10/07/2022
To mark Bristol Pride on Saturday 9th July, "ShoutOut" asked our news editor Terry to put together a brief history of the Pride Movement in Britain. This was a briefing for our presenters during our day long coverage of Pride, which went out on BCFM Community Radio, Ujima Community Radio and Bath Community Radio. Here is the text of this briefing, which we thought you might enjoy. Thanks to Wikipedia and Vice News for some of the background, but we have also drawn on a wide variety of books and websites to flesh out the story.
Timeline of Pride
There were some prefigurings of a modern Pride movement. Adolf Brand in Germany had published a magazine called “Der Eigine” (The Unique) from 1896. It was the first ongoing gay publication in the world, and existed until 1931. Brand was influenced by the naturist movement, early green ideas and a rekindling of interest in classical homosexuality. His magazine published articles by individualist anarchists in the style of Max Stirner and also advocated social democracy as a system of government under which gay people could thrive. However, his philosophy could also be very male centric and misogynistic. Magnus Hirschfeld, and his Scientific Humanitarian Committee adopted a more modern approach, advocating for women’s rights, gay and transgender emancipation. Mr Hirschfeld was years ahead of his time and unsurprisingly, he was forced into exile by the evil Nazi regime just for being gay and Jewish. He died in exile, a broken man in 1935, but after the horror of the Second World War, his ideas found their way to early gay rights groups in the United States and the returning gay service people in the US who tended to settle in port cities like San Francisco.
We should also mention as a forerunner of Pride consciousness the utopian philosopher Edward Carpenter. He lived between 1840 and 1928 and had trained for the priesthood. He combined some of the best teachings of Christianity with ecological awareness, utopian socialism, vegetarianism and aspects of what would now be called the “new age” spirituality into a vision of love and peace for humanity. He accurately predicted the rise of feminism, gay consciousness and environmental care. One imagines that if he were alive today he would be part of eco activism and animal rights struggles.
In 1965, the early American gay rights protest movement was visible at the Annual Reminder pickets in Washington DC, organized by members of the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis, and the gay men's group Mattachine Society. The Mattachine Society could trace its origins to 1950, when Harry Hay, an iconoclastic gay leader, even then, used his experience within the banned Communist Party of the USA to argue that gay people were an oppressed minority and needed their own advocacy groups. Mattachine members were also involved in demonstrations in support of homosexuals imprisoned in Cuban labor camps, ironically by a nominally communist regime, which has incidentally, apologised for past homophobic policies.
Early on the morning of Saturday, June 28, 1969, LGBTQ people rioted following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City. The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar which catered to an assortment of patrons, but which was popular with the most marginalized people in the gay community: transvestites, transgender people, effeminate young men, hustlers, and homeless youth.
The five nights of the Stonewall riots changed everything. They were described by the Mattachine Society as the “hairpin drop heard around the world”. Within days of Stonewall, a new gay movement began to coalesce as a new generation of activists, dissatisfied with the quiet advocacy of the old homosexual groups, formed new and unapologetic action groups. They used their experience in the protest movements of the day, such as the anti-war, black civil rights and feminist movements, to inform the new wave of organisations, such as the Gay Liberation Front.
On Saturday, June 27, 1970, Chicago Gay Liberation organized a march from Washington Square Park to the Water Tower at the intersection off Michigan and Chicago avenues, which was the route originally planned, and then many of the participants spontaneously marched on to the Civic Center. The West Coast of the United States saw a march in San Francisco on June 27, 1970 and 'Gay-in' on June 28, 197 and a march in Los Angeles on June 28, 1970. It was not easy for the organisers in Los Angeles. Police were initially obstructive and local activists received death threats from right wing extremists.
On Sunday, June 28, 1970, at around noon, in New York gay activist groups held their own pride parade, known as the Christopher Street Liberation Day, to recall the events of Stonewall one year earlier. Despite many political differences, the various LGBT+ groups that existed, from the radical Gay Liberation Front through to the moderate New York Mattachine Society, collaborated and put on a united face for the world.
In London, there were also LGBT+ groups of a quiet and moderate nature. They included the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, the Beaumont Society and the Albany Trust. In 1970, however, the first Gay Liberation Front meeting took place at the London School of Economics. Within a matter of months, GLF branches had proliferated around the UK and London meetings were attended by several hundred people. The GLF was a sometimes uneasy alliance of factions, ranging from socialists, anarchists, liberals, feminists and radical hippies, but as Peter Tatchell told “ShoutOut” in 2021, they were sustained and united by their belief in freedom for lesbians and gay men. Trans people took an active role in GLF but back in the seventies, trans liberationary thought was still in its infancy. And it has to be acknowledged that there were issues of bisexual phobia within gay lib politics. It was only in the middle 1980s that an organised bisexual movement really gets going in the UK.
