By David Topping

If the Pride Parade and Dyke March bore some similarities to the G20 protests, coming as they did one week later and taking over some of the same streets, it was in form only, not content. There were fences (though these were only four feet high). There were the spectators, lots with cameras, on the streets and on balconies and roofs above (though most weren’t horrified this time). There was a TTC bus, converted from its original purpose to serve as something different (though this one was for queens, not captives). There was Yonge Street, taken over and, between Gerrard and Dundas, turned into a makeshift pedestrian mall (though the still-boarded-up windows of the College Park Tim Hortons weren’t that way for fear of another onslaught). There were lots and lots of police (though beads and rainbow flags and big smiles took the place of riot gear and stoicism).
Pride, the city’s biggest party, remained that way—the Canadian Press pegs the number of Sunday attendees as more than a million—and this year, it served a different function, something like what it used to in darker days: the city’s biggest chaser. The G20 hangover’s still coming, but amidst all there was to be ashamed of, a big shot of Pride could only help.
Photos from Saturday’s Dyke March and Sunday’s Pride Parade, by Torontoist’s photographers and members of our Flickr Pool, are above.

CORRECTION: JULY 5, 2010 One photo in the gallery above—of the newlywed brides—mistakenly said that the two women pictured had come from Atlanta to get married; in fact, the women are Brenda Lehman and Georgi Georgi, both Torontonian. Lehman and Georgi were profiled in the Star on Friday along with Kristen Pierce and Kalisa Morton—it’s Pierce and Morton who arrived at Pride from Atlanta.