Lauren Semple has been the president of the Nanaimo Pride Society since 2023 and is a long-time leader in Nanaimo’s 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. They are also a drag performer with a background in musical theatre and an entrepreneur who works with organizations, such as Tourism Nanaimo, on inclusivity.
Semple, who was born and raised in Nanaimo, first started to identify as bisexual at the age of 11. After coming out to a friend she was outed to her entire school and became the target of homophobic slurs and harassment from other students.
They said at the time there was no support for 2SLGBTQQIA+ students in the school system and no queer-straight alliance or gender alliance groups in the school.
“So I did what a lot of young queer kids do when they’re in and out of the closet at that age,” they said. “I joined musical theatre.”
This started a 25-year career in the stage arts that includes a solo show called Unboxing Bravery where Semple explores their gender identity through a drag performance as Andi Rogynous.
“That’s where you find your people — the outcasts, the weirdos, the freaks and the ones that are bullied and don’t fit in,” she said about the theatre. “The over-exuberant, the exaggerated, the fanciful and the campy. I found my people in the theatre.”
Semple now identifies as a non-binary lesbian and said that it “still feels like a journey.”
“It’s just a process of getting to know myself.”
Nanaimo Pride is now the largest single-day event in Nanaimo and people from across Vancouver Island, the mainland and Washington State travel to attend it, including many people who consider Nanaimo their hometown.
The Discourse sat down with her at The Vault Cafe for a wide-ranging conversation about Nanaimo Pride’s history and the future of Pride in the city.
How did you first get involved with the Nanaimo Pride Society?
Lauren Semple: I first got involved in 2015. Rick Myers was president when I joined the society, a longtime friend of mine and chosen family. We’ve known each other for over 20 years now. We did musical theatre together and I met him at a drag show.
He called me up in 2015 and basically what had happened that time in our community was that John Lee, long time president of what was the Vancouver Island Rainbow Association (VIRA), renamed [the association] as Nanaimo Pride. He was an amazing guy, an amazing advocate, and he unfortunately passed in 2015. Rick called to inform me that he was stepping up to help lead Nanaimo Pride and build the community.
He said, “I need you to come over, because we got to talk about this, I need your help.”
So I came over, and we sat on his patio, and he said, “I want a fucking parade.”
I said, “Okay.”
He said, “I want fucking crosswalks.”
I said, “Okay, anything else?”
And he said, “I want the flag raising to be really important, and I want this to happen, I want community.”
The dreams just started pouring out of him.
It fired me up. He motivated me, I was totally bought in, and that’s where it came from at that point. So 2016 was the first Pride celebration as we know it today and we got the first two rainbow crosswalks painted that year. We had the guidance and the knowledge of everyone who had been a part of VIRA for so many years, these elders in our community, and then we also had new interest from people like myself who wanted to help grow and make it bigger and visible and accessible for people.
How is Pride in Nanaimo today compared to what it was in the past?
Last year was the biggest parade we’d ever had and so the parade is approaching 70 floats this year, so it’s just growing, the festival is growing. What’s really lovely is more participation, not just from allies, but from our own community.
We prioritize 2SLGBTQI+ vendors, we prioritize them as suppliers, we prioritize them in our food trucks, we prioritize them for our placements, so any service organization, small business, our goal is to build community, support our own community, give them them access to these allies and these opportunities.
It’s for us, it’s not about performing for the allies, it’s about highlighting and featuring and elevating our own community, and so we really work to do that, and it’s incredible to see how many queer and trans entrepreneurs there are in this city.
It’s really cool to see the Nanaimo queer and trans population grow. Our community is getting bigger here, but also we’re taking up more space, we’re more represented in the business community. We’re more represented in service organizations. Shout out to Nanaimo Family Life for 10 years of running the only two support groups in town for trans folks. No one else is doing that work.
One of my memories of you is leading people singing YMCA in front of City Hall during one of the counter protests to an anti-SOGI protest. Can you tell me about that type of activism, where you’re doing it with your community in response to this backlash that is happening?
I planned and attended my own first protest when I was in junior high. I felt incredibly strong about the teachers’ strike and the BC Liberals tearing up their contracts. I planned to protest on the front line of the school board office in Port Alberni and six of my convincible friends joined me to walk our letter to the MPs office. We were supposed to go to the MLA’s office, but we went to the wrong office. The MP lovingly offered to forward the letter, and then went to protest with our signs. Activism is a big part of my life, and how I want to show up in the community.
As a member of a marginalized group, there’s two different things that we need to do, and one is to show up for others. I have a lot of privilege. There’s a lot of privilege that intersects with where I experience marginalization and oppression. I carry a lot of privilege because of the color of my skin, I carry a lot of privilege because of where I was born. The fact that I speak English as a first language. There’s a lot that I carry, and I need to use that privilege to show up.
The community is so intersectional, it’s why I marched in support of Tent City in 2018 instead of going to Vancouver Pride, which is the same day. I was here, among lots of other folks from our community, because there are members of Tent City that were 2SLGBTQ, trans and queer people who are unhoused and requiring services and experiencing this crisis, so that’s where we needed to be.
When the Black Lives Matter rally came we were there providing security and first aid so that the rally could happen, so that the folks that needed to have that moment and needed the microphone and needed to tell their stories could do that. We showed up and supported them, and that’s how we want to be good allies. And we need to show up and respect these intersections and support other marginalized communities because when those anti-SOGI protests happened, and we needed to counter-protest those folks, we needed all of our allies to come.
