Canada’s bizarre LGBT monument designed to ‘glow like a disco ball’
The new $24 million monument in Ottawa cleverly attempts to link the LGBT movement's roots with Indigenous history. Surrounding the new Thunderhead monument at the centre of the Canadian capital is an interpretive wall offering visitors and passersby the official history “of 2SLGBTQ+ people in Canada.” As the Globe and Mail solemnly put it : “Every night, on the banks of the Ottawa River, a thundercloud will glow like a disco ball.” The 30-foot-tall monument is a cylinder with a cloud-shaped carveout, the interior of which is covered with thousands of mirrored tiles. The disco-ball effect, of course, is a nod to gay nightclubs. The cloud inside the cylinder, one activist said, symbolises the LGBT movement’s triumph. “We didn’t stay in the mould,” Martine Roy said. “We blew it up.” The monument and surrounding park were constructed with $24 million allocated to the LGBT Purge Fund after a class action lawsuit against the Canadian government launched by LGBT-identifyi...