Doug PollardLondon Pride
July 12th 2009 23:56
1st London Pride 1972
It’s peak Pride season as the world celebrates the Stonewall riots, the birth of the modern gay rights movement.
I have watched the growth of Pride around the world with pleased amazement, none more so than London Pride, because that was my first.
As they have since 1972, the marchers stream through the principal shopping streets of one of Europe’s major capitals, on Saturday, the peak shopping day. Now they also fill Trafalgar Square, and close the whole of Soho for a street party. The gay and lesbian staff of major companies, banks and utilities march under their corporate banners. Gay police and servicemen and women march in uniform.
London Pride has always been unashamedly political. It is about taking ownership of the city for a day. Every city street is ours, every shop, every park, not just the ghettos we cluster in – this year, even the Prime Minsters residence, Number 10 Downing Street, which held an official reception. For one day, we are the bosses and the rest of the world must dance to our tunes, or stay home and sulk.
1972 was rather different. That summer was a watershed for the British gay movement. In June a group of us from the Gay Liberation Front and the more sedate Campaign for Homosexual Equality launched Gay News, the UKs first national gay newspaper. And in July, a thousand or so queers marched openly through the main thoroughfares of London for the first time.
A large contingent of uniformed police marched with us then, too, surrounding us with a continuous thin blue line, sanitary protection for the mums and dads out shopping with their kids. It was meant to intimidate, but had quite the reverse effect. If they are so afraid of us, we reasoned, then we are truly powerful.
And so it has proved. Year after year it reminds people, as the slogan says, “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” From a thousand or so on that first march, to tens of thousands this year, swelled by the watching crowd to one million people, the biggest ever. It’s a powerful answer to all those who say we have been given too much already, and shouldn’t be demanding more.
It’s a pity that Pride Melbourne is not part of the great surge of World Pride, orphaned at the opposite end of the year. And it’s a pity that it remains in docile quarantine on a Sunday afternoon in St Kilda, instead of commanding Bourke and Swanston Streets on Saturday lunchtime. It robs it of half its meaning.
Because it does not matter how accepted we eventually become. As a minority, we can never afford to be safe, tame and invisible. Even after the Pope celebrates her first same-sex marriage in St Peters, we will still need a Pride March in Rome. And, as now, despite what has been achieved, there will still be more to do.
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