BBC Pride article

Wholly agree about not buying into the whole 'someone I disagree with is an actual threat' malarkey.

Most of this at local level isn't people wanting to stop these events from happening. It's a mix of people's experience having been trained to recognise Pride as:

A lot of this is really inappropriate in public.

This has become a corporate jolly.

This is a movement quite seriously unpleasant towards women and gay people, openly, including excluding anyone who dares to not agree with this - Pride now is actively hostile to people who wish to be openly homosexual. And to women and women's equality.

This is now dominated entirely by one political, partisan and quite extremist political view that is hostile to other views, actively seeks to remove women and gay people's legal protections and equalities, and really has quite a number of issues with child safeguarding that should be questioned

and therefore, this shouldn't be funded from local government and tax payers - because LAs have no business involving themselves in the above.

Many are becoming less keen to go or to involve themselves

And the symbol of involvement and support for it is no longer a neutral, entirely positive, lovely thing.

Pride in men in fetish gear and pup masks twerking for kids - yay

Pride in your road/village/town/city/country - boo, you're all racists.

I live in rural East Anglia, close to where I grew up. There was a gay pub (not a pub that did gay nights, a gay pub) two or three villages away from the late 80s or early 90s. There have been out gay couples in the area for at least as long.

Admittedly we're not a million miles from a mainline station that runs into London - but Crewe?

I read this a few hours ago and it felt like the author was told to try to make it “balanced” - the trans bit didn’t really say anything.

And yes it was very much lacking in mention of any of the fetish stuff, a glaring admission, and seems to add to the impression that it’s trying to be normalised.

It probably took off with business because it was an easy way to appear in stonewalls lgbt friendly business index. Use marketing money to put up a few flags in store and sponsor a float in the parade.

The lack of enthusiasm could be to do with business disappearing from the high street or their profits reducing and pride costs increasing.

I think there is something in the idea that someone had a vision of a month of pride being a new public celebration.

"I think Lloyds bank was fully window dressed in rainbow colours in June, as was possibly the Halifax if I’ve remembered correctly."

Halifax are owned by Lloyds so that would be probably be correct. They're currently in the process of getting rid of the Halifax name and rebranding everything as Lloyds.

Agree. I actively avoid places with the flag especially with the pink and blue “trans” additions. Always gutted if I have no choice but to enter a rainbow-bedecked store or bank. It’s blatant cynical corporate bandwagon-jumping.

Possibly but I think these corporations saw it as publicity and there are diminishing returns doing the same PR every year.

They just got bored

Perhaps the decline of pride celebrations can be partly attributed to a natural reduction in funding and support since Stonewall lost their grip on corporations, public bodies and businesses with their Equality Index scheme. I am sure there were extra points for rainbow washing, putting money into parades and encouraging employees to take part in pride celebration activities.
That, and the debunking of the narrative that trans people are #TheMostMarginalisedSectionOfSociety

This whole "I'm unsafe because I'm exposed to opposing viewpoints" idea is how we all got forced to use wrong pronouns.

Absolutely it is rational to be anxious around violent, volatile men like the Cooper described.

But it is not rational to say "as a GC woman I am anxious in my nearest city [because most people there have an opposing opinion]".

Contemptuous, irritated, sure... anxious? I don't buy it. How can they even know what you're thinking?

No mention of the fetish thing and, re. trans, not a word about its inherent homophobia (sexual racists, cotton ceiling, transing away the gay) or LGB✂️T. I expect they wanted to keep the article upbeat so wound up writing a nothing burger.

He sounds like a total liability, i agree. I also wouldn't want to go near that man, but that's not because of any political views I have, but because he sounds like an easily angered weirdo.

People who don't know you (in your nearest big city, rather than at your workplace etc) aren't likely to know your political views.

I am GC and tending to right wing these days so probably wouldn't see eye to eye with most people in say Brighton. But that wouldn't make me anxious going there.

It's a bit "I'm unsafe" isn't it? We need to push back on this idea that being around people with different views makes you "unsafe".

