WorldPride 2014 was the biggest Pride celebration in Canada and The ArQuives celebrated in a big way, with exhibitions, heritage walking tours, guest speakers, art projects, and more. A look back at some WorldPride highlights: 
On June 24, The ArQuives welcomed guests to the opening reception for Imaging Home: Migration, Resistance, Contradiction, an exhibition in partnership with Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights. The show features video portraits of LGBT activists in Uganda, Kenya, Botswana, Jamaica, Guyana, Belize, Saint Lucia and India, as well as documentary videos of Toronto drag queens by Anton Wagner and Edimburgo Cabrera, and portraits by Guyanese photographer Ulelli Verbeke. Guests speakers at the opening reception included Nancy Nicol, Namela Baynes-Henry, Brayo Bryans, and Richard Lusimbo (pictured at left). View more photos from opening reception for Imaging Home here. Samra Habib’s portrait show, Queer and Muslim: Finding Peace Within Islam, also opened on June 24, with photographs on display in The ArQuives’s reading room. Both exhibitions run until October 5, 2014, so come check them out! 
The ArQuives also mounted exhibitions throughout the city during WorldPride, at Toronto City Hall, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, and the Toronto Reference Library (pictured at right). Archival material from The ArQuives can also be seen all summer at shows on display at the Ryerson Image Centre and Textile Museum of Canada. 
Throughout the week of WorldPride, The ArQuives lead historical walking tours in partnership with Heritage Toronto to highlight the city’s rich past of LGBTQ+ activism and community. Tour stops included the Toronto AIDS Memorial, sites of past bars and bathhouses, Glad Day Bookshop, and more. Thank you to Heritage Toronto and our volunteers, including tour leads Rebecka Sheffield, Dennis Findlay, Karen Stanworth, Pearse Murray, Rachel Beattie, and Gerald Hannon (pictured above). 
As part of the Church Street Mural Project, muralist and The ArQuives volunteer Wil Craddock hosted a button making event on June 27 in front of his Pin Button Pride mural. The mural, located just west of the Church & Wellesley intersection, features paintings of pin buttons from The ArQuives’s collection, representing decades of activism and community organizing. Passersby were invited to learn about the histories of the buttons and try their hand at making their very own button (Wil, making buttons, pictured at right). Wil was also on CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning to talk about the important work of The ArQuives and ourr ecently announced partnership with the Canadian Museum of History. We hope you had a happy Pride with us! Thank you to our volunteers, donors, and community partners. Without you, our WorldPride programming would not have been possible. View some great photos from the WorldPride Parade here and here, by The ArQuives volunteer Don McLeod. Above photos by Michael Holmes.
