The Greying of Gay Pride

[Luv2play]

Yesterday Montreal staged its Gay Pride parade, a tradition that now goes back some 15 years or so. The August date was established several years ago because the traditional late June date conflicted with Quebec's fete nationale. It was a beautiful sunny and hot day and I pulled myself away from my lakeside chalet to come back to town to witness the events.

 

My overall impression was that the parade has become decidedly mainstream and attracts a broad spectrum of viewers like many other parades during the year. Gone are the early years when the only participants were Montreal's marginalized gay crowd and the gay crowd from Toronto, Ottawa and northern US states. Also gone were the wild parties in the gay bars spilling out onto Ste Catherine St. in the Gay Village.

 

After the parade I walked around the Village where I have a condo and dropped in on many of the bars to see what was happening. The crowd was very much smaller than in the late nineties when one could hardly move along Ste Catherine and where the street party went on for hours with everyone treating the street as one big bar.

 

The street is now closed off to traffic for the entire summer and now there are terraces in front of most of the bars and restaurants. The police are enforcing the rule the drinks must be kept on the terraces so there was no street dancing as in earlier days.

 

Also the crowds were smaller and the gay crowd looked considerably older (like me I suppose). But getting back to the parade, there were at least five floats that were excellent, just as I like them with lots of dancing boys and drag queens thrown in for color. One major bank, TD, had a great float with all the dancing boys in brief trademark green briefs.

 

Several of the bars had floats, including Stock, which had the hunkiest dancers (all strippers). They brought up the rear of the parade (pun intended) and I was glad that I hung around to see several of the strippers do what strippers do best, that is drop their pants. We were treated to rear and front exposures by the dancers at the back of the float which put a great exclamation point on the finale to the parade.

 

One bar, Le Stud, which caters to an older crowd and which I hadn't visited in the last year, had a new attraction in the form of a stunning server who serviced the terraces where I was having a beer and cheeseburger. The mostly older grey crowd were enchanted by his presence. He obliged by wearing only a pair of tight jeans very low and exposing his colorful briefs over his shapely buns. He had one tasteful tatoo over his left breast and his chiseled good looks extended from the top of his cropped head to his muscular yet lithe torso. Am I going on too long?? Anyway, I may go back to Stud to see if he was a one day special or is now part of the permanent staff.

 

I took a few pics and if I can manage to load them I will add them to this thread.

[+ newatthis]

Thanks for the great report, luv.

 

... One bar, Le Stud, which caters to an older crowd and which I hadn't visited in the last year, had a new attraction in the form of a stunning server ...his chiseled good looks extended from the top of his cropped head to his muscular yet lithe torso.

 

When I visited in June, many of the restaurants had servers like that. What's more, many were world-class flirts as well.