Earlier this week, to take a temperature gauge of where London LGBTQ+ people stand on the matter of Pride in 2023, I spent a sunny afternoon sitting in the brilliant intersectional queer bookshop, The Common Press. Located at the Shoreditch end of Bethnal Green Road, The Common Press is more than an expertly curated outlet to buy LGBTQ+ literature. It houses podcast studios, performance space, an adjacent bar with the legend ‘Sounds Gay? I’m In!’ stencilled on to the glass windows, a vivid new entry point for Brick Lane. There are nightly community group meetings, book clubs. In 2023, there is also an alternative Pride event.
In two short years since opening, The Common Press has become a vital east London queer community resource. It looks and feels like 2020s queer culture, a space that has moved from the night-time and into the day. When I mention to one of the managers, Aisha, that I’m writing a story about the search for the soul of London Pride, she beams: ‘You’ve come to the right place.’
Unusually for a London LGBTQ+ venue, The Common Press is owned and run by people of colour, women and non-binary folk. Walking in as a middle-aged, white gay man reminds me what it feels like to be the minority-in-a-minority, in a good way. Not that I am unwelcome, just that somebody who looks just like me isn’t running the show, as has been the case for most of the 51 years of London Pride, the annual London protest, party and parade for LGBTQ+ visibility. During its half century lifespan, Pride has become a bit like gay Christmas. Thrilling as a kid, daubed with tinsel and glitter, a national celebration everybody feels obliged to take part in and understands to be roughly a positive thing, without ever being quite sure where its real meaning lies.
‘In many ways,’ says Aisha, ‘we are living our ancestors’ wildest dreams.’ When it began in 1972, London Pride was attended by 2,000 people who marched from Highbury Fields, the symbolic site of the arrest of Louis Eakes a year earlier for importuning. In 2022, to mark its 50th anniversary, an estimated 1.5 million people attended the London event. ‘But that doesn’t mean we can’t do better.’ With the exponential rise in attendance and profile, there can be an inevitable confusion in purpose.
‘Pride for me is about honouring our past, but also about amplifying other voices,’ says Aisha. ‘It’s about trying to create change. We need to talk about women’s rights, racism, trans rights, equal pay. There are so many issues going on and as queer people, we’re vocal, we’re unapologetic. Traditionally we’re like, hey, this needs to change. That’s in our DNA. When you look at art, when you look at culture, queer people have always been at the front because we have traditionally been more daring at pushing forward. These protests were part of it.’
Has this pioneering spirit been lost in the corporate-endorsed, government takeover of what used to be a civil rights protest? It didn’t take long to get fierce customer responses on what Pride stands for in 2023. Sitting towards the back of the shop, I bumped into Amelia (24, they/them, identifies as “just queer”), a medical student at Queen Mary’s studying for a doctorate. ‘There’s always been this debate about whether it’s a party or a protest but right now it has to be a protest. Because everything’s f***ed. It’s just a terrible time.’
Amelia reckons they will ‘probably’ go to the main Pride event this year, as their college is marching, but they’re much more interested in attending Trans Pride the week after. This sentiment is echoed time and again during my afternoon at The Common Press. Splinter events like UK Black Pride, Trans Pride and a whole host of local borough Prides have gathered a natural head of steam, as the main Pride event has sanitised and corporatised. They all feel so much closer to where the heart of Pride lies in 2023.
We haven’t got anything changed without protest, without f***ing shit up a bit
‘These grassroots Prides had to happen,’ says Aisha, ‘because people were not included.’ Remember, every time you see a High Street ba nk ma rch down Haymarket during the main Pride event this weekend, that makes space for one less community initiative. ‘They never felt represented. That’s what happens. When there’s an entity that doesn’t work, you have to go and make it yourself. This is why Trans Pride is around, why UK Black Pride is so powerful.’
‘Trans Pride is definitely better than regular Pride,’ says Amelia, ‘which is just a parade of companies in a row. I feel like if companies want to be involved in it then there should at the very least be some criteria for what they are doing and where their money is going.’ Amelia thinks that if Pride were rebooted as a protest, it would get closer to the active concerns of young queer people in the capital. ‘It could be powerful. We haven’t got anything changed by not making a nuisance of ourselves, without protest, without f***ing shit up a bit. Pride clearly has helped with that historically.’
