In this episode, we throwback to 1985, where two seemingly unlikely activism campaigns collided. Kingston’s fight to have a gay and lesbian pride day, and the campaign for nuclear disarmament joined together to stage a controversial lesbian and gay kiss-in on the steps of Kingston city hall, that sparked controversy throughout Kingston.

Though we had talked about the fight for Kingston’s first ever pride celebrations in our first episode, today we will uncover a different aspect of the same history.

In this episode, we discuss a brief moment in the summer of 1999, where parking attendants in downtown Kingston were rendered so incapable of doing their jobs, that you could find them sitting frustrated in restaurants instead of looking for parking violations. These parking attendants were prevented from doing their jobs by no more than two to three youths, who would follow the parking attendants on their routes, run ahead of them, and plug quarters into the parking meters which had expired, preventing the attendants from giving these vehicles tickets. These youths were members of the People’s Parking Ticket Service. They would then slip envelopes onto the windshield informing the owner of the cars that they had been saved from a ticket. The envelope also asked for a small donation so the PPTS could continue their efforts. In addition, the stated purpose of the donation was to support the funding of a youth shelter in Kingston.

In this episode, we discuss the violent and racist history of Kingston prison institutions, through the lens of one activist at the center of it, Robert Tex Gentles.