Some things, like the Centre, came and went but one thing that always seemed to manage to somehow pick up the pieces and regenerate itself each year was the Pride event of a march and rally in London.
As I mentioned earlier I think it took events like this to really show that there were large numbers of ‘ordinary’ lesbians and gay men prepared to come out and walk in large numbers, to show others that they really were not alone. Usually, it consisted of a march (or later to be more apolitical, a ‘Parade’) from some central area, like Hyde Park, to a finishing point somewhere else, with a rally in a park or similar location. The first one I’d been on was back in 1979, celebrating the 10th anniversary of Stonewall. This in itself was the third march, since the first in London, in July 1972, when 2000 people had attended (though there was a small march billed as a ‘Gay Day’, from Hyde Park down Oxford St in 1971 organised by the GLF (Gay Liberation Front) Youth group that had about 200 attendees). There were to be no marches though between 1974 and 1977.
Reincarnated, in 1978, it went from Earls Court to Shepherds Bush but was still relatively small. However, it was featured in two television documentary programmes at the time, with short but generally positive segments on ‘World in Action’ on ITV and ‘Inside Story’ on BBC. Quite a few people saw the film cameras on the day though, and covered their faces as they went past the cameras, as they were worried they would be seen by parents, friends or family, who did not know they were gay, such was the undercurrent of fear, anxiety and worry about at the time.
However, this was always a ‘must attend’ event for me after that, partly as everyone else you knew would be there too and it wouldn’t be good to say you hadn’t attended to, partly as it was important to be seen and partly as it was always good fun. Yes, it might pour with rain, yes the police might be unpleasant, yes it was a long day but you just ‘went,’ especially if you lived in London. However, the organisation of the events were nearly always fraught with issues too, whether related to problems caused by the money lost by the previous Pride, the make up of the organising committee, issues to be dealt with smoothly on the day or problems with tidying up after the event, both literally and figuratively.
Many different ways of staging the event had been tried in the years after that third 1979 march that I had attended. In 1980, 3000 people, including myself, marched from Hyde Park to end up at the University of London Union (ULU) in Malet St. In 1981, it had decamped (literally, not figuratively) up to Huddersfield of all places, as an act of solidarity with the Yorkshire gay community, whom rightly claimed that the West Yorkshire Police were harassing them, by repeatedly raiding the Gemini Club, a leading nightclub in the North of England at the time. The idea of taking it out of the capital and ‘up north’ seemed a good idea at the time too.
1982 saw a small march of about 1200 people, perhaps due in part to the weather forecast, on a similar route as 1981, which I was on with my boyfriend Mark and his good friend Gabrielle. It did feel smaller, I remember looking around anxiously and saying to Mark that there didn’t seem to be as many people as we had expected. I have pictures of us all laughing, at being completely (and I do mean completely) sodden by the absolutely torrential rain, a cloudburst, along with a crack of thunder which had started just after the march moved off. We jokingly said that the almighty clearly had it in for us too. In 1983, the march was held on the 2nd July, with around 2000 people again starting in Hyde Park and ending at the ULU in Malet Street.
Capital Gay, a freesheet, that that recently started publication in London, reported that about 2,000 had attended ‘on the happiest Pride parade for years’, which was probably as much as anything because a) it was dry and b) it was not in Huddersfield. Oddly enough, in 1984 it seems that everyone forgot to organise a march, (or more likely nobody wanted to take on the huge responsibility for it) but 1,500 people still turned up in Hyde Park, simply because it was the first Saturday in June.
After that non-event and the recriminations, from 1985 things started to expand, in terms of scale and the numbers attending, quite quickly. The march went from Hyde Park to the Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank of the Thames, with the number of marchers an estimated 10-15,000. This was the one that the mining communities showed up to, as recreated and immortalised in the film ‘Pride’, in return for the gay support by the LGSM (Lesbian & Gays support the Miners) during the miners’ strike. It was also immortalised by John Waters as ‘Divine’, who arranged to ‘parade’ down the middle of the River Thames on a large barge, with a huge PA system onboard, blaring out his hit single ‘You think you’re a man, but you’re only a Boy’. As a PR stunt it certainly took some beating. Capital Gay called it, “the biggest gathering of homosexuals Britain has ever seen.”
By 1986, the organisers had realised that with the scale it was now on, and the expectations that surrounded it, it was starting to become less a march than an ‘event’, a happening in its own right; more a parade to showcase all the best that the community had to offer. It was felt that it needed somewhere ‘big’ to finish and so it ended up in Kennington Park in South London. It was another success and was generally agreed to be the best march and post march rally (or party as it was starting to be called), so far. Interestingly too, for me, this was the first time that there was less of a feeling of ‘open hostility’ from the police walking with it, there were even some smiles that the crowd managed to get from some of them, some banter, each riposte celebrated by enormous cheers from the crowd. On June 27th 1987 a similarly attended march and rally was held finishing at the Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank, despite its limited size, with Bronski Beat performing on the main stage.
