Thursday, July 3, 2025
We’re still a little tired but our hearts are full after another busy weekend celebrating our city’s 2SLGBTQIA+ spaces as part of Toronto’s Pride celebrations.
What started as a one-time celebration of diversity within the profession has flourished into an ongoing initiative that not only seeks to make a more welcoming industry for all, but that is advancing important research into Toronto’s 2SLGBTQIA+ spaces and their spatial and urban characteristics. This year that research took shape into a mini-exhibit at the Pride Toronto Street Fair, including a 10’ tall triangular obelisk recording over 250+ queer spaces in our city, past and present, as well as some limited-edition TSA merchandise celebrating some of the city’s most iconic queer spaces in support of the research. Throughout the 3-day Street Fair, we chatted with just over 4,000 attendees who stopped by our booth to learn more about our city’s queer spaces, with many of them contributing to our research by sharing their memories and stories of their favourite spaces.
The exhibit was also an opportunity to officially launch our Toronto Queer Spaces Database, an ongoing digital project many years in the making that aims to catalog and document Toronto’s 2SLGBTQIA+ spaces, past and present. This database, hosted on the TSA website, increases access to information on these understudied spaces, contributing to our mandate of promoting understanding and appreciation for Toronto’s built environment. While currently just a list, our aim is to grow this database over time to include images, drawings, and maps that allow for a better understanding of the evolution and shape of these spaces.
Capping off this weekend was our now annual participation in Toronto’s Pride Parade, the second largest in North America and one of the largest Pride parades in the world. As has become tradition, the TSA contingent once again marched remembering and celebrating Toronto’s Queer Spaces, with colourful signs depicting both past and present spaces. A special thank you to all those who represented us so well at the parade—including TSA Members, family and friends—as well as to the tens of thousands who cheered us on.
Whether it was our participation at the parade or our booth at the Street Fair, none of this would have been possible without the support and dedication of countless individuals, including our Pride Initiative Leads, Kurtis Chen and Janice Miyagi, and our Street Fair Booth Volunteers Adria, Anahita, Andrew, Brian, Casey, Davood, Dmytro, Erin, Haoyu, Jake, Jim, Joe, Jocelyn, Jordana, Karina, Larissa, Maria, Mariana, Marissa, Rosie, Scarlett, Stephanie, Tracy, and Yuchen. A special shout out to volunteer Ryan Falkbenberg for all his help with the booth, parade logistics and getting our database up on our website, and to our dedicated TSA staff and UofT placement student Kate Rozumey for all the behind-the-scenes work to make our Pride initiatives possible.
This year we also want to give an extra special shout out to Community One Foundation for their generous Rainbow Grant which made our mini-exhibit at the Street Fair possible, and the Ontario Association of Architects for their ongoing support to our Pride initiatives through Special Project Funding.
We also want to say thank you to Toronto Metropolitan University’s Department of Architectural Studies, and more specifically their Director Lisa Landrum, their 2026 student Exhibition Team Avery La-Rose, Aashir Imran, Gisele Ortega Joseph, and Duha Ismail, as well as their shop team, for their help in building this year’s mini-exhibit. They’ve even been kind enough to agree to host the mini-exhibit on their ground floor atrium space for a few more weeks, so make sure to catch it while you can!
Until next Pride!
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