A gesture of defiance

1972 was a very different world.

Today 40 years ago, the first Gay Pride rally through the centre of London took place. There had already been Gay Pride gatherings - the first being in Highbury Fields in 1970. Now we had the prominence and visibility of appearing en masse in the heart of the capital! Needless to say, the tireless Peter Tatchell was involved in organising it:

"Not surprisingly, only 700 people joined the first ever Gay Pride march in Britain, held in London on 1 July 1972. Many of my friends were too scared to march. They thought everyone would be arrested. We weren’t arrested, but we were swamped by a very heavy, aggressive police presence. They treated us like criminals.

Despite this intimidation, we were determined to have a fun time and make our point. The march was a carnival-style parade, which went from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park. There were lots of extravagant costumes and cheeky banners poking fun at homophobes like the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse.

"We got mixed reactions from the public – some hostility but predominantly curiosity and bewilderment. Most had never knowingly seen a gay person, let alone hundreds of queers marching to demand human rights. “Aren’t you ashamed?”, one man shouted. “No”, we shouted back, as we blew him a kiss.

Unlike nowadays, there was no festival or entertainment in the park after the march - just an impromptu “Gay Day” - a sort of D-I-Y queer picnic. Everyone bought food, booze, dope and music. It was all shared around.

We played camped-up versions of party games like spin-the-bottle and drop-the-hanky. I won one of the games and my prize was a long, deep snog with Thierry, a gorgeous French gay activist who had come over from Paris.

But it was more than good fun. Same-sex kissing in public was, in 1972, illegal. Our party game was a gesture of defiance. The cowardly Metropolitan Police would have arrested us if we were lone gay couples kissing, but they dared not arrest 700 of us."

Listen to the man himself talking about the event on the BBC.



We may have come a long way in forty years, but let us not be complacent about the importance of Gay Pride. We have a lot of freedoms in the UK, it is true. Many others are not so fortunate across the world. And we should never forget that liberty is sometimes ephemeral, and not to be taken for granted.

Gay people in Weimar Germany experienced the least restrictions, the greatest rights in European gay history in the 1920s and early 30s. In common with many queens today who take pride in avoiding Gay Pride, they believed the "battles had been won", that Gay Pride was "irrelevant", that all that mattered was to be beautiful and to have a party - but in a matter of months, what those German queens took for granted was very soon swept away with the rise of the Nazis.

Once more, we embark on the countdown to next Saturday's World Pride in London and, "scaled down" due to crap management or not, among the feathers, foof and faff we will be making a statement, in support of our oppressed peers in countries across the world, and in opposition to those - even in this country, such as the organised religions - who continue to espouse hate against us.

I've been attending Gay Pride since 1985 - and every consecutive year since 1991 - and I will continue to do so. The need for Gay Pride has not gone away.

Pride London