Being a woman, around angry men, can be unsafe yes, but that is zero to do with the politics of the woman in question

(Then again, it's a bit weird that we still make such a big thing of the death of Guy Fawkes!)

It's because we all like burning things. Right!?

Right...?

I can sort of understand why people might support Pride so much because there's so little civic celebration of anything else nowadays. People don't go to church at Christmas and Easter. Traditional public festivities for things like Shrove Tuesday or May Day have largely disappeared. As far as organised festivities go in many places, it's Pride and Bonfire Night and that's it. Halloween, Christmas etc. might be made a big thing of in shops but there's no mass gatherings.

So people have a desire for community celebration, they are vaguely supportive of the LGBT (maybe secretly ashamed of their homophobic past), and so they think "why not?" as far as Pride goes.

But if you think a bit harder you start thinking "why this?" Of all the things our society could choose to celebrate, why this random small minority of people? It all seems rather bizarre and even a bit creepy.

(Then again, it's a bit weird that we still make such a big thing of the death of Guy Fawkes!)

I'm not sure it's necessarily about being assaulted at night on the street but rather an atmosphere of hostility towards women, particularly gc women
For Manchester specifically, I remember Anthony Cooper (who runs several gay bars on Canal Street) shouting for GC lesbians to be 'dragged off by their saggy tits' on one of the pride stages. I'd not feel safe going into any establishment where men openly spoke about women like that. Cooper shouted it into a microphone. God only knows what he and his friends think is okay to say when the mic is off.
We all know that some men can turn from friendly to hostile to physically abusive in the blink of an eye.
That kind of red flag would make me avoid anywhere he might be.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3350481-Homophobic-attack-against-lesbians-at-Manchester-Pride-Thread-title-edited-at-OPs-request

i think a major problem is that there is no real focus to Pride events but naturally different people bring their own along whether it is promoting their companies or flaunting their fetishes.

Then when people complain they get tarred as being anti-LGBTQ

Call me a prude but taking my 8 year old anywhere that they might see a man in nothing but a leather thong is diabolical parenting.

Indeed. We ended up somewhat accidentally at Leeds pride (was there for the weekend for a wedding and Pride was taking place on our “free day” touring the city centre). DH is not very up on stuff and just could not understand the “pup play” folk. He was like “what’s wearing a dog mask got to do with being gay?”. Quite. There was a young guy in a mask pushing an old masked guy in a wheelchair who was carrying a toy puppy and asking kids to “stroke him” - totally grim.

On the commercialisation side - I laughed out loud when a massive 18 wheeler truck with a rainbow Evri heart emblazoned on it passed by right in the middle of the parade! Preceded by and followed by the likes of “Leeds building society for Pride” and “Morrisons for Pride”. It’s just cyclical marketing and puts me right off using such companies.

I came to say this is a major point the article misses - the fetish side of Pride is a problem for many people. The badging of Pride in the article as a small-town family event completely overlooks this. Our own, smallish market town Pride parade a couple of years ago included leather fetishists and furries (there was no parade this year). If it’s being billed as an adult only, ticketed event then have at it, but when it’s sold as a “family” event in a public space, people are going to turn away.

I wouldn’t know whether Starbucks have striped straws or not because the last time I went there they were raising money for mermaids - and I walked out never to return.

I read it earlier and thought it was fairly surface level for an article labelled “in depth”.

It had a few statistics but didn’t delve much into the reasons behind them, for example.

I thought it was a good start, though, the Beeb wouldn't have published that this time last year.

It dodged completely the withdrawal of support by gay men and lesbians because Pride refuses to accept that same sex attraction is same SEX attraction not same gender attraction.

Do business really want their logo in the background when a man dressed as a dog makes little boys and girls pet him?

”Hand-wringing” was my first thought.

Matt left Crewe as soon as he could, aged 18, feeling that he wasn't accepted as a young gay man. The only LGBT scene to mention was a tiny, makeshift bar behind a curtain in the back of an out-of-town pub.
He left in 2015, but this June found himself returning home, for Crewe Pride.

Crewe is a large Northern town (population over 70,000). The writer makes it sound - in 2015 - like Hicksville in the early 1980s.