Being from Calgary, the celebration of pride is not something I am used to in huge doses. Calgary does have an annual pride parade that is usually fairly festive, and this year even secured itself a public park to hold a day-long event with booths, music, and revelry. This pales in comparison to the week long, devil-may-care-hell-breaking-loose pride celebration that Toronto is host to. I love it. A week of events, parties, clubs open until 4 am. What a way to celebrate the GLBTQ community!

I had missed a bit of the week coming in on a Wednesday and wasn’t sure what events would be happening, so I settled on the Pride Parade to satisfy #360 on my list.
On Sunday, we headed out from Guelph in order to get there for the 2pm parade start time. It was a bit of a drive into Toronto, but we made it with a little time for some lunch and a pee break. We walked through the baracaded streets to the parade route. The streets were filled with revelers and it was a fight to get up the streets to find a good place to view the parade. We waited a bit before the parade got to us, about 40 minutes after it left it’s starting point.


The parade was happy, colourful, fun, and loud. While many of the floats and participants were there for a good reason, such as the GTA Elementary School Teachers, and Parents of Trans Children, a lot of the floats were just there for advertising. I have a hard time believing Bacardi gives two shits about the community and was in the parade for anything other than the 1 million person strong captive audience. Those aside, the parade was festive and great. I have to say though that the water guns were a bit of a silly addition. It seemed almost every float had people with high powered super soakers spraying the audience. Well, first of all it was kind of raining to begin with, and second of all most of the people watching have cameras. I know I wasn’t the only one annoyed of constantly trying to shield my camera from the flows of water raining upon us.

I will admit that I did not stay for the full parade. After the parade had marched by for over an hour I was getting a bit weary of balancing on a little ledge in order to see. Then one of the police monitoring the parade made a comment there was still an hour left to go. That was it for me, especially since half of the floats were just advertising to begin with. I’m not sorry I left early, it took us the better part of 20 minutes to work our way down half a block in order to leave the festivities.
In all I would recommend the parade to people, but be prepared to stand for a long time and be advertised to in enormous amounts.