There may be many difficult conversations to be had about how the Pride festival has changed, but it's also worth appreciating what the event means
This year marks 50 years since the Stonewall Riots forever changed the face of gay liberations. On that night, a routine police raid on a gay bar in New York took an unexpected turn when queer folk fought back. It became the galvanising moment for a generation of activists and ordinary people who had become sick of their every move - every decision about who to dance with and what to wear - being punished and forbidden.
Many of us know the broad story of Stonewall, but when you turn back to revisit it, the little details jump out, things which seem so preposterous now. I can never forget the fact that it was forbidden by law to wear more than three items of clothing of the opposite gender. A silk scarf, a hair-band, a blouse: these were OK, at least technically. But add a skirt or a high heeled boot and you were breaking the law. It’s easy to forget how recently these tiny personal choices were policed, and policed with such violence.
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From RTÉ 2fm, Will St Ledger, Grand Marshall of Dublin Pride 2019, talks about Stonewall and its effect on the LGBT+ community
Of course, for all the progress made since Stonewall, we still live in a society where queerness is punished. Ireland has been taken to task for its inadequate approach to hate crime laws. Homophobic and transphobic hate crime has spiked in the UK in recent years. Last month a picture went viral of two bloodied women on a date who had been attacked on a London bus for refusing to kiss for the entertainment of their attackers. As the Pride parade comes around, some despairing queer people may justifiably be wondering whether there is cause for celebration - and celebration rather than uprising is what the modern face of Pride looks like - at all.
It’s something I’ve wondered about myself, but I’ve come to think that for all the commercialisation of Pride, it’s more important than ever we see it as a way to be jubilantly defiant rather than simply as a party. It isn’t a celebration that all the work has been done and being gay is easy for everyone now. It’s a moment to show the world that even when it’s not easy, LGBTQ+ people will still be here, as they always have been.
When asked if she would be wary of being openly affectionate with a woman again, one of the women injured in the London bus attack responded movingly: "to not hold someone's hand and be affectionate in the way heterosexuals do, to me that is kind of cowardly. People fought really hard for much more and gave up a lot of their own safety to fight for it."
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From RTÉ Radio 1's The Business, Liam Geraghty looks at the thorny issue of corporate involvement with Dublin's LGBTQ Pride Festival
I totally sympathise with critiques of Pride. Corporate involvement and the presence of the likes of the Garda Síochána and the PSNI are difficult conversations which won’t be going away any time soon. But I think it’s important too to take the time to appreciate this event, which would have been literally inconceivable to a generation of Irish people not long ago, going through the heart of Dublin.
Pride becoming more accessible and mainstream is often seen as a negative thing for understandable reasons; nobody queer wants it to turn into an asexual, apolitical day out with no meaning. There is a positive way to look at its expansion too though, not as an event becoming more suited to straight people, but as a thing which more and more LGBTQ+ people in sub-groups outside of metropolitan centres might hear about and feel able to participate in. Seeing the presence of Macra na Feirme and the GAA in this year’s Pride parade for the first time is a material and truly heartening illustration of this.
