LGBTQIA Pride – authentic expression and being seen, heard and valued all year round
(Content warning – hate crime, discrimination, homophobia, transphobia, serious violence)
As we reach the end of Pride month, I want to reflect on what the concept means to me, the importance of being able to show up authentically, and the need to create spaces where people feel seen, heard and valued to continue all year round.
Like many in the LGBTQIA community, I’ve developed a level of cynicism about the corporate pinkwashing that characterises parades and parties that have their origins in civil disobedience and resistance to oppressive laws and discrimination. It’s a complicated picture, because on one hand, I feel extreme discomfort about marching alongside corporations involved in the arms trade, institutions that are being investigated for horrific abuses of power, and more run-of-the-mill big businesses that will drop the concern for their queer and trans colleagues the moment they change their social media banners from rainbow flags back to ‘normal’. But on the other hand, I’m well aware of the need for visibility, for antidotes to shame and stigma, and for spaces where we can show up authentically and unapologetically. And some might argue that pinkwashing is preferable to the alarming experience of seeing companies retract their public support for the LGBTQIA community through fear of upsetting powerful bigots.
Recently, working with people whose experiences of being LGBTQIA in their home countries were shockingly full of trauma and danger reminded me of how important it is to have public, joyfully resistant declarations of welcome and inclusion. And seeing queer or questioning kids attend their first Pride is always a humbling and beautiful experience that makes me so happy that they’re not growing up in times like so many of us did (Section 28 – the UK law that banned public sector bodies from discussing or ‘promoting’ LGBTQIA identities – lasted for my entire school career).
So I begin this reflection with a word of caution that’s repeated by tired members of the community every year. Performative allyship, and enjoying the glitter without engaging with the struggle that necessitated marching through cities, yelling ‘we’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going anywhere!’, isn’t helping. It’s great to show solidarity and be visibly supportive, but stigma, lack of access to healthcare, transphobic public policy, homophobic hate crime and poorer mental health outcomes (to name but a few) don’t go away when the flags are packed away for another year and the queens get out of drag.
I’m not advocating for getting rid of marches and celebrations altogether, but I’m more interested in grassroots, community level organising and thinking about how we can create spaces all year round that are based on a real desire to support people to show up authentically and know that they are safe, welcomed and valued. An intersectional approach is crucial, so it feels important to say that I’m not imagining these spaces with only the LGBTQIA community in mind. Apart from anything else, we contain multitudes and might have several minoritised identities that mean facing very specific barriers to access and forms of discrimination. I’d like to take some space to think about what those spaces might look like – what values, action and principles might be involved, and how it feels to be part of them.
When I think about what stands out to me as the important elements of Pride month that I’d like to see honoured throughout the year, the first words that come to mind are resistance, representation, rememberance and reimagining. Some of this might be at odds with the shiny, corporate approach to celebrating Pride, though I’m curious about how the idea of disrupting or ‘queering’ these spaces, at least as a first step towards deeper change.
Resistance
I had a great time at last week’s Dyke March in London, with ‘The First Pride Was A Riot’ scrawled in sharpie across the back of my jacket. This was an event that did a great job of showing joyful resistance – a combination of power, playfulness, euphoria and outrage. It encouraged us to stay connected to the origins of the Pride movement, and what we’re marching for. Maybe some of the people who show up to wave at the floats and watch the performances in their home town each summer would be horrified to think of trans people throwing bricks during the Stonewall riots, but that was the origin of today’s movement in all its shiny, corporate glory. And I hope they would also be horrified by the police brutality and human rights abuses that led to that riot in the first place. If this all seems like something that happened in a bygone era, and perhaps not so relevant today, I’d suggest that we’ve come a long way with so many rights and freedoms, and that the backlash against that progress is very real and very frightening. Keir Starmer, likely the next UK Prime Minister, has recently stated that he is against the teaching of ‘gender ideology’ in schools, effectively signalling a return to something akin to Section 28. And looking at equivalent developments in the USA and in European countries (such as restrictions on lesbians’ right to adopt in Italy) shows how easily things can change for the worse. It’s therefore essential that we protect our ability to speak truth to power, to show up in public as our authentic selves, and to protest injustice. Beyond LGBTQIA issues, there are threats to our civil liberties and freedoms creeping into our societies, and we must be able to find strength in numbers and resist. There are related ideas that we can extrapolate from this in terms of community building and organisational development too – essentially that it’s dangerous to hold too tightly to rigid and traditional hierarchies where people are afraid to speak up.
