The question that I have posed in the title is one that I’ve been musing on a lot lately. This is because there used to be a valid point in and a reason for Pride Marches. It was the one day in the year when lesbian, gay and bisexual people could travel to London,where the main Pride march was held where they could socialise openly and with friends without fear of the sort of social opprobrium that may have been sometimes vehemently expressed to them in their home towns. It was also a day of self expression for groups that dare not do so openly for the rest of the year. Pride was once an event where people could protest about major issues of concern such as the AIDS crisis, the exclusion and exposure to potential blackmail that gay service personnel were once under, the sacking of gay teachers, police harassment of gays and all the other inequalities that gay people once faced in Britain, despite the passing of the Wolfenden Report Acts that decriminalised gay sex.

But primarily, Gay Pride as it was once called, was an expression of the idea that G-A-Y didn’t just mean the technical description of being attracted to the same sex, but also that gay people were as Good As You. It was to show that to be gay did not mean that you were lesser than others, just different but that gay Britons are just as valuable as non-gay Britons. Pride was once a clarion call for equal rights and responsibilities, a rallying point for those who wanted to be treated the same as others and not be penalised just because they were attracted to the same sex.

However the main battles for equal treatment have been won. You can’t be sacked from the armed services for being gay and neither can you lose your teaching position or be excluded from the police for not being straight. Sure AIDS is still with us and still taking lives and it is still a disease that needs to be beaten by science, but the other major battles,that my gay friends fought so hard for during the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, have been won. Lesbian and Gay people do not have any appreciable disabilities in British life. They can marry, adopt children if they want, do any job they want, are protected from police harassment, are accepted in many churches and non-Orthodox synagogues, but most importantly are accepted in the main by the British public. I suspect that if you asked Britons would they care if their doctor was gay then the answer that you would get would be along the lines of ‘meh’ or ‘who cares?’ This is a massive difference in viewpoint from the position that would have existed for example in the 1950’s where gay people were routinely brought before the courts and punished just for being gay, a situation that the public back then might well have approved of.

There used to be a point for Pride marches etc, there used to be a goal, that of equality. However equality has been won and we need to ask two questions. The first is: ‘Is there any point in Prides’ and secondly: ‘Has what Pride has become which is all too often a street festival for exhibitionists and corporates chasing after the ‘pink pound’, damaging the image of lesbian, gay and bisexual Britons? My answer to the first is that the battles have been won, the original point of Pride which was to be part of the fight for equal rights and equal treatment, is no longer valid now that there are no societal or legal impediments for being gay. To take part in a Pride march today and to believe that you are taking part in some way in a fight for equality is as anachronistic as marching in 2021 against the appeasement of National Socialism by Neville Chamberlain’s government of the 1930’s.

My answer to the second question which is are Pride festivals damaging the public image of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, would be ‘all too often’. Pride is where lesbian, gay and bisexual Britons are very much on public display and therefore should be an occasion where these communities show of their best most high achieving people, their most effective community groups and generally celebrate the contribution made to Britain by those from these hitherto ignored and oppressed members of society. Unfortunately that’s not what we get. Instead we get all manner of people parading their fetishes in public, such as partly clad SM’ers carrying whips, men leading other men in dog suits on leads and overt displays of sexualised behaviour of a kind that might not be acceptable to the public if they were engaged in by straights. I have no problem if adult people want to engage in BDSM or polyamory or fetishised cross dressing with other adults. However this behaviour should be kept in private or in those clubs that are set up for such purposes. Displaying this behaviour in the street does no good for the image of lesbian, gay or bisexual people. It makes the community look bad.

What’s worse is the domination of Pride by various fetishists and exhibitionists appears to be driving some normal LGB people away from Prides. A bisexual friend of mine once said that he didn’t feel the need to go to Prides as their sexuality was not their entire being, it was just a part of them and who they are and that they didn’t feel the need to display it in the street. I wonder how many other normal, well adjusted, contributory members of society who just happen to be gay, lesbian or bisexual feel the same way? Judging by the way that many Pride celebrations seem to have become dominated by fetishists and exhibitionists and denuded of normals, I would say that a lot of LGB people are voting with their feet and having nothing to do with Pride. This has ended up with Pride being a hollowed out thing, stripped of what it once was which was a public clarion call for equality and is now dominated by the exhibitionists and the corporate entities that want to both simultaneously exploit LGB’s for their purchasing power and to virtue signal to the Left and a Left dominated Establishment.

There were once good and valid reasons for Gay Pride marches but these reasons no longer exist, just as there’s no reason for groups like the Mattachine Society, an early Left-led gay rights campaigning group, to exist. This is because the battles have been won. Equal rights are here and they are unlikely to be removed unless there is some unforeseen and highly unlikely sea change in Western societies.

There will always be a need for gay friendly venues and organisations where like minded people can meet, socialise and work towards common goals, free association is both necessary and important, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that Pride’s time has come and gone. Pride is no longer a gathering of oppressed individuals and the groups that represent them, with grass roots organisations in the forefront and gay people doing stuff like campaigning work or showcasing gay or gay friendly entertainers. Instead it is a wholly corporate gathering, organised in a very top down manner for people who are no longer oppressed or suffer from any social disability. It’s become somewhat of an empty vessel.

It’s correct in my view that we should ask whether there is any point in continuing Pride in its current forms and whether continuing with a hollowed out and pointless series of events that have devolved into festivals of hedonism and exhibitionism do individual LGB people in the UK any good at all? In the West at least the battles for equal treatment have been won and there is now little point in Pride as a campaign unless it refocuses to fight for the equal treatment of LGB people in less enlightened parts of the world. A Pride that focused on the plight of LGB people around the world and called out and criticised the Iranians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Chinese and Indonesian etc regimes that either have less than equal treatment for gay citizens or who are murderous towards them, might be a Pride worth supporting. Sadly that is not what Pride events have become. Instead of turning their attention to LGB people who are still living in oppression overseas, they have become festivals of empty hedonism, corporate greed and virtue signalling. That is not a Pride that many people can feel proud of.