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She was known for pioneering roles for women in Canadian journalism and politics as the first female Conservative member of Parliament elected in BC and the first female Conservative appointed from the province to the senate.

And when I finally succeeded in escaping my hometown, I became crudely aware of my origin. “I am from Pune,’’ is a line I will be repeating until one day I give up, seeing people’s confusion and just say Mumbai. It’s easier — geographic simplifications never hurt anyone.

While putting together this issue, we decided to take a look back at how Pride has been represented in The Ubyssey in years past. One piece we found was a paper published on February 5, 1998, coordinated by Pride UBC — that year’s Pride issue.

Before she was a drag queen, Anita Wigl’it had a job that was, at times, “boring.” But then, she ushered the Australian classic Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and a seemingly normal shift and show would forever changed her life. The then-twenty-year-old saw something in that theatre that she had never seen before — drag queens on stage.

I always believed I was someone whose life was in constant motion — at least that’s what I believed when I first left Vancouver in May of last year. And yet, seeing the familiar Vancouver grid come into view from above, I discovered a discomforting warmth arising with my arrival “home.”

As students walked across the stage during a May 2012 commencement ceremony, the crowd burst into an applause that was decades in the making. This applause was unique — it wasn’t just to celebrate graduation, but to recognize 76 Japanese Canadian UBC students who were forced into internment camps in 1942 before they could complete their degrees.

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