows the importance of these queer spaces being in rural communities because she grew up in the small town of Byrd Albin, but there are these little country towns everywhere on P.E.I, that, especially in the winter, are really inaccessible from experiencing queer life in places like Charlottetown.

4:14  
If you live in Tignish, it's January, like you're probably not gonna, you're probably not going to be in town a lot to to go and be a part of these things. So, you know, just having more community and more gatherings and more. Just being together would make a huge difference and having like resources for people and, and different things like that would make a huge difference.

4:34  
One of the people who creates those kinds of programs in Charlottetown is Rory Starkman. They're a community manager with Peers Alliance, which is a queer youth group based out of the capital city. But when they first moved from Toronto a number of years ago, they weren't finding that same queer community they had back in the Big Smoke.

4:52  
And I started to kind of feel more and more not necessarily isolated, but also very much like I was I was in queer relationships but never in queer community. So you know, there would be dances from pride and, and that would be fine. But I think something I was seeking was, you know, a place to actually go and talk about LGBTQ experiences. And at the time, pride wasn't really offering that there wasn't a whole lot

5:20  
going on. In Rachel McLeod's opinion, the answer to that lack of community lies in Victoria, a community that in her words has always been tight knit

5:31  
The queer community could really like take a note of that book and be like, you know, it doesn't it doesn't matter like we're not we're not putting up walls here to keep people out. It's about making everyone everyone in the community feel like they are just as important as everyone else.