Article content John Banks, an ardent defender of the LGBTQ2S+ cause and of the community’s rights and freedoms and the organizer of Montreal’s first Pride event 45 years ago, has died. He had been in declining health for some time. The news was made public Monday by the Archives Gaies du Québec (AGQ).
Banks, who would have turned 81 on July 3, was a dedicated and longtime volunteer with the organization, which works to document the history of the province’s LGBTQ2S+ communities. “More than simply the memory of things, the archives are an object lesson in what was,” he said to explain his devotion. Born in Montreal in 1943, Banks affirmed his sexual identity early.
“I was never in the closet, so never had a coming out,” Banks said in the 2018 AGQ documentary John Banks, une vie d’engagement. As Serge Fisette wrote in a 2022 tribute in Fugues , a publication focused on news related to LGBTQ2S+ communities, Banks said he felt neither shame nor guilt but, rather, serenity. He started to hang out in gay bars when he was 15, “understood clearly his difference, his marginality — and the omnipresent climate of repression, which he would not stop battling throughout his life.
” Banks “was a pioneer in the recognition of our rights but also in the quest for us to take our place in the social arena,” Fugues contributor Denis-Daniel Boullé said in a poshtumous tribute in Fugues . “He assumed his homosexuality very young but, most importantly, he decided no.
