Afloat, adrift and sometimes in tune: Of Virtual Pride

June marks the beginning of what, in some places, is known as the Pride season. While it feels daft to have a special season for celebrating the freedoms we have to be who we are all year round, I guess the press needs some way of keeping focussed.

My feelings about the purpose of Pride (in the LGBT+ sense) are sometimes seen as anachronistic and possibly even controversial by some. Naturally to me they are not anything of the sort. I am not trying to be controversial. I do have something to celebrate and, COVID notwithstanding, the freedom to do so ... at the moment.

I was born eleven months after Alan Turing took his own life and a few years before the Wolfenden Report recommended the removal of criminal sanctions for the so-called "crime" of homosexuality activity even though it was nearly another decade before those recommendations were implemented. I grew up through the years when being gay led to prosecution and imprisonment. I actually remember the Sexual Offences Act (1967) being passed into law. Many people thought that meant the end of persecution for being gay, but what those people may not know is that the number of prosecutions for homosexual behaviour actually went up in the decade that followed. I experienced an attempted entrapment by two good looking young constables in the early 1970s. Luckily I did not take the bait. There was something that felt very wrong in that situation. They weren't in uniform, but their clothes certainly made me suspicious. They were dressed alike with exactly the same type of very shiny black shoes. I was right to be suspicious. I saw newspaper reports later of men having been caught out by pretty policemen in that exact same cottage. I found out a few years later that a teacher colleague had been caught out in an entrapment. He was charged and tried for gross indecency and, while awaiting sentencing, he committed suicide.

Although deeply in the closet at the time I was a school teacher through the years after Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government brought in the notorious Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988) with its deeply insulting homophobic language. This was in the midst of the devastation brought about by the AIDS crisis; a time when many reactionary forces seemed to believe that if they left us to get on with it we would wipe ourselves out and save them the trouble. I lost friends. P. lost friends ... and his brother. Governments all round the world were slow to act and were partly responsible for too many deaths.

I have lived to see countries slowly become open to the idea that same-sex relationships could be formalised and recognised in law. I finally climbed aboard the bus when I helped campaign for equal marriage.

I have also seen that many people who want to be left alone to live their lives freely in consensual same-sex relationships are subject to the most terrible abuses depending on where they happen to live. I have marched, rallied and demonstrated on behalf of some of those people who have no voice. I have stood shoulder to shoulder with people whose dedication to human rights I greatly admire outside many embassies in London, including Iran, Nigeria, India and (several times) the Russian Federation.

I have marched among hundreds of thousands in London many times and in tiny embryonic Pride events outside the capital to see them grow year on year. Perhaps my own personal favourite Pride moment has been to lead the band at the head of the first Pride event in my local town.

I march because I can. I have had many discussions with young people who do not know the history of the struggle to get where we are. To too many of them, Pride is party time. They see my reasons for marching as if they were regarding some artefact in a museum. While there is still one person in the world oppressed for being in a sexual minority the marching and the rallying need to carry on. If we are free to celebrate what we have achieved we have a responsibility to continue to march for those who can't. The European Union seems to be very quiet while many municipalities in Poland are illegally, but with impunity, declaring themselves "LGBT-free zones". The death penalty and life imprisonment is still all that people in some countries can look forward to. I'd like to think that everyone remembers why we can dance in our Pride parties to our X-Factor wannabes, but that seems to be not always true. I cannot turn my back on my own past or the present and future of too many other people. The peace is fragile and, for that reason too, the struggle must continue.

Sadly, COVID has seen to it that there will be no marching this year. I looked back through this blog to try and capture a photograph of a past Pride to put in a discussion forum, but maybe I didn't get round to writing about them. Anyway, here are a few photographs of some of those moments.