There’s an entire rainbow road to celebrate LGBTQ+ people and it goes straight to a beach

Move over, Utrecht—Toronto just snatched your queer thunder.

Until a few weeks ago, the little Dutch city of Utrecht southeast of Amsterdam was home to the longest rainbow road on Earth, a bike path of more than 570 meters (1870 feet) running through the heart of the campus of Utrecht University. In 2021, the colorful Holland trail usurped the previous record holder, a nearly 500-meter (1640-foot) path for cyclists installed in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2017.

But now the record has passed to Toronto’s new rainbow road running along the city’s famed Hanlan’s Point Beach, which for decades has been a meeting point for LGBTQ+ Canadians on the downtown-adjacent Toronto Island. Debuting on May 25 with a star-studded ribbon-cutting ceremony, the 600-meter (1968-foot) section of the primarily pedestrian Beach Road features traditional rainbow flag colors flanked by the trans, black, and brown chevrons of the Progress Pride flag at each end.

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“For nearly a century, queer people have walked along this road to go to Hanlan’s Point in search of community and togetherness, including marching out here for the first Pride gathering in all of Canada back in 1971,” explains Travis Myers, co-founder of the group Friends of Hanlan’s and the artist behind the rainbow road project. “Now in the present day, as queer people make the same pilgrimage, the space itself can reflect back the community that has made it what it is and continues to make it special.”

Myers says his inspiration for the road, officially known as “The Long Walk to Equality,” came from famed Canadian queer landscape architect Claude Cormier, who passed away last September after a career that infused playfulness and color into countless projects.

“By using the geography of a space as a tool for communication about the space, it can transcend languages and preconceptions to become something universal,” says Myers. “This is a living and vibrant monument for a living and vibrant community.”

Just a few short years ago, the future of Hanlan’s Point looked grim. Despite its historic importance to the local LGBTQ+ community and its global recognition as one of the world’s most popular clothing-optional queer beaches, Toronto city developers eager to redevelop the downtown waterfront area proposed building a large open-air amphitheater and festival space here that would have transformed the longtime queer safe space into a mainstream party venue.

In response to the city’s shocking plans that neglected to incorporate input from the local queer community, in 2022, Myers and others formed a grassroots group called Hands Off Hanlan’s, which sought to preserve the site’s important LGBTQ+ legacy. After rallying a public outcry that forced the city to drop its amphitheater project, the group morphed into Friends of Hanlan’s, which successfully garnered city council support to honor the queer heritage at Hanlan’s permanently.

In May 2023, the Toronto City Council unanimously adopted motion MM6.22, put forth by Councillor (now Deputy Mayor) Ausma Malik to “recognize the eight decades of queer history, community, and the importance of place-making at Hanlan’s Point Beach and surrounding area,” and “establish a community advisory group … to develop ways to better safeguard the Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (2SLGBTQ+) community at Hanlan’s Point Beach and surrounding area from bigotry, violence, and discrimination.” A subsequent motion the following month, also passed unanimously, further cemented the preservation and commemoration efforts.

“Queer public space is always precarious,” says Myers. “For so long [at Hanlan’s Point], it’s been the members of the community who have come back every year and ensured that the space stays queer-friendly. Last year’s motion by the Deputy Mayor to recognize the queer significance of this space and formalize its status as a historically queer space is important. Hopefully this road takes some of that burden off of individuals and lets the space speak for itself.”

The rainbow road’s opening celebration and ribbon cutting featured speeches by Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, Deputy Mayor Malik, and Bobby MacPherson from Pride Toronto and performances by Canada’s Drag Race stars Lemon, Jada Hudson, and Aurora Matrix. Donations from community members and queer-friendly businesses, including The Waterfront BIA, Gilead Health, and Skittles, entirely funded the more than $150,000 (USD $110,000) project.

The installation of the rainbow road comes less than two years after Toronto lost what for years had been its first and most famous LGBTQ+ monument, a statue of early settler Alexander Wood set at the heart of the city’s Gay Village. Wood, a successful Scottish immigrant and city magistrate of York (Toronto’s former name) who owned the land that later became the Gay Village, found himself at the center of a murky scandal in 1810 after demanding to inspect the genitalia of several men who had been implicated in a rape case.

The scandal earned the magistrate the derisive moniker Molly Wood (“molly” being a contemporary slur for “gay”). Still, he was later resurrected as a folk hero by Toronto’s early gay movement. In 2005 a rather flamboyant statue of Wood created by artist Del Newbigging was installed at the corner of Church and Alexander Streets, becoming Canada’s first LGBTQ+ monument, and purportedly granting good luck to all who deigned to rub his bronze bum. Still, the statue was not embraced by Toronto’s entire LGBTQ+ community, especially those who saw Wood as a symbol of cis-white male colonialism.

Smash cut to 2022 when, in the wake of renewed scrutiny of early Canada’s residential school system and its abuse and murder of the country’s Indigenous peoples, the Wood statue was abruptly removed and destroyed after it was discovered that Wood had raised funds for a mission school that later became a residential school. Some Indigenous groups later balked, claiming that they were not consulted before the statue’s hasty destruction.

With the opening of the rainbow road at Hanlan’s Point, Toronto now has a much more inclusive and hopefully far less controversial LGBTQ+ monument, one that honors the history of not just one person but of the entire community.

“Beginning in the 1930s and potentially even before, queer people have made the trek out to Hanlan’s Point in search of a place where they could gather and socialize without fear of judgement or persecution,” says Myers. “In the decades before homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada, taking the ferry out to the island and making the walk along this road was one way of getting away from the prying eyes of Victorian morality and meeting other people who existed on the margins. The rare freshwater dune ecosystem once provided the perfect cover for people to hold the hand of their partner or express their gender identity without the same fear that doing the same thing in the downtown core could cause. Through those years, the soft sandy beach and the dunes were tended to by the community when it seemed like the rest of the city had forgotten about this place.”

Myers says it’s no coincidence that the first Pride gathering in Canada was celebrated here in 1971, just two short years after homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada.

“The queer liberation movement in this country has so many lines traced through Hanlan’s,” he says. “This was the place where queer racial justice groups met for picnics, AIDS organizations fundraised, and queer religious people took communion in secret. It’s not an exaggeration to say that there is queer history in every grain of sand along the beach.”

Nearly a century on, Toronto’s queer community continues to flock to and care for Hanlan’s.

“I’ve heard from so many people that gathering here away from the pretense of the bars and clubs is a great equalizer, something particularly true for the many trans folks who view this as a place where their bodies are less politicized,” says Myers. “For many, this is a place where the words ‘queer community’ feel real.”

Myers says he wants queer people around the world to feel connected to their history, which is so often erased.

“I want people to feel a sense that they belong and deserve to belong,” he says. “As so many queer spaces disappear, it’s important to help people feel empowered. This is a way of telling the world we deserve to be safe and happy now by showing people that we’ve always been here and always will be.”