Is Pride flopping? This parti-coloured celebration of all things LGBTQIA+ started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men. Then it became a day, then a week, then a month, and now it spreads throughout the summer, accompanied by all manner of feast days and ‘visibility’ events. Its expansion coincided with the addition of all the letters after the first three. This is when it became a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality – very old hat – but just about anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional, ranging from wearing wigs to not fancying any kind of sex at all. Every peccadillo was deemed worthy of a flag and a float.
But the wheels finally seem to be coming off the Pride clown car. What was mushrooming is now shrivelling. Several newly Reform-led councils – including Kent and Durham – have taken down Pride flags from their municipal properties and won’t be flying them during the high days, or any others. The Times reports that Whitehall has banned civil servants from buying Pride lanyards. This is supposedly part of a ‘crackdown on waste’ – but it’s conveniently timely.
Pride events themselves are dissolving. Several celebrations during Pride Month, which begins on Sunday, have faced financial difficulties. Lincoln, Plymouth, Southampton and Hereford have all either been abandoned, cut back, or had to rely on emergency bailouts from wealthy private backers. ‘Many of our usual sponsors are unfortunately unable to help due to budget constraints,’ the organiser of Lincoln Pride told the BBC last month. His counterpart in Worthing reported that ‘he had unsuccessfully been trying to secure sponsorship since September and warned the event might be cancelled unless that changes’.
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