Innovation Hub #DisplayYourPride 2026: Celebrating Pride at U of T from Past to Present

Photo of Innovation Hub team in front of our Display Your Pride installation

Every year, the Innovation Hub participates in #DisplayYourPride, a university-wide competition to encourage groups to engage creatively with Pride Month. In this blog, members of our senior leadership team reflect on their experience putting together our contribution for this year’s iteration of the event and the importance of Pride Month at the iHub.

Written by the Innovation Hub Leadership Team

When people come into our space for the first time, many are drawn to the colourful display at the back of the room. “iHub Pride” is written in large, flower-filled letters upon a green backdrop—a garden to represent how we encourage our students to be in our space: naturally themselves.

Display Your Pride is a tri-campus event which encourages groups on campus to submit a photo sharing how they show off their pride in June. At the Innovation Hub, we take Pride Month seriously. And, given as we recently celebrated our 10^th anniversary and the university’s bicentennial is coming up, this year is really about revisiting the past. Which is why, for Display Your Pride 2026, we wanted to nod to the history of LGBT+ representation at U of T, celebrate the students and societies that first displayed their pride, and highlight the Innovation Hub’s participation in the event over time.

Pride Means Collaboration

When we advertise our Display Your Pride activity to students, they always ask us, “what is Display Your Pride anyway?” For the Innovation Hub, Display Your Pride means an opportunity to create a colourful addition to our space, encouraging students to reflect on what Pride Month means to them.

One way that we facilitate this reflection is by assembling our Display Your Pride installation collaboratively with our work study students and staff. Doing the assembly together not only makes the process fun, but it makes room for important conversations. When assembling our display this year, we noticed how students stopped to look at the historical photos and read the articles we put together for our display. Our leadership team had a moment of reflection about the importance of celebrating Pride and were moved to see the history of Pride at U of T:

Diana: “To me, it’s very important that we include everyone in our space when we talk about Pride — we can’t make assumptions about people’s identities, or what they have been through to be who they are now. Pride Month makes room to celebrate those unspoken-about journeys, too.”

Huda: “I really appreciate the sense of joy associated with pride. What really stood out to me was that everyone was able to come together and create something special to honour the history of pride at U of T. The ability to celebrate love should be a joyful experience, and I felt it during #DYP at the iHub.”

The Final Display

When we put the finishing touches on the final display and stepped back, we realized that this would draw the attention of those entering the room ahead of even the large banner beside it. Our hanging installation shifted gently as students walked past it, colourful, glossy images shining in the sun. It was so satisfying to see the history of Pride at U of T displayed in this way.

Looking Beyond Pride Month

While putting our display together and reflecting on the archival materials that we’d collected, we reflected that, while Pride Month is a time to celebrate and commemorate, the work to support our LGBT+ peers shouldn’t be confined to June. At U of T, groups representing the voices of LGBT+ students have existed for over 50 years and work year-round.

To recognize their continued contribution to our campus and the community beyond, we want to close this blog by sharing a small piece of history. In November 2011, the Ontario Heritage Fund (in association with U of T and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, one of our previous partners), unveiled a plaque to commemorate the history of the first sexual diversity advocacy group at U of T:

Having first met off campus, the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA) convened again on November 4, 1969, at University College to advocate equality and freedom for gay men and lesbians. This was the first group of its kind at a Canadian university. Early on, UTHA attracted supporters far beyond the University of Toronto community, influencing the formation of like-minded groups on university campuses across Ontario and the country.

Our display includes a copy of the meeting notes from those first meetings in 1969. We have included them because we wanted to demonstrate how far back the history of Pride at U of T goes. Students have been displaying their pride bravely and loudly long before Display Your Pride was a formal event, setting a precedent for other institutions across the country.

Many of our Display Your Pride creations have stayed up long after June had passed. We keep them up because we want to recognize that Pride isn’t a one-time occasion: it’s a commitment to inclusivity, understanding, and continued support of our LGBT+ peers. We hope that our contribution to this year’s Display Your Pride inspires our teams for years to come, just as the past groups of student activists have inspired us.

For further resources about LGBT+ groups and initiatives around campus, please feel free to refer to the following informational resources: