How Pride became the biggest festival in Toronto

By the time Toronto Pride Week rolls up the last of its rainbow flags and red carpets for another year, it could easily rank as the city's most attended event for 2015. That's a huge win in a city with a cultural calendar as packed and competitive as Toronto's.

If the success of the last five years is anything to go by, Pride Toronto 2015 can expect to play host to well in excess of a million attendees during its ten-day-long run. Some estimates even put the attendance numbers closer to two million.

To put that in context, that's two to four times the number of participants for events like the Toronto International Film Festival and the NXNE Music Festival.

So what's the secret sauce in Pride Toronto's success? We can't know for sure but there's probably an argument to be made for it coming down to a magic mélange of willfulness, restless self-improvement and — frankly — a bloody fine instinct for showing folks a good time. It's been a long road from adversity to legitimacy for Pride Toronto. And it's certain that the festival wouldn't be where it is today if any of these factors had gone lacking.

The globally recognized festival had its scrappy beginnings in the early seventies, as a series of island picnics organized by Toronto Gay Action Now, the Community Homophile Association of Toronto and the University of Toronto Homophile Association. It was a humble start: a fun summer gathering of like-spirited folks, with just a few placards to mark the significance of the event — Toronto's first public display of gay solidarity.

By 1974, the picnics had germinated into the first Toronto Pride Week, days filled with pageantry, music and revelry, culminating in the event's first march through the city. But, despite a few friendly gestures (then-mayor David Crombie sent well wishes), city council flatly refused to recognize the festival through the rest of the decade.

In the 80s, relations between the city and Toronto's lesbian and gay communities reached an ignition point. Incited by a series of police raids against popular bathhouses — quaintly dubbed Operation Soap — widespread sympathy started to galvanize around LGBT issues. The mass protests and rallies held in the aftermath of these police actions were a major turning point for awareness of LGBT rights in Toronto and in Canada at large. It was the beginning of a mainstream shift towards embracing them as human rights and not just the remote interests of some vocal minority. And Pride Week, as a touchstone of the community's refusal to be cowed, was a direct beneficiary of that energized support. Pride became the party for the right to fight.

Even as tensions lingered between LGBT activists and the city under the Art Eggleton mayoralty, Pride Week grew from an attendance of under 2000 in 1981 to over 25,000 by the start of the 90s. In 1991, whether from a sense of inevitability or a newfound enlightenment, Pride Week was finally given its official recognition by the City of Toronto. Just three years later, Barbara Hall would become the first Toronto mayor to march in the Pride Week parade.

Hall's official participation started an abiding tradition of Toronto mayors marching in Pride Week parades - until Rob Ford broke the chain in 2011. Ford's decision was frowned upon by both critics and supporters alike — and widely reported on — but it did nothing to abate the momentum of the festival, which by then was estimating attendance at between 500,000 and one million visitors.

It had taken 30 years, some of them very contentious, but Pride Week had persevered to become something truly insurmountable — a world class event.

That status was further reinforced when Toronto Pride was chosen to host the 2014 WorldPride Festival (something akin to a Universal Exposition for LGBT, for lack of a better description). Toronto Pride beat out Stockholm for the honour, and became the first North American city to host the event.

Taking the title of Parachute Club's 1983 hit "Rise Up" as the festival's slogan, Pride Toronto's hosting of the WorldPride event completely smashed expectations.

"Hosting WorldPride changed everything," says Aaron GlynWilliams, Co-Chair of Pride Toronto. "It was a completely different scale. We had over two million people attend our events, we had over 100 affiliate events, we had an economic impact on the city of over $719 million. It was one of the biggest events in the city's history."

"It was phenomenal to be a part of," he adds. "But it also left some huge shoes to fill."

The challenge for Pride Toronto in the afterglow of the wild successes of WorldPride 2014 has been to make the 2015 event just as glorious and aspirational, without the benefit of the added financial investment or social sway that came with the WorldPride designation.

It's a challenge many organizations would have shrunk from. But Pride Toronto, as they have with so many other hurdles over the years, have used this as just another opportunity to prove they shouldn't be underestimated.

"WorldPride showed us the kind of successes we could achieve," s GlynWilliams said. "And it gave us the expertise, the experience, to replicate some of those successes."

"We've taken the lessons of WorldPride and we're making them relevant to what we want Toronto Pride to grow into."

Part of that fresh approach in 2015 has been to make the daily events at each Pride Week site part of an immersive thematic experience.

"We're trying to reflect the diversity of our city, not just around sexual preference and gender identity but also culturally," GlynWilliams explained.

"We want to make every one of our satellite events a destination in its own right."

Those "destination" experiences have already included a Beach Party at Sugar Beach, a sold-out human rights conference and a Saint-Jean-Baptiste celebration (in drag).

By the time Toronto Pride 2015 is done, there will have been a full day of transgender events (including a parade, a fair and a free concert in Yonge-Dundas Square hosted by Chaz Bono), a South Asian Bollywood-themed mini-festival, a Pan Am-inspired latin dance event, and the streetsmart Blockorama block party, to name just a few of the highlights the festival has on offer.

Pride Toronto 2015 might not be quite on the scale of 2014 WorldPride experience but it also seems more focused and sure of itself. There's a sense that this newest incarnation of the festival is building towards something — that it's on the precipice of another evolutionary leap.

"We're treating this year as an exploratory phase," GlynWilliams said.

"It's not so much about being as big as possible as it is about being the best possible. We're trying new things, we're being ambitious."

"We've programmed something relevant and exciting and big, every night of the festival," he added.

"So far we've exceeded expectations at every event. I see big things ahead for Pride Toronto. It's going to be fun to share that with the city."