Until last year, the only acknowledgment of this historical moment was a plaque hidden in the underground walkway beneath city hall. With renewed investment in public art by the Winnipeg Arts Council, who are overseeing this project with help from Heritage Canada, myself and sculptor Bernie Miller set out to create a memorial streetcar in bronze adjacent to the site of Bloody Saturday, on the present day Pantages Plaza at Market and Main St., one of the city’s busiest intersections.

As an artist of his generation, Paskievich places himself within a Cold War discourse with Paskievich working primarily as an NFB director from the time he finished his studies in the 1970s. It is interesting to contemplate an artist with Paskievich’s observational talent were his family to remain in Europe after World War II, joining filmmakers like Sergei Parajanov in the Odessa film scene established by the visionary Dovzhenko.

At the time of writing we were informed that Pride Toronto had banned Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from participating in this summer’s Toronto Pride March. Capitulating to Israel lobby groups and to City Hall threats to withdraw funding if the group marched, the board of Toronto Pride has chosen to set a dangerous precedent by censoring a community human rights group. We are thinking about the impact of QuAIA on queer movements, queer politics, and where the “movement” is now.

First, there hasn’t been a super political queer mag since the Body Politic ended over twenty years ago in 1987. There have been a number of more academic inclined queer theory journals, special journal issues and a steady stream of queer articles. One could say that that there has been an explosion in queer theory and queer studies. This explosion of queer into the public from the 1990s onwards has simultaneously been breathtakingly exciting and boringly normalizing.