BBC Pride article

[CervixSampler]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj63jyl09jxo

An interesting read. Manchester is my nearest city. I’m not a fan of the ugly, dirty place where I feel anxious as a GC straight woman. There does seem to be less overt support in terms of fewer pride flags flying. I think Lloyds bank was fully window dressed in rainbow colours in June, as was possibly the Halifax if I’ve remembered correctly. The Lego store has had a Lego progress flag at the back of the till for weeks. I’ve not seen anything in Starbucks though. Last year they had rainbow straws. I’d like to shop without politics and don’t see why banks and building societies need to get political. The money would be better spent supporting local LGB charities imo. And Tunnocks giveaways.

That whole article just felt so pompous. The thing with all the flags in shops and rainbow straws etc is that the vast majority of people just ignore them. It doesn't change anyone's view of Lgbt people (i mean if someone is homophobic, rainbows won't change their mind) and it doesn't make anyone more likely to buy the coffee. So what's the point of spending all that money on the stuff?

Can you explain why being GC makes you anxious in Manchester? I travel there for work sometimes and yes I'm vigilant whwn walking at night (as I'd be anywhere) but if a man is going to attack you he won't ask for your views first...

Thought it was an interesting and fairly balanced article on the issues facing the movement and particularly the complexities of including the trans element

This article is going to be shared by me with a few younger people I know.

For teens and people in their early 20s they don’t remember a time before rainbow washing and corporate pride so can’t understand why I don’t whole heartedly think pride is A Good Thing and want to travel to various cities to be part of the crowd, who I suspect are largely not part of the LGBT+ community anyway.

Any reticence about Pride events can so easily be labelled as bigotry.

So I find this article helpful in that it summarises some of the issues. It could have gone way harder on the financial corruption and safeguarding issues that some prides have been involved in, but at least it is a conversation starter that may start some critical thinking.

Pompous:

"As a young man, I eventually left Ulverston to live in Manchester. But this summer I took a trip back to my old hometown for their Pride festival, a tradition still in its infancy.

The once-familiar cobbled streets looked so different to how I remembered them, lined with cheering locals clapping and filming on phones as a procession bedecked in rainbow flags swept past, led by a brass band playing upbeat gay anthems. It felt a world away from Manchester's famous pop stars and stages covered in corporate logos."

It is labelled as an "in depth" article because it is padded out with this kind of nothing-waffle. I'll stick to the Times!

It’s basically identical to the short programme on Radio 4 that was on recently.

Very much avoiding the elephant in the room of trans identified men insisting on access to female spaces despite the law, and how much conflict the has produced. That, and the demands for affirmation and for everyone to act as if we believe someone has really changed sex when we know they haven’t.

It puts many people in an uncomfortable position of having to be inauthentic and lie. People are not happy to be forced to do this.

I never understood the corporate obsession with Pride with flags decking out shops etc.

It has never happened for any other causes anti-racism, anti-sexism etc

I have no real idea what it is meant to achieve

Read that this morning and thought there is a gradual starting to shift, although nothing like balanced or actually getting to the issues.

You'd need insight and experience to know what they're getting at: that trans 'we want everything, all the time, right now' and trampling over and excluding/ ripping stuff off everyone else in the LGBT+ all the time is becoming a serious downside that has turned off many who were previous supporters and enjoyers of Pride (the whole baseball bats in barbed wire, blood stained t shirts, and the stuff about hanging lesbians who won't give men straight sex on command just about finished me), and that's before you get into the political visibility of 'we don't want women and gay people to have rights' and the death threats/peeing everywhere.

But it's a foot in the right direction I suppose. A beginning of other narratives the general public hear alongside the waaaaah everybody hates us for No Reason At All narrative, which is what will come from the usual TQ political sources.

I just read this, I thought it was a nice balanced article. Yes it doesn't delve deeply into the trans issue but it openly acknowledges that people have different views on this and that that's one of the issues with Pride. I don't think we always need to take a side - acknowledging that people have different views on an issue can sometimes be enough.

”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.

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

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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

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 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!)

(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...?

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

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.

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?

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