Toronto Pride will honour gay men killed by dating app serial killer

Toronto Pride has announced they will pay tribute to the gay men allegedly murdered by Bruce McArthur. McAruthur used gay dating apps, like Silver Daddies, to carry out a series of murders between 2010 and 2017. He mainly targeted immigrants and men of colour in Toronto’s gay village.

The killer has been charged with the murders of Skandaraj Navaratnam, 40, Andrew Kinsman, 49, Selim Esen, 44, Abdulbasir Faizi, 44, Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, 37, Dean Lisowick, 47, Soroush Mahmudi, 50, and Majeed Kayhan, 58.

LGBT+ activists have criticised law enforcement for not acting sooner and for not taking the crimes seriously. Many believe racial-bias from the police allowed the murders to go unchecked for so long.

“All the South Asian men that went missing kind of fell by the wayside and nobody paid attention until something happened in the white community,” Toronto community activist Haran Vijayanathan said.

“For Toronto’s LGBTQ community, this has been a very difficult time and I know that many are very upset and many are still grieving,” Head of the investigation Chief Mark Saunders said. “They have many questions about what happened and what could have been done differently.”

Homicide Detective Hank Idsinga has said there is no way of telling how many more people McArthur might have killed.

Toronto Pride will honour those killed by ending the parade in black. “At the end of the parade, the community will be invited to march in silence, wearing black,” said Pride Toronto Executive Director Olivia Nuamah. “Even though we understand that we’re celebrating, we also need to deal with some hard truths about the LGBTQ community and the issues of safety that we still suffer. It’s one of the ways we want to commemorate the death of eight men in our community.”

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