Podcast Episode: Toronto: Football, Falls, and a Piece of Gay History

Pip: Brett Hayhoe has been to ten countries, watched football stop dead for a commercial break, and somehow made all of it into a single trip report. Ask Brett delivers.

Mara: This episode follows brett's tenth entry in the World Traveller Series — a road trip through Niagara Falls and into Toronto, covering sport, spectacle, and a piece of LGBTIQA+ history that no longer exists.

Pip: Let's start with the road, the falls, and the flag the size of a stadium.

Toronto: Football, Falls, and Gay History

Mara: The entry begins with a phone call — brett's friend Paul inviting him to Toronto for an international football fixture between Toronto and Detroit, shortly after brett's election as Co-President of InterPride. The journey there sets the tone before the city does.

Pip: And the tone is set at Niagara Falls, which brett describes with genuine force — no hedging, no tourism-brochure softness.

Mara: The post is direct about it: "The sheer, relentless, thundering volume of water — the mist rising, the roar that you feel before you hear it, the way the whole thing simply overwhelms every sense simultaneously — is something that has to be stood in front of to be understood."

Pip: That is a sentence that earns its length.

Mara: And the practical upshot is clear — brett's recommendation to see it from the Canadian side is presented not as a preference but as a categorical instruction. The view of the full Horseshoe Falls curve is, in the post's words, non-negotiable.

Pip: The border crossing produces the episode's sharpest moment. Brett's companions object — philosophically — to presenting passports to enter Canada. Brett is not sympathetic. "How arrogant," he says. "You think you have the right to travel to another country without paperwork?" It's a small scene that names something the rest of the world notices rather more than Americans tend to realise.

Mara: Toronto itself opens with a Pride Toronto reception held in brett's honour following the InterPride election — genuinely moving by his account — before the football game the next night.

Pip: The game is where American ceremony goes full ceremony. Two king-sized flags, each nearly the width of the stadium, unfurled across the field during the national anthems. And then, every commercial break, play simply stops. Players stand around. The crowd waits. Then they resume.

Mara: Brett calls it deeply strange to experience in person, and then concedes it somehow held together — "American sport operates on its own logic, and the logic, however alien, is internally consistent."

Pip: The third night is what Paul called, with characteristic directness, "the gay thing." Toronto is where the North American version of Queer as Folk was filmed, and Paul guided brett through every location — streets, bars, corners.

Mara: The revelation was the main bar. On screen it reads as intimate, almost domestic. In reality it was enormous. The show had compressed a vast space into something that felt like a living room. Brett saw it while it was still open. Several years later, it closed.

Pip: That's the weight the entry ends on — not the football, not the falls. A piece of gay history, now gone, that you simply had to have been there to see.

Mara: Infrastructure as defence, sport as ceremony, a bar that no longer exists — brett's World Traveller Series keeps finding the thing inside the thing.

Pip: Montreal is next. Entry eleven. The bar for entry ten is, by any measure, high.