On 27th November 1970, GLF London held the first gay rights demonstration at Highbury Fields in London, after the arrest of a young gay person, Louis Eakes a member of the old Liberal Party, for soliciting – an offence used primarily against gay men that was eventually swept away in the sexual offences reforms of 2003.
The activities of the GLF were many and varied and its is thanks to the actions of the many chapters of the group that we today have Switchboard, Gay’s The Word Bookstore and countless other institutions. In her classic 1995 text “No Bath But Plenty of Bubbles”, Lisa Power noted that thanks to the organisational abilities of GLF and the change in gay people’s consciousness that it brought about, the community was able to respond to later challenges as well, such as the AIDS pandemic of the mid eighties and the assault on freedoms by the right wing of the Conservative Party. But all that lay in the future.
In 1972, the London GLF followed their American comrades in holding Britain’s first ever Pride march. About 2,000 LGBTQ+ people, many in drag, marched through central London, culminating with a kiss-in at Trafalgar Square. The date chosen was the 1st of July 1972, the nearest Saturday to the anniversary of Stonewall – a conscious homage to the rebellion's first spark. Although not official, a few men in radical drag (which was akin to what would now be called genderqueer drag) had also held an impromptu march in London a few days before the official Pride Demonstration.
Nettie Pollard remembers just how dramatically Pride stood out from other political protests of the era. "I remember seeing one woman with a T-shirt with 'Lesbian' written in big letters. That courage in being so open and visible was extraordinary to me. This wasn't a demonstration about a specific law or campaign – this was just about who we are, the idea that for LGBT+ people our very existence is political."
Another factor which it’s also important to remember is that the emerging LGBT+ Media was also intertwined with the birth of Pride Marches in the UK. There were people in the GLF who had experience with the underground press of the late sixties – a riotous mix of publications that surrounded the new left and cultural radicalism of the day. The GLF magazine was called “Come Together”, but it was a coalition of groups, again sometimes working uneasily together, that allowed for the formation of the first all national gay newspaper in the UK, “Gay News”, which went on sale in the same week as that very first London Pride march. In the same month, “Spare Rib” started publishing. “Spare Rib” was a second wave feminist magazine and understood issues of intersectionality long before many white feminists appreciated the significance. The paper was a huge success and although not specifically lesbian in target audience, it was widely ready by lesbian women, a considerable number of whom felt marginalised by the gay male domination of some wider gay groups.
Of course, in the 1970’s there was no community radio, and the UK government was only just beginning to tentatively allow a small number of tightly controlled commercial radio stations in localities. There were alternatives – Tony Allan was the first out gay radio DJ, broadcasting from the veteran pirate radio ship Radio Caroline, then anchored off Holland. In the early 80s, several land based pirates experimented with LGBT+ broadcasting – notably GayWaves and Radio Marilyn. Finally, in 1987, as part of its remit to serve minority tastes, Channel Four Television commissioned a gay programme, “Out on Tuesday”, despite howls of derision from the right wing tabloids.
Local Prides began to proliferate during the 1970’s, although were very low key to begin with. Avon Pride was first held in June 1977 in Bristol and was inaugurated to raise money for the “Gay News” Blasphemy Trial. That’s a while other issue that we can go into some other time, but in brief, forthright Christian fundamentalist activist Mary Whitehouse, who had been gunning for “Gay News” for some years, brought a private prosecution against the paper for publishing a poem by James Kirkup. “Gay News” was ultimately found guilty but in the long run, the case helped turn the tide of public opinion against Whitehouse and against the existence of historic blasphemy legislation.
During the eighties and nineties a number of culturally focussed West Country Prides took place, with the kind assistance of such friendly businesses as the Watershed, the Arnolfini and the much missed GreenLeaf Bookshop. Names of such events included Queer West in 1999. Although large Prides were moribund in the noughties, low key events took place in the Frogmore Street Car Park, by the Pineapple Pub, and on one occasion in some side roads off the Gay Village area in Old Market. But it was in 2010, when, as Outstories History project notes “Pride Bristol successfully revived; a week of social and cultural events culminating in the largest yet gathering of LGBT people in Castle Park in central Bristol.”
