While Pride Month is June in the US (to commemorate the Stonewall Uprising in June of 1969), the big LGBTQ+ celebration in Montréal is Fierté, celebrated in the first week of August.
Pride festivals in Montréal have gone through many forms and iterations since the first 52-person march in 1979. With Fierté, the attendance has grown enormously, with over 3 million attendees in 2019. Since there were pandemic restrictions in place for 2020 and 2021, the re-opening of all the events this year was a big deal.
Fierté has events all over the city, but the twin foci are Rue Sainte-Catherine here in the Gay Village, and at the Olympic Stadium Esplanade where the big parade is held… or was supposed to be. More on that later.
Over the past week, Rue Sainte-Catherine has been getting more and more crowded with booths (ranging from small organizations to lots and lots of big corporate rainbow-washing efforts) and attendees. Pride flags are nothing new on Rue Sainte-Catherine, but the city also put up giant disco balls. At Place-du-Village, they put up a big geodesic dome to host several events, ranging from an outdoor disco to a virtual reality experience placing you “in the shoes of an LGBTQ person.”
By the weekend, the street was packed. Despite 90+ºF (32C) temperatures and very high humidity, crowds came by to visit see and be seen, to dance in the streets, to go to the bars and restaurants, to see drag show cabarets, and to get stickers, keychains, and water bottles from big companies.
On Sunday morning, the big parade at the esplanade was abruptly canceled. The reason given was a lack of security personnel / volunteers. Organizational chaos ensued. There’s a lot of finger-pointing, blame-shifting, and conspiracy-theorizing going on, and it will probably be a while before anyone understands what really happened. In the meantime, a lot of impromptu parades formed, and more people poured over to Rue Sainte-Catherine. Some mini-parades, like one Brazilian samba band, got shut down by police (over noise? I couldn’t tell). The event’s web site was even shut down, although who did it and why is not yet clear.
The cancelation of the parade may have been a big disappointment, but it’s not that easy to shut down the party. You may not be able to tell from the pictures above, but there were thousands and thousands of people along the street. Sunday evening and into early Monday morning, we could hear the revelry continuing.
Yet Monday morning, walking along the street on my way to school, I was amazed. Cleaning crews were arriving (as they do most mornings), but the street was no worse for wear than your average day. If you didn’t know about the event, you’d be hard pressed to guess that there had been tens of thousands gathered here just hours before.
