Despite my pleas with the powers that be to slow the flow of time, it’s somehow already June again, and for every gay in the village, that means one thing: Pride Month.
The lead-up towards every queer’s favourite month of the year is typically focused on meticulous planning of a sufficiently camp fit while planning how many Pride events you can squeeze into the calendar to show it off, before July comes around to spoil the fun by reminding you to check how much you spent on overpriced G&Ts this year.
It’s also, of course, an important time to take stock of where the LGBTQ+ community is at in terms of our safety, rights, and autonomy across the globe. Everyone knows Pride is a protest, even if it has become a protest where you can buy rainbow handfans and some loveheart earrings to boot.
As much as I love the celebratory side of Pride events, it’s difficult not to feel that the yearly routine of celeb-filled festivals and corporate parade floats comes from an incredibly privileged perspective; one that ironically came from the increased acceptance and awareness of LGBTQ+ people through the tireless activism of Pride protestors in the 80s and 90s. Brands have since tried to capitalise on Pride Month as though it were a kind of Wrestlemania for the gays (ignoring that Wrestlemania is already for the gays).
Debates over whether Pride events should be a festival-like celebration of our hard-fought rights or a method to force the government to acknowledge and address the suffering of LGBTQ+ people have raged long before the first rainbow-edition vodka bottle was sold at London Pride. While the answer has fluctuated with the times, the recent wave of DEI rollbacks and the UK’s dark descent into open transphobia have put things into perspective for me.
Of course Pride never needed corporate sponsors – a rainbow Budweiser was never going to change things for us.
This year, I’ve not spent the weeks leading up to Pride planning my rainbow outfit or looking up the setlists for my local Pride. I’ve been too busy wracked with fear that Labour seems more than happy to strip away my rights to pander to would-be Reform voters, or that the EHRC thinks it’s reasonable to ban an entire community from male and female bathrooms with no evidence to justify it.
2025 has felt very much like a line in the sand in the way I engage with Pride Month. I, and others I know, feel that we cannot in good conscience continue to celebrate Pride in the way we have previously because the stakes are simply too high. This could very well be the last Pride Month we have where trans people are allowed to use the gendered bathrooms during it: now is not the time for rainbow-branded merch; it’s the time to make us, the LGBTQ+ community, heard.
Pride organisations need to take note of the vibe shift and adapt. Several organisers have already taken commendable steps by banning political parties from their events, but this should be the first step of many to create a Pride that addresses the issues we are facing. Awareness is simply not enough anymore.
The focus needs to shift from public institutions and brands showing their Pride through rainbow paraphernalia, and onto activist groups and NGOs, which are making the effort to push back on the government’s hateful treatment of trans people and their allies. There is room for both, but a modern Pride needs to prioritise groups made by us, who fight for us.
Sustainability simply isn’t a good enough argument against this anymore. Sure, sponsors are a good way to raise money to support groups that are doing the work and large-scale festivals, but we as a community should be raising the bar of what we expect from those brands when it comes to their own actions, values and donations.
The truth is, we don’t – and never did – need these brands to assemble, protest and organise. You only need to look at the emergency demonstration held following the devastating UK Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act’s definition of a woman. In just a few short days, a cavalcade of trans rights groups, trade unions, and activist organisations came together using minimal funds and their collective followings to bring over 25,000 people to the streets of London in one of the most influential protests of our time – that’s more people than can fit in Madison Square Garden, by the way.
I say all this not to condemn Pride organisations, but to motivate them – the evolution of Pride marches into a celebratory festival came largely because LGBTQ+ lives were improving, which is no doubt a cause for celebration. But things have changed over the past few years. Hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people are on the rise, Right-wing misinformation is making bigotry ripe in the UK, and the prime minister has demonstrated he’s unwilling to swim against the rising tide of transphobia.
Of course, when I say LGBTQ+ lives were improving over the past two decades, I mean the lives of white, able-bodied, neurotypical queer people. Pride has always needed to be a protest. It needed to be a protest when Brianna Ghey was tragically killed or when the Tory government blocked Scotland’s Gender Recognition Bill, and all through the UK’s deeply hateful treatment of immigrants, LGBTQ+ or otherwise.
It has always needed to be a protest because the fight to end discrimination in the UK never stopped. Discrimination doesn’t start and end at homophobia or transphobia, which hadn’t even been stomped out in the first place; none of us are equal until we are all equal.
To those reading this who are running major Pride events this year, I know you work tirelessly to make Pride in the UK what it is. I can’t imagine the time it takes to secure the support of your sponsors or to ensure the safety of attendees to express themselves. I am almost certain you are all capable and passionate people. Now, more than ever, the community needs to know that all that dedication and expertise – and, vitally, money – is being used to fight, not to party.
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