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Something monstrous is stirring

An alternative LGBTQ Pride is a necessary response to the event’s takeover by Barclays, Starbucks and Boris Johnson, says ZACHARIAH PANKHURST

As many people are aware, the Stonewall riots were an iconic moment in the history of LGBT liberation struggles. A routine police raid in 1969 on a bar in Greenwich Village where LGBT people liked to hang out saw a big push back from the clientele that become a riot lasting days. 

The first London Pride happened three years later on the anniversary of that riot, organised by the gay liberation front (GLF) — a group with a strong and explicit anti-capitalist agenda which put anti-racism and feminism at the top of its manifesto. 

Pride was a militant protest as well as a celebration with radical politics at its core and people engaged in direct actions fighting back against the cops who tried to stop them.

Fast forward 30 years to the Monstrous Pride project that was born of a growing dissatisfaction with what London Pride has since become. 

We don’t want to have to register an application with a committee so that we can march behind the army, shoulder to shoulder with Boris Johnson. 

We have spoken to NGOs, charities, minority affiliations and grass-roots activists who can’t even afford to pay the fees to have a stall in the corner while Barclays and Starbucks get centre stage. 

It is the grass roots and the marginalised who drive and have always driven liberation forward and it is their voices that must be centre-stage if we are to create an event that is politically progressive.

These are the reasons why an alternative is being created this year. We want a celebration and a protest with progressive politics at its heart centred on the most marginalised of our communities. 

We believe that it is possible to have fun without spending lots of money and to shout out loud without politically sanitising the content.

We are going to be kicking off at Pride in the Park on Sunday and then hosting two weeks of art, talks, movies, poetry, parties, and fabulous insurrection at a squatted venue somewhere in central London (follow us online to find out where!). Everything we host will be free and wheelchair accessible.

 

For more information visit www.houseofbrag.wordpress.com, Twitter @houseofbrag and Facebook ‘House of Brag: The London Queer Social Centre.’

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