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.