Anyone else feel Pride is really toned down this year?

[Moonandstarz]

I was shopping yesterday evening in my local shopping centre & besides Primark & Schuh no other stores had a pride window display or even a sticker on the window. Flying Tiger had rainbow merchandise on the window but not specifically pride.
Precious years we had rainbow crossings in the car park, rainbow flags everywhere. Nothing like that this year.

In my opinion this toned down pride is much more inclusive & is signalling everyone is getting on with their lives & co existing. May just be my area but I found it very refreshing.

This thread was merely highlighting that "pride month" has been completely toned down compared to previous years & many big stores & companies are choosing not to display rainbows. My town & shopping centre have no flags, buntings or displays up. It's an observation.

It's an observation that has come with comments about how lovely it is to not have to see it and how glad people are that it's not as visible.

I'm not sure why anyone would find pride horrible to think about or find it horrible to see rainbow flags. Unless...

@SarahAndQuack said: you have to realise that for some people, Pride is about a little girl seeing that there are other little girls with two mummies. Or it's about not being the only gay person you come across in a day. Or it's about remembering friends who died of AIDS or family members who couldn't come out.

That would be good. Unfortunately these days it looks more like a bunch of porn-addled weirdos in furry suits. Add the TRAs and you’ve got a movement that looks nothing like the above at all.

But your OP ends In my opinion this toned down pride is much more inclusive & is signalling everyone is getting on with their lives & co existing. May just be my area but I found it very refreshing.

That's not an observation, it's an opinion. So it's not surprising people expect to debate it, and it's not surprising some people will not agree that it's inclusive.

Personally, I suspect money has a lot to do with it, but so too does the growing acceptability of homophobia.

Fortunately, I've not found Pride to be like that where I am. Though I admit I missed it this year as we were busy. A friend's daughter went and said it was lovely seeing her school's parade float go past.

The businesses sticking rainbow flags up in their windows in 2023, over a decade after same sex marriage was legalised (with minimal political effort), weren't doing so in the 80s were they? It's just cheap and lazy corporate virtue signalling now.

The marches do seem a bit dated to me, but if some in the LGB community think they're worthwhile it's up to them.

Yes that is it, as I said it was just an observation but it also goes to show how normalised lgb is now in society, there is no need to virtue signal anymore. Live & let live.

I don't see how you could prove that a lack of support for Pride indicates greater normalisation of gay people?

No, you weren't just making an observation.

You've repeatedly said you find it "refreshing" that shops have "nice clean white" displays, and you've also said you're happy that people aren't "jumping on the bandwagon".

An observation would be: I've noticed there's not so much Pride stuff around this year.

What you said: I've noticed there's not so much Pride stuff around this year and I think that's just fantastic.

@Beowulfa the only brands with the window displays were Primark, Schuh had a small pride sticker, all the other stores had no rainbow graphics or stickers of any sort. No flags, buntings or banners in the town centre or shopping centre.
I think it's a positive step & it's become so normalised there's no need to do the virtue signalling.

Well lots of lgb people my friends & family included will find it refreshing too as they just want to get on with their lives!

I don't believe the school is pushing any agenda, and I think it's absolutely wonderful seeing schools involved with Pride. It actually makes me feel tearful.

But, it's clear that Section 28 has a very, very long shadow.

Not toned down in my area. There are pro-Pride/ LGB / TQ+ messages going out over the tannoy at the CoOp and Tesco and possibly other supermarkets. I was in Tesco looking for yoghurt yesterday when an elderly lady said, after the fifth pro_ LGB/ TQ+ announcement had come over our heads, that she hoped she was pretty open-minded but the whole Pride thing was getting a bit much. I said to her that I was a lesbian and I agreed that it was all out of hand.

A friend of mine looking for socks in Sainsbury's reported seeing Pride socks on sale. They also have Pride party ware, headbands and 'Progress' flags in various sizes. Oxfam is promoting a whole range of Pride-orientated wares.

I must go to Sainsbury's and see if they've yet again got the rainbow flag plastered all over the screens of the scan-as-you-shop handsets. It feels like it was only a few weeks ago they took them off.

I know a lot of gay people who feel Pride has been over-corporatised for some years now—many of us are old enough to remember when it was mainly a political protest march.