I feel it in my bones when those moments come. The people who can safely show up, need to show up. The ink hasn’t even dried on trans rights in this country, that legislation is still wet. Everything is at risk of being lost. We’re seeing that down south, we’re seeing that in Europe, even in Canada, we’re seeing this happen, and you can’t let it go unanswered.
Since the Black Lives Matter protests, it has been controversial for police officers to march in Pride Parades. I don’t recall seeing police at the Nanaimo Pride parade outside of helping control crowds and traffic. Is that something the Nanaimo RCMP is not interested in doing or is that something you’ve had conversations about with officers and said it’s not appropriate?
The relationship with RCMP is obviously super dynamic. They are not a sponsor, they’re not a community partner, they’re not a co-advocacy group, they’re not another marginalized community that we’re building with. They’re not a professional organization, they’re not heavily engaged with 2SLGBTQI+ training or relationship building. There’s a past track record, which is troubling nationally and locally, and there continues to be inconsistent actions, inconsistent responses, inconsistent treatment of our community members.
So when we look at that, it obviously does not fall within the alignment of what we’re looking for, and when we look at policing as an institution and the needs of other communities that intersect with ours, such as people of color, Black, Indigenous and racialized folks. Trans people have even worse relationships [with police] than, say, I or many of my board members do. We have privilege in those interactions, so we have a duty to provide deeper care for those folks. Because of that, there’s never been a formal invitation from us, or a formal application from the police to march in the parade.
Back in 2017 there was definitely a big discussion on the board about it with people wanting to extend the invitation. As a society and a community, people really had to learn how to listen to the voices of Snuneymuxw members and other Indigenous folks that had their experiences and trans women of color and their experiences, and we had to open our eyes and advocate for everyone, or decide that we were going to just ignore everyone else’s experience. It was a growing point for the society, and since then it’s never really come up again.
Have you had any major incidents at Pride from homophobic people?
We rarely have any issues inside of the festival. We tend to have issues at the entrance to the festival on Comox Road and at the exit where they head towards the float planes on the waterfront. Once people are outside of the park, that’s where we generally see bad actors. What we’ve talked with the RCMP about consistently is we don’t need you in the festival. I don’t need you riding around the festival, making people uncomfortable and making people intimidated. If we do need your help there, we will call you. But can you just be on the outside, around the perimeter, that’s where the bad actors are, and we see it year after year.
There’s been some increase in the severity of that. Last year, we had some people standing at that intersection harassing parents and children as they were leaving Pride, specifically targeting those folks and saying some incredibly awful things. And then, on the other side of the waterfront, towards the float planes, we had someone planting incredibly homophobic, transphobic letters that said, “for the Pride community” on the front of them and when you opened them it was just absolute hate. Those were planted along and made to look like they were for Pride so our people would pick them up.
Last year we had the first-ever major escalation during our parade, which was incredibly scary, because the Lapu Lapu Day tragedy already raised all of the risk. A driver was verbally abusive and hurling homophobic slurs at one of our volunteers, who was staffing a barricade, and this person was incredibly upset that they could not drive on the parade route and they were abusive verbally to this person and saying very hateful things. They then proceeded to drive through the barricade, struck our volunteer, and then drove onto the parade route and proceeded to put thousands of people’s lives in danger, while yelling homophobic slurs out the window.
They then proceeded to threaten to run over another volunteer, while using more homophobic slurs if they did not let him off the parade route.
The saddest thing about that incident was that the investigation didn’t go anywhere.
There’s a lot of disappointment that you feel when something does happen, and these people [RCMP] have been so insistent that they’re there to protect and they’re there to help, and that it doesn’t go anywhere. [RCMP] didn’t stop the car from being on the route because they weren’t where we told them to be, even though we know we’ve had issues at that spot before.
City workers in dump trucks who were there to provide what we call heavy barrier protection at major intersections got out of their vehicles to provide assistance, and while that was happening, three more cars followed the first one onto the parade route.
The fact that only one person was physically injured is mind-blowing to me. My greatest fear is a vehicle on the parade route, and we had four of them, and the three that did not harass the other volunteer drove the entirety of the parade route and then verbally harassed me at the end.
I see these three vehicles, and they’re screaming, and they’re calling me names, and they’re hurling slurs at me throwing me the middle finger, and I had no idea what was happening. I was like, “Where did these cars come from? What is happening?” It was my absolute worst nightmare.
So it’s been a full-court press for safety, and that’s not something the RCMP can give us. It’s been us working with our own systems and policies and volunteers and the parade routing and transportation people and volunteer training, and working with a traffic management company to get more heavy barriers.
Is there anything else that you would like to say?
There’s 30 years of Pride in Nanaimo. There’s a lot of history, there’s a lot of resilience to celebrate, and a lot to remember and reflect on. I just would love to see everyone come out and be a part of our week and be a part of those events and support it and engage with that history. The history of our communities isn’t often really celebrated, or shared. Those stories aren’t told in the same ways, and so I think this is a really great opportunity for us to help educate members of our own community, but also allies and people who are new to Nanaimo about what’s here and what our history is.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the city Semple grew up in. They were born and raised in Nanaimo and only spent a few years living in Port Alberni as a child. We regret the error.
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