Hey, Gay! Did you know that June is widely regarded as Pride month across Canada? We sure did!

We hear you like Pride. What’s more, we hear you eat up that rainbow-coloured slop that corporations shove down our throats for 1/12th of every calendar year. We hear you can’t get enough of your iced coffee or your Chappel Roan, and to that we at Arthur say: you’re valid!

Seeing that our venerable student Association have had the kindness to organize a trip to Toronto Pride (and offload some bucket hats in the process), we at Arthur thought we’d extend the good hand of charity and organize a trip of our own.

After all, the theme of our summer serial is all about finding value in the things close to hand, and the city of Toronto—at a commute of one-and-a-half to upwards-of-three-hours depending on the day—could hypothetically be argued to be just that.

So, seeing as the coffers are hurting while we wait for Trent to give us the good ol’ TWSP cheques, we thought such an event could prove a good means to make a little supplementary income.

If nothing else, we’re pretty sure it should count towards some sort of DEI initiative.

Seeing as I—as a homosexual, a transsexual, and a woman—count towards at least three of Arthur’s Stalinist diversity quotas, it falls to me to organize this trip. If you’re not already sold on the premise of hanging out with me, at Pride, in the heat for twelve hours, in a city I vocally hate, permit me to upsell you on the notion.

An itinerary follows for the Arthur-Pride-Trip agnostic. I’m sure once you read it you will find it very much to your liking. That said: tickets are limited, so act quickly! You wouldn’t want to miss out on the trip of a lifetime now, would you?

What: Arthur’s One-and-Only 2024 Trip to Toronto Pride

When: June 30th (during Pride Month)

Why: Because like the Pope, we love gay people.

5 Tickets are available for each of the seats in my Mazda 5 (it seats seven, but me and my buddy are taking the first two). Cost is one $15 PlayStation Store gift card + food and gas, split evenly (minus me, of course).

If we have sufficient interest, we could drive to Oshawa and take the train in—which would give us another 4 tickets—but we kinda gotta know about that by this week cause my buddy who would drive has to get the car off his parents and he also needs to book work off that day and honestly it just seems like a bit of a hassle.

First come, first served unless I dislike you. One of the tickets may be reserved for my girlfriend, but she might also take the train in so we’re working off airline rules: ticket five only costs a fiver but if my girlfriend shows you’re being left behind. Sorry ‘bout that, but that’s economy class for you.

My work email is located prominently in my bio for e-transfers. I also accept cash or cheque, deliverable to office 104 of Sadleir House.

ITINERARY:

Meet in the Sadleir House Parking Lot at 10:00 AM for a 10:30 departure. We would leave earlier except I believe it to be criminal to get out of bed before 8:00, and insist on spending an hour every morning making needlessly fussy coffee beverages and reading high falutin books on the couch I found in a dumpster. 

Expect, for this reason, that I might actually be a bit late. Perhaps you can smoke a few cigarettes in the meantime?

Leave closer to 10:43 AM after a few false starts—which is to say, stalls (I drive manual, ladies).

The drive to Toronto should take about 90 mins, but it is the day of the Pride parade and a weekend, so no promises. Now might be a good time to mention that taking the 401 makes me homicidal.

Either way the drive affords us plenty of time to listen to Charli XCX’s brat in full.

Speaking of which, your ticket comes with Aux privileges, and by “aux privileges,” I mean the privilege of listening to my personally curated playlist for the duration of the drive. Arbiter of taste that I am, the contents of this playlist are not up for discussion—though I do accept friendly amendments so long as they don’t involve Lady Gaga.

Traffic permitting, we should arrive in Toronto by 12:00, and by noon I mean probably closer to 1:00 in the afternoon. Granted, we’ll need to find somewhere to park, and you know how that can be with the road closures.

Even if it takes us till 1:13 to be parked, I’ve left us plenty of time before the parade. Did you know that lunch is catered? That’s right, I’ve arranged for all of us to go to my ex-girlfriend's house in the Annex for sandwiches. She makes a really killer artisinal ciabatta (yes, technically, I know it’s not actual ciabatta—which is trademarked—but it’s good, okay?).

This should mean that with ~half-an-hour budgeted to eat, we can easily get to the parade route between 2:17–2:35. It starts at 2:00, you say? Not to worry—it’ll take them at least forty minutes to get to Queen street, and why would you want to be standing on the hot sidewalk in the scorching sun when you could be sipping some of Amelia Monwort’s free-range kombucha?

After we’ve said our goodbyes, made our way to the parade, and watched the procession of drag queens on bank floats go by, we have an hour from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM to check out the street fair! What better opportunity to buy resin earrings, friendship bracelets, and non-body-safe piercings you’ll wear once and then never look at again?

Don’t worry, though—if you think that Pride is becoming too much about buying things these days, I completely empathize. I’m sure there’s plenty of other things you could do which don’t include giving money to people with green mullets such as: the Toronto Jazz Festival sponsored by TD, the Steers & Queers Tailgate Party sponsored by Rogers, Blockorama Act 26: Liberation Now sponsored by Bud Light, and the Pride Sober Oasis sponsored by TD. Anti-Capitalist fun for the whole homonationalist family!

Pride is about more than just parades, though—that’s why we at Arthur intend to bring you an authentically queer Toronto experience for the rest of our stay in the gayest city in Ontario that isn’t Stratford during Shakespeare festival.