I don't think criticism of what it's become is primarily coming from "when's heterosexual pride?" conservative straight people, though there will of course be backlash growing from those too. Nor do I think criticism of the additions of furries, straight men who think they're lesbians (back in the day these were the military types who used to be part of the then openly homophobic Beaumont Society) and the current overfocus on public displays of male sexual kink (puppies, bondage, adult babies etc) is unwarranted or particularly politically right wing or illiberal. Not to mention the rewriting of LGB history that's been going on which pisses a lot of lesbians and gay men off and for good reason. There are a lot of issues, and a great many of those questioning are not doing so because of homophobia.

We used to go to Pride and joyfully be part of celebrating the huge spectrum of brilliant humanity.

We stopped when it became clear that the Rainbow of inclusivity does not include lesbians being able to define themselves as female people who are sexually attracted to other female people (irrespective of the gender identity of either party).

We'll be delighted to come back to Pride when the love that dare not speak its name is allowed to exist again.

Stonewall seem rather quiet.

And yes, commercial Pride seems to have disappeared and also, very much dimmed in the public sector.

I’ve just been into town and there are flags hung from shops across the whole town centre - it must have been coordinated by the Council and is using the fixtures where there are normally Christmas decorations. It’s horrible. I’m a bisexual woman and I feel completely alienated. I don’t remember us ever having them before.

The thing with Pride is that it is now so extreme with LOUD BRIGHT COLOUR GLITTER KINK NUDITY that people have just grown a bit tired of it all. After all, a large proportion of LGB and also T don't associate with any of those things. They just want to live quietly.

Gay people have fought so hard for so long for no more than equal rights (same sex relationships and marriage to be legal), only to have the movement be taken over by TRAs and blue haired self proclaimed queer people in heterosexual relationships. That's gotta sting a bit, watching people self ID in to their own imagined oppression.

Don't feel alienated @MurielThrockmorton ,come to my town you'll be much more comfortable X It must come down to local council funding with the decorations but in my area it's definitely toned down & I'd imagine many lgb lkke my friends & family feel more comfortable with this. I'll ask them & report back

Yep this. I've a friend who's heavily involved organising our local pride events, and he's not comfortable with the T element of it being seemingly brought to the front, nor is he comfortable with being referred to as queer, which he considers a definite slur.

Agree with every word. If you look at this thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4822750-being-ostracised-by-friends-over-kink-at-pride

there's a widely supported understanding that Pride is now fuelled by corporate money, straight desire to look virtuous and mainly male kink. It's a million miles from the days when lesbian and gay people didn't have the full human rights that straight people enjoyed and closeted in case they were sacked.

I see that anyone criticising Pride is being accused of homophobia. Bizarre, because the loudest critics of Pride are the the LGB people who no longer go because they're not welcome (last time I went to Pride a drag queen called me a cunt). TQ+ is inherently homophobic in its insistence that gender prevails over sex and that lesbian women and gay men must be prepared to have sexual relationships with members of the opposite sex. Could there be anything more homophobic than that?

t would be a shame if gay individuals felt uncomfortable displaying pride flags, or attending celebrations, out of fear.

Absolutely. Growing up in the 80s/90s, homophobia was the societal norm. Even heterosexual people who supported civil rights for gay people often did so out of compassion ("the poor things can't help it"), not because being gay is just a normal variant of sexuality. Gay people were very much othered.

Fast-forward to 2023, and we have had a decade of relentless forced-teaming of gay people with the trans lobby, plus blue-haired spicy hets. And a decade of Pride and the loudest LGBTQ voices being all about trans and normalising kinks. Far from increasing acceptance of being gay as a normal part of humanity, Pride has been co-opted to mean lesbophobia (unless you're a lesbian with a penis), fetishes on display, and drag queens. It's pushing us away from the acceptance of gay people as completely normal people who happen to be same-sex attracted. It's re-creating the homophobic stereotypes of the twentieth century, with gay men again framed as flamboyant, sex-obsessed freaks, and lesbians as not mentionable at all.

No wonder the public are sceptical. It's not because they are - in general - homophobic - it's because they don't like what is being presented to them by Pride as LGBTQ. And neither do many gay people.

@Pluvia very well said & it's exactly how my lgb friends feel... Also mobbed with teens & their pronouns taking selfies for social media...