Representation
To return to the subject of Section 28, I often think about the impact of having little to no meaningful representation of people whose sexual orientation and gender identity I could relate to throughout my childhood. I didn’t understand my own identity for a long time, having had my formative years influenced by enforced silence on the subject of LGBTQIA identities, bodies and reelationships. I realise that there were many people in my generation who were joyfully, defiantly queer in the face of all of this, and who couldn’t deny who they were if they tried. But no doubt, there were at least as many of us who were confused, ill-informed and dealing with a nagging suspicion that something was ‘wrong’ about us and that it wasn’t a good idea to talk to anyone about it.
It's perhaps a cliché to say that representation matters and that ‘if you can see it, you can be it’. But there’s also a lot of value in considering who is visible in a space, a role, a community, or a position of power, and what that might do to welcome or discourage people from attempts to be part of the community, or pursue a role. It’s also worth pointing out that people who may have had to develop hypervigilant levels of sensitivity to signs of safety/danger tend to be pretty good at seeing through tokenistic attempts to ‘tick the diversity box’. Again, going through the motions from a place of compliance isn’t going to contribute much to meaningful change. But for young people, and former young people who didn’t see themselves represented in the past, seeing positive examples of people like themselves in spaces and communities can have a genuinely positive impact.
Remembrance
Pride is, in part, a celebration. But it’s also an opportunity for us to commemorate those we have lost, to remember where we’ve been and how far we’ve come, and to use this to inform ongoing action towards further change. I’d suggest that this approach, which locates us in time and place, and offers opportunities to learn from our mistakes, is a crucial part of any social movement or community. Some of the injustices and tragedies that have taken place, and continue to take place, within the LGBTQIA community are almost too overwhelming to comprehend. Losing so much of an entire generation during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s seems to have had a fairly significant impact on intergenerational learning and younger people’s engagement with their community’s history. Part of me is relieved for queer kids growing up in more recent years, perhaps being able to take many of their rights for granted, or to be unable to imagine what it might have been like not to have them. But there’s a risk of not learning from the past, not honouring those who fought for human rights and those who lost their lives, and becoming complacent. We don’t have to look very far to see how quickly and easily hard-won rights, laws and policies can be revoked, and how successfully minority groups can be made into scapegoats to distract from abuses of power. And we don’t have to look far to find very recent examples of the loss of lives as a result of violence and discrimination – I’ll be remembering young people like Brianna Ghey as I march tomorrow. These are difficult and sobering thoughts, though remembering those lost and those who came before is the least I can do in a bid to connect with our shared history.
Reimagining
It’s often the case that ideas and ways of being move from the margins to the centre, only for something new to appear outside of the norm and eventually influence mainstream culture (and/or perhaps be assimilated into it – though assimilation is a topic in and of itself). I believe that the world has a lot to learn from queer culture, and pushing the boundaries of ‘respectability’ is potentially helpful for everyone. Similarly, the stigmatising of certain bodies and what people do with them has done, and continues to do, serious harm – pushing back against this with radical inclusion is necessary and important as part of a move away from categorising some bodies as inherently better than others. Equally, we can all learn from the freedom that comes from ways of relating to each other without there being a script or template that we’ve been primed for throughout our lives. For example, how do we work out the division of labour in households where the usual gendered expectations don’t apply? Well, generally we might work it out according to ability, preference, need and so on, as opposed to social expectations based on chromosomes. I’m being a little flippant, and I realise that many people of all genders and orientations are entirely capable of non-stereotypical negotiations, but the point is that there’s freedom and a chance for Adult-Adult communication when we don’t have so much baggage from social pressures and norms. And I’d like that to be extended in so many ways beyond the LGBTQIA community – for us to reimagine what spaces and communities free from inherited and restrictive notions of gender, relationships and identity might look like. What would it be like if we all had the resources that helped us to develop the skills to work out exactly who are and what we need, and if we all felt safe enough to show up courageously and authentically everywhere we went? I hope these are questions to reflect on as we imagine what’s possible going forward, and I want to offer my gratitude to the LGBTQIA community for offering me welcoming spaces to work out who I am and show up as myself.