Pride has become pompous, grotesque and intolerant.
I first attended Pride in 1985, aged 16. Back then it was a mere afternoon in a specific place, not beamed from every media device across the Western world for an entire month. It was a bad time to be un-heterosexual, with AIDS at its height and the popular press taking open, casual delight in the deaths of young men.
Even then, I found the concept of ‘Pride’ as something to be celebrated rather odd. I wasn’t, and am still not, remotely proud, or indeed ashamed, of my sexual orientation. I consider it utterly unremarkable, and ideally, I’d like everybody else to feel that way too.
‘Gay Pride’, as it was called then, seemed to me to be a defensive and reactionary framing. It handed our critics too much power and missed a crucial point about gay rights. For gay people to have full rights as citizens, and to be treated the same as everyone else, we should demand ‘indifference’, surely? Though, fair enough, that may not be the most inspiring call to arms.
For what now seems a very brief period, roughly coinciding with the Noughties, it did finally seem like this was happening. That decade has an increasingly bad reputation, but looking back it often seems quite relaxed and mature in comparison with what followed.
Look at the character of Dafydd, the only gay in the village in Little Britain. Much of the humour in that series, now widely disowned by its creators, came from the naughtiness of pointing out that society had moved on. Dafydd was an exhibitionist neurotic stuck in the past, living in a culture in which nobody much noticed or cared about his sexuality. At the time, what nobody realised was that Dafydd was not the past but the future.
Like many things, Pride metastasised in the early 2010s and became Dafyddish – pompous, grotesque and unbearable. June is now the cruellest month. We have the ubiquity of the ever-evolving, ever-more ridiculous rainbow flag, appended to both corporate and institutional logos. There are special-edition Pride products from mouthwash to cat treats. Vapid statements of solidarity are dropped on Twitter by establishment institutions from the police to, hilariously, the national football team – which, lest we forget, is perfectly happy to be decamping in a few months to take the knee in a country where homosexuality is illegal and to play in stadiums built by slaves who died on the job.
