On Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m., on the northeast corner of Yonge and Wellesley, I lost my virginity. It was hot, it was rowdy, it was public, and there was much shouting and joyous screaming. And it was wet. Very wet. Was it enjoyable? Yes. Was it painful? Actually yeah, a bit. Was it exactly how I imagined? No. It never is when something is so hyped, so notorious, and so mythicized as the annual Toronto Pride Parade.

I never expected the GSA issue to be so well-known. To be honest, I didn’t really expect anyone to care about the situation at our school. In our school, it was just myself and a couple friends who were talking and thought that it would be pretty cool to have an LGBT club or group at our school. We didn’t know what GSAs were—we found that out when we Googled it—and then we decided to propose one.

In today's Urban Planner: Happy Canada Day, Happy Pride, Happy Ribfest. We aren't going to tell you about everything to see and do in Toronto this holiday Friday, but we'll give you plenty of choices.

Pride is a time to celebrate the freedoms and rights we fought hard for in the community. At the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA), we would like to think of ourselves as a resource for people to learn why they should be proud—why pride and Pride are important. We're the repository, the records, for the accomplishments to be proud of, from the big scale to the small personal victories. The Archives have those personal stories, as keeping our stories alive is really important.

If you were a baseball fan in Toronto during the summer of 1981, the best place to catch a game was a neighbourhood diamond. The Blue Jays played so poorly during the first half of the season that when major league players went on strike in mid-June, it was a relief to long-suffering fans (the team lost 11 straight games before the walkout). While the Blue Jays didn’t make it to the World Series, Toronto was home to championship baseball action that October thanks to the effort of the Cabbagetown Group Softball League (CGSL) to bring the fifth edition of the Gay Softball World Series (GSWS) to the city’s east side.

The light in the sky was slowly fading as more than 350 people gathered in Cawthra Square Park, behind the 519 Community Centre, for the annual AIDS Memorial Vigil. The theme for this year was the importance of family in supporting those dealing with HIV/AIDS; “however defined—whether biological or by choice,” said Rick Lees, who co-hosted the event with Doe O’Brien Teengs.

Glad Hand is Torontoist’s political cartoon, created by Brett Lamb and appearing here every Friday.