Cover art courtesy of The Trevor Project, 2023. Check out their excellent guide on supporting queer disabled youth!
It’s Pride Toronto 2024!
Time for screaming queers in corporate pride merch, angry dykes in secondhand pride merch, and the annual blossoming of the Absolute Vodka rainbow patio umbrellas across the city. It’s a magical time of sun, sweat, and cruising in the misting stations; love really is love, after all.
Unless you’re a disabled dandy, handicapped homo, or crippy queer, that is.
For those of us slightly more fragile faggots who still want to party with a protest (and protest with a party), Pride is the time for another round of doors so tight your chair gets stuck, throngs of rainbow-decked dog lovers trying to pet your service animal, and desperately scouring the Pride Toronto™ website for actually usable accessibility information.
To be fair, Pride Toronto™ does provide some accessibility information for the festival weekend of June 28-30. While it’s excellent to see this effort, the assurance that “there is at least one accessible portable washroom wherever there are portable washrooms” feels a bit underwhelming. Encouragingly, they do state that they lend out mobility aids at “the ASH.” Further googling has determined this is the confusing lingo they’re using for their “accessibility hub” located at 58 Wellesley St. E. While there is no information on exactly which mobility aids will be available or how many, they do emphasize that these will only be available to use from 7pm-11pm on Friday the 28th and 1pm-11pm on both Saturday the 29th and Sunday the 30th. I suppose we’ve all just decided that cripqueers don’t need to be out at night. Thankfully, ASL interpreters will be available for six of the larger stages, but it’s unclear if they’ll be there for every single act. “Attendant Care Workers who are trained professionals” are also available from the ASH, but we’ve got no information on what kinds of care those professionals are trained to provide. Raised platforms and a few advance reservation seating options are available for stage and parade viewing, but again, the lack of information around capacity limits and space reservation methods leaves us wanting.
Interestingly, organizers have created a volunteer staffed “sensory space” for rest and quiet relaxation. Unfortunately, I can’t specify its exact location as sources differ across Pride Toronto™ media. It might be in George Hislop Park, Norman Jewison Park, or James Canning Gardens; look for a bunch of quiet people there, I guess. Finally, there are five designated TTC Wheel Trans Drop Offs, all just east of Church St., at 80 Charles St., 85 Gloucester St., 103 Maitland St., 72 Carlton St., and 72 Gerrard St. Importantly, there is no continuously accessible designated path around the festival or even a disjointed accessible path that connects the nearby stages, attractions, and raised parade viewing platforms.
Now, Pride Toronto™ also has a nifty little digital booklet of Pride related activities (and before you ask, no, it is absolutely not compatible with screen readers). It lists events both directly helmed by Pride Toronto™ themselves as well as those run by their officially endorsed partner organizations from May 17 to June 30. Page five provides the same accessibility spiel outlined on the general website. However, things get a bit trippy when we flip through the event listings themselves. Each listing has a little icon indicating whether the event is accessible, a paid event, a free event, 19+, or has a bar (truly the five genders of our time). Of the 46 Pride Toronto™ organized events listed, 37 have the little wheelchair/accessibility icon. Amusingly, neither the parade itself nor the listing for that cheeky little Accessibility Pride “Sensory Space” has the accessible icon, but I will concede that the parade listing did have a tiny bit of text leading readers to the accessibility page on the main site. The Annual Youth Conference on May 17th was also not designated as accessible, but it is common knowledge that young people never experience disability or intersectional concerns (wink, wink).
Let’s take a closer look at some of those 37 juicy Pride Toronto™ sanctioned accessible events. That’s a pretty hefty inclusion rate. At first glance, I was happy, dammit. But just like any Lex connection, the mood starts to shift the more you dig for details. Take, for example, June 20th’s Pride Pool Party with Raja at the Grand Bizarre Supper Club from 7PM to midnight. Scooting right past the cabana ticket pricing of over a grand, an accessible pool party for a $50 general admission ticket sounds like a blast. Or it does until you realize that the “accessibility” on offer at this pool party doesn’t extend to the pool itself. The event venue’s own accessibility information document talks about wheelchair accessible seating (likely just a snazzy table) and accessible parking spaces at the nearby Green P lot. Staff will also permit service animals (woof), let guests bring and use their own personal accessibility devices (hot damn), and willingly email guests instead of calling them on the phone (luxury). But there are no accessibility features that enable a wheelchair user to get in that sexy pool, no information about strobing or flashing lights and, curiously, not even a whisper of an accessible washroom.
The rest of these accessible events are outside, on the street, around a stage. At each stage is a creche of portable washrooms including, as promised above, one wheelchair accessible portable washroom. Some of these stages have ASL interpreters during the main festival weekend and some of them have accessible seating and raised viewing platforms. While these things are great, they don’t actually provide the information a crip person needs to plan their big gay day out. There is no information about curb cuts, nearby subway station accessibility features, flashing lights, major long-term construction, significant potholes, or cracks. Additionally, and I cannot emphasize this enough, there is no mention of any bars, clubs, restaurants, or convenience stores a disabled person might want to visit that may, god willing, even have a locking single-stall washroom with an automatic button.
While it isn’t perfect, and by no means could I grab all that information for my fellow fags with chairs, canes, tubes, bags, meds and spindly spines, I recently packed up my service pup and headed up and down the designated Pride Toronto™ Church St. strip. I aimed to do the painfully simple work of scoping out the potentially AODA compliant restaurants, shops, and venues you might want to know about if you’re a cripqueer with a thing for rainbow street parties and the human urge to enter an establishment and maybe even use a washroom now and again. This is avant-garde research, people; a true testament to my rapidly worsening right hip and the inaccessible legacy of Pride parades and festivals around the world to this day.
To that end, I present to you, The Bare Minimum: A Pride Toronto Festival Map with Some Accessibility Considerations. Built as a companion to the cute little map in that digital Pride Toronto™ handbook, this handy map is fully to scale, compatible with screen readers and includes information about accessible washrooms, push buttons, level entrances, elevators, restaurants, patios, parade and rally viewing spots and TTC infrastructure. Since it uses the Google Maps platform, directions and measured distances are a breeze. Feel free to download a copy and add your own customized landmarks.
Atticus Hawk (they/he) is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research looks at the role of Leatherdykes in the creation of medical knowledge and harm-reduction practices for fat, trans and disabled bodies in kink.