The next rite
HARVEST FEAST
The Thanksgiving edition of the Long Weekend Series. Event #5. Come hungry. Enter thru the backdoor.
- Thanksgiving long weekend
- Long Weekend Series #5
- 19+
Vancouver · Mateo Tomas presents
Vancouver's flagship gay warehouse party. Two rooms of sound, three rooms of play, open till the sun.
October 11 · 2026 · Long Weekend Series #5
The next rite
The Thanksgiving edition of the Long Weekend Series. Event #5. Come hungry. Enter thru the backdoor.
What's next
Six editions, one for every long weekend of 2026, inside a multi-room underground bunker downtown. A season pass covers all six plus express entry. Harvest Feast (above) is up next. Here's the rest of the year.
Tickets move before they're announced. The list hears first: pre-sales, secret rooms, addresses. Nothing between parties.
Join the listSince 2014
Backdoor didn't come from a boardroom. It started in 2014, when Matt Troy founded Vancouver Art & Leisure (VAL), a radical, artist-run gay society built inside warehouses the city kept trying to shut down. Sex-positive, political, and stubbornly independent, VAL turned unconventional spaces into stages for DJs, drag, fashion, and art.
It survived everything thrown at it: city crackdowns over its sex-positive events, wave after wave of renoviction, and an arson that gutted its Railtown home in early 2018, and rebuilt every single time. Backdoor became its flagship: the party that funds the art. In 2019 it took over the Plaza of Nations for Pride weekend and became one of the largest single gay-nightlife events Western Canada had ever seen.
Today it carries the name Mateo Tomas, Troy's stage name, but the politics haven't moved an inch: men who love men first, no corporate sponsors, no apologies, and a standing campaign to make "no-fun city" a thing of the past.
From the vault
A decade of warehouse takeovers, afterhours, and Pride blowouts. A few from the public record, the full archive lives on Facebook.