Vancouver Pride Parade on Robson Street, 2019. (Shutterstock)
Vancouver Pride organizers are aiming high with their goal of hosting the world’s largest pride festival, but the rainbow road to get there will be a long one.
WorldPride is a globe-trotting pride festival, held in a different city for a pride season and organized by the local pride society supplanting and significantly expanding the host city’s usual pride events, festivities, and programming, and adding a human rights conference.
The host city for WorldPride is transformed into an electric village celebrating the LGBTQ community, its annual Pride Parade is super-sized, and it becomes the beacon of the global pride festival calendar. Vancouver as the host would become the “must-visit” gay tourism destination of the year, attracting hundreds of thousands of members of the LGBTQ community from all over the globe. WorldPride is essentially the Olympics of pride festivals.