Amelia’s dissertation has involved speaking to a lot of trans people, ‘and everyone is having a terrible time. There’s so much abuse. The health system is so discrimina tory and awful and based on so many horrible old colonial ideals. The Government is intervening with very specific trans things, even like leaflets for trans people about cervical screening. I’ve heard the Health Secretary is vetoing inclusive language. It’s madness.’ What makes Amelia angriest about LGBTQ+ life in London in 2023? ‘People not being listened to. And people not being treated as people.’
Whether the sensitivities around cervical screening for the transmasculine community will make it on to the blockbuster party agenda at Pride in London this weekend is a moot point. For what feels like decades, the old spirit of Pride in London has been evaporating to make way for corporate interests. We have seen how brittle this support can be in the great Starbucks Pride Month fiasco. Yet if we want it large, goes the establishment thinking, then someone has to pay for it. You don’t get to take over a city like London without a hefty security bill attached. Prejudice still takes multiple forms. Those inclusivity flags festooning Regent Street won’t pay for themselves during a cost-of-living crisis.
Renee is one of the cheerful booksellers at The Common Press. She talks me through some of the current bestsellers, including Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends, the riotous, moving sex memoir of an old LA hardcore punk performer (‘we’ve sold a lot’) and Chloe Hayden’s Different, Not Less, an easily digestible study on queer neurodivergence. Renee is a young mother who found queer life recently. She attended her first Prides last year, seeing how the land lay at both the big commercial Pride and UK Black Pride. ‘Obviously that felt more like home,’ she says of the latter.
Renee sees the positives to an ongoing, existential search for the soul of Pride. ‘I have high hopes with Gen Z and Gen Alpha,’ she says. ‘They are definitely on our side. With the rise in social media, we’ve become more empathetic to different experiences, in hearing how different groups of people experience life.’ The old gatekeepers no longer organise who does and doesn’t have a voice. She says her own awakenings coincided with first hearing the brilliant Black, queer podcast, Two Twos. ‘More people can spot their own community online, even if they don’t see it in person. When I was growing up, there was none of that.’ Renee is 31. ‘The phrase I used to hear was, “Oh, Black people don’t do those things.” Okay. But [Two Twos’ presenters] Nana and Ro were two of the first Black British queer people who spoke to me, just by saying, “No, we’re here”.’
‘I said to someone only the other day,’ says another Common Press customer, Steven (33, he/him, identifies as gay), sipping a coffee, ‘that to be LGBTQ+ is to be political. It is a protest against what society expected of you. You are political, in your family, in your neighbourhood and in your work. You are a symbol, from the time that you come out. Even in a place like London, which is so free and beautiful, this is still the case.’
Steven says that he always associates Pride with one word. ‘Freedom. It’s the energy of people together.’ That togetherness should be a powerful visual tool, even if it only lasts for 24 hours. ‘The way I see it, there are two voices right now. There is the voice that is supportive of equal rights, that just want us to be able to get on with our lives. Then you have another, more conservative voice that doesn’t like what it sees, so it fights back even harder than ever. We succeed in so many aspects of life that it makes people afraid, because we are breaking rules and structures that make some people comfortable. That frightens them. They are intimidated by us. They are afraid. So, Pride is about connecting people who live within a predominant culture of fear.’
‘There are laws that are very extreme, some in the southern States of the US, some in Africa,’ says Renee. ‘The UK has dropped [down] several places in the list of rights for LGBTQ+ people.’ Even so, she remains positive. ‘Though it might seem controversial to say it, I think that’s proof that we’re headed in the right direction. Let me use this analogy. If you needed to redecorate or refurbish a house, there first has to be some destruction, some chaos, so that you can build stronger foundations to make something better. Maybe the struggle is here?’
This year, The Common Press set up its own Pride initiative, Brick Lane Alternative Pride, an ongoing event running from 20 June to 1 July. ‘Local Prides are important for London,’ says Aisha. ‘Because it is also nice to know your neighbours, your community in a particular area. That is a beautiful thing. And I think it’s an important aspect of all our intersectional identity.’
The reasoning behind it is beautifully straightforward. ‘Pride should be about coming together,’ she says. ‘For so long Black queer people, people of colour, trans people, non-binary people and especially queer women have never been allowed to lead from the forefront. I think it’s important to highlight that, to recognise what it looks like. Because this is what it should always have looked like.’