By the time it was due to start planning the 1988 event, to be held on June 25th that year, it was also recognised that some kind of official historical commemoration needed to be made of these events. As much as anything, the organisers wanted to be able to show future event sponsors what kind of scale support they would see and moreover that they could be trusted to manage such an event. As a result Cleancut, my own production company, offered our services to the organisers to make a documentary about the event, using equipment hired from the London Video Arts workshop in Soho.
In the event it was estimated that around 40,000 people attended the event in all , where Section 28 was very much at the top of the agenda, along of course with the ongoing and devastating effects of HIV/AIDS. We had determined to have three teams with cameras out on the day, getting all the action from both Parade and Rally, although in the event we had severe technical problems with one camera, that meant most of the footage taken on it couldn’t be used in the final edit. Luckily, the other two teams managed to get some excellent footage of the parade and especially the rally in Jubilee Gardens again, afterwards. We also had someone taking photos of the event as well. Interviews were secured with, amongst others, The Communards (Sample question: What do you want to see happen in the future Jimmy?: ‘All out onto the streets, Revolution”!) and Derek Jarman. We had made a list in advance of interviews we wanted to get, with a range of different types of people attending, so the crew was particularly looking for these on the day. We got some good clear footage of Michael Cashman on stage, talking about the issues raised by Section 28 and also the interviewers were briefed to specifically ask related question to those interviewed. As far as I’m aware this was the first time that a video celebrating ‘Pride’ had been commissioned and made.
In the end we cut together about a 35 minute documentary, with a mixture of vox pop from attendees, more serious interviews about the potential effects of Section 28 and the reasons to come on such a march and music from the performers, which had included the already iconic Sandie Shaw. I recall in particular my partner Dennis at the time being assigned to do interviews and haranguing two police officers , a man & women. He was like a little terrier with them, determined to get a response of a sort. ‘Is this the first march you’ve been on’, he brightly asked? ‘Do you like policing these Pride marches’? When I first watched the rushes I was cringing inwardly, thinking that he was really pushing his luck! To his credit though he got a reaction, ‘It’s all right’ the policewomen laughed, ‘we don‘t mind‘. What a difference I thought from that policewomen talking about ‘all the poofs here’ eight years before, at the Notting Hill Carnival. Were things moving forward, attitudes finally changing, even those ingrained ones in the police force?
Derek Jarman, who had been diagnosed as HIV positive six months before, provided a fitting soundbite that we used to wrap up the video, when he was asked whether the future, with the Section 28 debate ongoing, looked bleak for gay men & lesbians, when he said ‘Oh no, I think it will help bring us all together, I hope so anyway: I’m an optimist!
In the final event, he was right of course, events such as that did provide a platform around which groups came together, to fight back in relation to the legislation. Derek himself became a leading campaigner against Clause 28 and was able to live to see much of the positive effects of this campaign, this ‘fightback’ in the following seven years, though sadly dying, in 1994, of HIV/AIDS related complications.
That was the first and last time we filmed Pride. Generally, I preferred to be having fun, actually being part of the Parade itself and Pride was to continue of course, although the increasingly popular Brighton & Hove Pride and Manchester Pride events did take away from some of its domination as ‘the event’ to be at each year. By 1990 and 1991 the annual parade was going right across London, starting from Victoria then via Trafalgar Square & Whitehall, past the Houses of Parliament, and down Kennington Road to Kennington Park. 1992 saw London as the ‘Euro Pride’ capital and both 1992 and 1993 events were large enough to need to end in Brockwell Park, near Brixton, although it was quite a trek, as Kennington Park became too small and crowded a location to be safe. 1995 saw the march start in Hyde Park to end in Victoria Park, Hackney whilst the 1996 and 1997 marches went on down through south London to end at the larger site available on Clapham Common. In 1999 the event was renamed ‘London Mardi Gras’ ( in a nod to the hugely successful event each year in Sydney, Australia) and finished up at Finsbury Park, this route being repeated in 2000 and 2001.
The event was held on the Hackney Marshes in 2002, not an especially popular location for many, due to accessibility issues, so in 2003 it stuck to Hyde Park in central London. In a nod to the unofficial very first ‘Gay Day’ rally in 1971, there was a Big Gay Out in 2004 in Finsbury Park. And so it continued through the last few decades. In 2013 some reports suggested that as many as up to half a million people took part in the ‘Pride in London’ Parade, going from Baker Street via Oxford Street and Regent Street to Whitehall, followed by a festival (“Summer Rites“) in Shoreditch Park. And they continued, in much the same vein, until the year 2020 sadly saw ‘Pride’ cancelled- like so many other events- due to the nationwide restrictions to control the spread of the Covid-19 virus. But the event, which now has a long tradition and history and means so much to so many people everywhere, has happily continued again, post COVID, although the debates surrounding its presentation and staging continue, as ever.
