As Toronto marks the fiftieth year of its first gay rights march comes this celebration of those who march with pride.

Toronto’s inaugural Gay Pride March took place in 1974 when a hundred people gathered to march from Allan Gardens to Queen’s Park, calling on lawmakers to include sexual orientation in the Ontario Human Rights Code. The march helped lay the groundwork for what has become one of the largest gay pride festivals in the world. In Pride, Lambda-award-winning writer Michael Rowe brings this history, and the challenges the gay community has faced since, into sharp focus while Toronto photographer Angel Guerra captures his city’s pride parade on a human scale. In 120 photographs, Guerra zooms in from the glorious spectacle to the small scenes and single participants, shining a light on moments of joy, strength, ferocity, resilience and love. At a time when 2SLGBTQI+ rights are under renewed threat throughout the world, Guerra and Rowe’s work captures the power of a movement that contains multitudes.

Angel Guerra is a writer, visual artist and designer. In 2002, he founded Archetype, an art and design studio, in downtown Toronto, focusing on the cultural industries. He is the winner of the Alcuin Prize in Book Design and has been named among the country’s top five book designers by the National Post. Guerra lives in Toronto, ON.

Angel John Guerra's profile page

In 2003, Michael Rowe became the first Arsenal Pulp Press author to win a Lambda Literary Award, for Queer Fear II, the sequel to his first critically-acclaimed queer horror anthology, Queer Fear. He is an award-winning independent journalist who has lived in Beirut, Havana, Geneva, and Paris. His work has appeared in the National Post, the Globe and Mail, the United Church Observer, and numerous other publications. He has been a finalist for both the Canadian National Magazine Award and the Associated Church Press Award in the United States. He is the author of several books, including Writing Below the Belt, a critically acclaimed study of censorship, pornography, and popular culture, and the essay collections Looking for Brothers and Other Men's Sons, which won the 2008 Randy Shilts Award for Nonfiction. A contributing writer to The Advocate, in 2009 The Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan nominated Rowe for the Michael Moore Award "for divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric" for his work on The Huffington Post for which he is a political blogger. He considers it his proudest moment as a new media journalist.

Michael Rowe's profile page