Doug Pollard38 years of Pride
February 8th 2010 09:03
The first London Gay Pride March July 1972
While writing the previous post I realised that it's been 38 years since my first Pride March, and over the years I've attended Prides in London, Manchester, Bristol, Boston Massachusetts, Amsterdam and of course Melbourne.
I joined Gay Liberation Front in London around 1970. The first London Gay Pride March was in July 1972. 700 of us marched down the main shopping street - Oxford Street - and ended up in Hyde Park,
Gay sex between men over the age of 21 had only been decriminalised a short time before, in 1967, so a lot of bars and clubs were owned and run by gangsters. Saunas and sex on premises venues were still illegal. So all gay businesses were barred from participating in Pride because they were "exploiting our oppression".
Anyway, most of the bars didn't want their locations or their proclivities publicized, and neither did their patrons.
I forget the year, but on one occasion the march went through the "gay ghetto" - Earls Court. The patrons of the Colherne, London's oldest surviving gay bar and leather bar - pelted us with bottles and cans.
Incidentally, I knew someone who claimed to have been the first to wear a leather jacket to the Colherne. A navy man, he'd been to the US just after WW2 and was captivated by the Marlon Brando on-the-waterfront jeans/t-shirt/leather jacket look.
He claimed the first time he walked into the Colherne wearing the look, people asked him what he thought he was wearing, and why didn't he go home and put on a nice sports jacket and slacks.
Most gay businesses did not take space in the then emergent gay publications, for the same reasons, and wouldn't allow them to be sold on or even outside their premises. I was one of the founders of Britain's first gay newspaper, Gay News, and was chucked out of many pubs for trying to sell copies to the customers!
Lesbians were not part of Pride at first - they generally preferred to put their energies into the women's movement and resented what they called the tokenism of the gay men. In the 1970s and 80 the lesbians held their own separate marches.
Leather and fetish communities were banned too, because they might blur the central message that gays were as normal as everyone else. Also S&M practices were considered "oppressive" and "internalized homophobia".
There was even talk of banning drag: some felt it demeaned women and pandered to straight stereotypes of gay men. But drag queens had been at the forefront of Stonewall, and were usually much more "out there" in the face of oppression than the rest of us. Drag stayed.
We were all very politically correct: Gay Liberation Front used to organize what were called "Encounter Groups", small groups of randomly selected gay men of various ages and types, who were basically expected to get together to "overcome their addiction to sexual stereotypes and body fascism" - or in other words, have an orgy.
There was also a group of men who styled themselves Radical Feminists. They argued that gay men should wear women's clothing as an act of solidarity with women's oppression, but should make no attempt to appear to be women or ape women in any way. Best excuse for bad drag I ever heard!
When we marched down Oxford Street that first time, there were almost as many police as marchers - they hemmed us in right and left, marching alongside, not in solidarity, but to intimidate, to keep us moving, and to stop us talking to any members of the public.
For our own protection, of course.
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