50 Years of Pride
Each year when Pride comes around, well for the years that I have been out and celebrating, I reflect on the history of Pride, what it means to me, and the place queerness has in my life.
Recently, a queer friend of mine asked me how I knew that June was Pride month.
I have to admit, I wasn’t 100% sure. I rightly assumed it had something to do with the Stonewall riots of ’69, but I didn’t know the details. So, for those of you out there not 100% sure (and afraid to ask out of fear of being seen as ignorant), here’s a brief history:
In New York in the 1960s, The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar in the Greenwich Village. Police at the time would regularly raid gay bars, arrest the patrons, and fine the owners. In the early morning of Friday 28th June 1969, the New York police raided the Stonewall Inn and the queer community fought back, resulting in riots that lasted for weeks in the streets near the Stonewall Inn. These riots paved the way for the modern Queer rights movement.
Since then, queer rights have progressed in leaps and bounds. On this, the 50th birthday of Pride, we can celebrate the fact that: 26 countries have legalized same-sex marriage; 19 countries allow people with gender dysphoria to serve in the military; and 27 countries allow joint adoption. Pride marches taking place around the world are a visible demonstration of the achievements made since 1969. But they also serve as a reminder of the history of our community, and how much there is still to fight for.
Last year, I went to the cinema to see Boy Erased, a film about conversion therapy in the United States. As I sat next to my friend watching the film, with silent tears streaming down my face, I struggled to identify why it was that I was crying. Was it the disturbing scenes of conversion therapy being portrayed, in which one boy was forced to attend his own funeral and hit with a bible by his family? Was it the fact that this practice continues to exist in America? In over 32 states, conversion therapy is still legal. In fact, conversion therapy has only been banned in three UN member states worldwide. Or was it that another friend had disclosed to me that they had experienced it, and I hurt on their behalf?
But no, it was none of these reasons. Rather, as I sat staring at the screen, I realised that those conversion therapy sessions represented a highly concentrated version of the oppression we, the queer community, have experienced throughout our lives. Watching these scenes brought back all those memories of a time in my life when I experienced marginalization on a near daily basis. The daily pronouncements on my sexuality and the resultant denial of the fact that I was gay. That time when I cried myself to sleep at night in the middle of the countryside listening to Florence + The Machine’s ‘Shake It Out’ because my friend asked me whether I was gay. Or that time when my year at school adapted The Back Street Boy’s ‘I Want it That Way’ to reference my assumed sexuality, altering the last line to ‘Which School House boy is gay? Alex Peter is gay.’ I sloughed it off as a joke at the time, as banter. But I ask you, would you ever think of mocking someone for being straight?
These, thankfully distant, memories rise to the surface of my mind in my reflections at this time of year and I am happy to say that I now live in much happier times. As I say, progress has been made.
So, whilst overtly a celebratory day, and an occasion in which I have never felt such strong love for and from so many strangers, Pride is a time to reflect on the discrimination so linked to queer identity, the fight and struggle of those who have gone before us, our own experiences, and the fact that our work is not yet done.
With such successes as I have mentioned before, particularly, in the West, we seem to forget that bullying and discrimination on the basis of one’s sexual orientation and/or gender, is still rife in society. It is very easy for someone who is not part of the queer community to say “Ah, look at all the progress that has been made. Queer people are our equals now.” It is easy to continue to think that, especially in the socially liberal bubbles I know many of you reading this are part of.
But the recent attacks on the female couple in London clearly demonstrate that this is not the case. Between 2013–14 and 2017–18 in England and Wales, the rate of LGBT hate crime per capita rose by 144% and transphobic attacks trebled in the same time period. While better reporting is likely to have contributed to this, there is a strong belief that hatred is growing in Britain.
And it is this fear of attack and discrimination that permeates our daily life.
I remember being in Harrogate train station, saying goodbye to my first boyfriend after having had him to stay for a lovely weekend, and not kissing him out of fear of what people might say or do. Fast-forward two years, and I’m in London, walking in West Kensington with my then-boyfriend, him reaching for my hand to hold it and me spending the remainder of the time checking the face of every single passerby to see whether they were looking at us and, importantly, how they were looking at us.
These are daily occurrences in the lives of queer people. They grow from societies that tell you that you are wrong, that the way you feel and the way you love is alien, and that these feelings are not to be acted upon. This self-policing behaviour develops after years of experiencing a range of attacks, both physical and verbal. These overt displays of aggression are then reinforced by daily microaggressions, such as the naïve use of words like ‘gay’ to mean ‘silly’. And they build over time. They build to create self-loathing, feelings of “I don’t belong here”, “Why I am like this?”, “I hate myself”. These thoughts, if left unchecked and unchallenged develop into barriers to full societal engagement, and, in the worst case, suicide.
The experience of discrimination is something all of us in the queer community share and is the real reason for the Pride marches. Queer identity grows from a seed of ‘aberrant’ love, is watered by the rains of discrimination, and eventually blossoms into a flower of internal and, hopefully, external acceptance.
Thankfully I no longer have such strong feelings and they are confined to a much darker period of my queer journey. But there are many out there who do. And accordingly many fantastic organisations work hard to address these issues. Just Like Us is one such charity that raises queer issues in schools through their Schools Diversity Week and by sending queer alumni back to talk about their experiences. (For anyone who hasn’t seen the CEO’s, Tim Ramsey, TEDx Talk, you can find it here – it’s fantastic!). The Diana Award, through their Anti-bullying Ambassador programmes, empower young people to not be passive bystanders to queerphobic (amongst other types) bullying, but to be active upstanders who call out bullying behaviour and work with teachers to make the school environment safer. And Red Balloon Learner Centres, a charity that supports young people who have been so badly bullied that they self-exclude from education to recover through an academic and therapy-based programme.
But the reality is that we can’t leave this work up to charities alone. We all need to take responsibility for the actions of our peers: to call people out wherever we hear or experience queerphobic behaviour. We need to lobby for greater awareness of queerphobia in the workplace such as sessions at orientation on what language can be perceived as queerphobic. And we need to demand better education in schools, both inclusive relationship education at primary schools and inclusive sex education at secondary schools. And to my fellow Queers, we have an obligation as well to be willing to answer questions, no matter if we think that they are annoying, stupid, or even queerphobic, as long as they are asked from a place of genuine ignorance and not delivered with malicious intent.
And so this year, as I celebrate Pride, in Paris this weekend and then Geneva the following, I shall be thinking of all of the above. I shall think, as I do every year, of the progress made, of the people who have come (and died) before me, and of the work that still needs to be done. Happy 50th Birthday, Pride! And remember, “If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna’ love somebody else?!”
