Took the skiddly winks into town last weekend to go see the Manchester Pride 09 parade. They enjoyed it, not having been to one before, though some of the ironies weren’t lost on them. In particular the girl skiddly wanted to know why the Home Office and Barclays Bank had floats. She wanted to know what either of them had done for gay people.
Good question, now go to the back of the queue.
She was the only person in the queue, so as with every good question a child asks I answered with a question of my own. Why are you asking that. She was thinking of Moses Kayiza, whom we met a few times on our travels around the many and various enclaves of the rainy city. Moses was from Uganda and had been persecuted because he was gay. His claim for asylum was refused by the Home Office.
Leaving aside the whole debate around asylum, there’s the slightly different debate around what Pride means and what it now stands for. During Pride 2006 I stood in the rain with Moses and a small gang of his friends and supporters collecting signatures for his anti-deportation campaign. He got a few hundred over the course of the weekend (including an off duty policewoman who’s partner reminded her that as a police officer she was prohibited from making political statements. She shrugged and signed anyway. Props to her, whoever she was). Not bad, but how many thousands of people were there. And why wasn’t his campaign, and others like it, an official part of Pride. Didn’t Pride begin as a protest against homophobic discrimination and violence, or am I missing something.
Now that the pink pound is out in the open and can breathe we find that the other side is blue. I guess a lot of people always knew this, gay black people especially. But still ,reflecting on it, I can’t help but be disappointed. In the same way that I feel disappointed by the men I know fighting against racism who can’t see their parallel behaviour towards women.
How much further up your own arse have you got to be before you remember what Pride was about. You lose your right to complain about discrimination and prejudice when you are guilty of it yourself. Or being slightly less harsh about it, as Pastor Niemöller probably maybe might well have said :
…by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
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My favourite moment of the parade: the Labour representation, on foot, following behind the Barclays Bank float, which looked very blue, very efficient and very well got it made. Actually there was another foot patrol between them, but I’ll attribute that indiscretion to the organisers, who obviously struggle in the same sentence with the concept of political humour and irony.
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The thing with Pride... where to start? It started off as a protest, then became a march. A march, like a protest but not quite as feisty. Mainstreaming, some acceptance, some assimilation. Then at some point it became a parade, maybe when the beer companies moved in. Now this disturbs me more. A parade is something that you watch, as a consumer. Not a march or a protest, which is something you join in as a participant. I like to be a participant in life, not watch from the sidelines. I don't like my gay pride (whether it is LGBT or Q or I or all of the above) to be watered down by gaseous beers and the unsightly sight of conventional-looking and acting queers jostling for a seat at at the same old table
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