To that end, I aim to bring you a nightlife repertoire brimming with all of that unique charm and character for which Toronto is so well known. Now if only I could find where that went…

To start the night we have a dinner reservation at Sneaky Dee’s at 5:30, so make sure to not get too engrossed with the artisans, cause my friend who’s a line cook there kind of had to pull in a favour to get us this table on such short notice and their boss is low-key mad at them but that might also have to do with the three times last week they showed up to the midnight-to-7AM shift hungover.

We’ve only got the table for an hour because the restaurant is hosting a folk-punk show that night and they need to clean the place before doors, but that’s fine because I want to take us to my ex-girlfriend’s poetry slam at 7:00 anyway.

No, not Amelie. No, a different ex-girlfriend. Yeah, she’s in her sixth year at OCAD.

Anyway the slam is in this combination coffeehouse and foreign literature store on Queen St. West, which is a bit of a walk, but it’s also, like, so much more in touch with the pulse of the city, you feel me?

As we dodge Skip the Dishes drivers whizzing down sidewalks on e-scooters I’ll be happy to point you to all the well-know Toronto attractions such as: graffiti alley, Queen’s Park, the many “medicinal” magic mushrooms stores, and the hospital where twelve vials of my jizz are stored!

Once we get to the Slam I’m going to grab some sort of hoppy IPA. My ex isn’t on until like 7:20 technically but I think she’s only reading like three poems anyway and one of them is only like five lines (she looooooooves Rupi Kaur). Anyway, we can leave at 7:30 cause I want to hit up two-for-one cocktails at this bar in the market cause I’ve been craving a Dark n’ Stormy (or five).

After all, the most important part of a good night is a strong pre-game—at least that’s what the twinks all tell me.

Assuming we get to the bar between 7:45 and 8:00, that gives us plenty of time to have a few drinks and still have our entire evening ahead of us. I’ve arranged a private walkthrough of my ex-girlfriend’s solo show near the AGO (not in the AGO, I admit, but in the basement of a townhouse across the street). She’s doing a silent auction, but promised me she’ll hold any paintings for you if you’re interested in buying so that you don’t have to lug them to the club.

No, she’s actually not at OCAD. No, yeah, she dropped out of TMU. Yeah we met on Lex—she invited me to a nude portraiture class her ex was posing for.

If we budget about an hour to walk to the gallery and contemplate the tasteful erotic still-lifes (it’s a meditation on translocating the Phallus that she started after reading Lacan), we can get to the club when it opens at 10:00.

Listen, I know that dancing in a dark, crowded room full of mostly sweaty gay men is not everyone’s first idea of “fun” (trust me, I’m a lesbian), but a significant part of the queer experience (as I’m so often told) is getting fucked up on ecstasy and gyrating to drum n’ bass. 

Electronic music is like the one thing trans women get recognition for, so I think we’re obliged to pay our respects for SOPHIE. 

Plus, this place is kind of swanky and up-market. I mean, Church Street isn’t what it was in the 90s anymore. This place charges for the gloryholes and you’d not be remiss to see a woman here on her bachelorette party.

Not that we’re going to stay there, all night, mind. Pride month only officially ends when you go to bed for the first time after June, so we’re staying up to make the big gay month last. 

At 0:00 there’s a shipping container DJ set in the harbourfront (my ex-girlfriend is performing—no, not that one), and we and you, friend, are going!

Remember, the venue isn’t licensed (it’s an abandoned warehouse) so we can stop at the LCBO on the way if you want to B.Y.O.B. That said, I’m pretty sure my ex is bringing her polycule and I think that Chastity deals ket so we can also stop at the Circle K ATM if you need cash for that.

If you ask me, listening to women spin industrial metal against video projections of the numogram is the authentic Pride experience that all of these sanitized, corporate-friendly, bucket-hat-wearing bankers are afraid of. True transgression is born not of Pride parades, but of Twitter transsexuals playing techno and doing poppers in public bathrooms.

Yes, our rights might be in a freefall backslide in the United States, the United Kingdom, and even here at home, but who needs to think about that when you have Rufige Kru and Ritalin, am I right? 

I said, “Am I right?”...

Well, all good nights come to an end, and so it is that if I’m to get you Very Important People back to Peterborough I might need to become slightly reacquainted with reality. There’s a 24-hour McDonald’s on Spadina (you know the one) that we can stop in around 4:00 so that I can chug a 5-hour energy and rest my head wearily on the table while I contemplate my life choices.

No, I’ll totally be fine to drive, why do you ask?

Yes, I swear this has nothing to do with the fact that everyone I’ve ever dated is doing cooler things in bigger cities and I’ve committed to doing grad school in fucking Peterborough.

How much good really comes of Pride, do you think? I mean, I’m still struggling to get my school to recognize my name. I have a wristband that says “M” from when I was hospitalized this year. I have this sinking feeling that every good thing that ever happens to me is a consequence of the institutions in which I run seeing me as a check-box on a DEI initiative.

No, I’m fine, why do you ask? I mean, things have gotten so much better on the whole. Like, people totally tolerate trans people these days, as long as we don’t ask for our existence to be recognized or our humanity acknowledged. 

We literally couldn’t have the privilege of being yelled at on Twitter by children’s authors without Pride, right? Doesn’t that have to mean something?

Sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Yeah, I’ll be fine in a minute I think. I’m just tired. Maybe I had one too many yerba mates at Céline’s art show. 

Everything will be better tomorrow, I’m sure. In any case, there’s always next year.