It's that time of year again. Gay Pride is almost upon us London folk, and I begrudgingly have to admit: I feel a little trepidation.
I can't speak for other Pride festivals and Mardi Gras celebrations around the country because I've never attended them, but I often wonder whether London Pride does more harm than good for the perception of LGBT people in the community.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm no homophobe. I'm a lesbian and proud myself. If anything, I'm heterophobe, often going out of my way to exclusively surround myself with 'the Gays': a beautiful, hilarious, effervescent, creative pool of friends that I love and adore as if they were born of my own flesh. And I most definitely want them to feel pride in themselves, and feel that they have a voice and a place within their community.
So to all intents and purposes, a day-long celebration in Soho, revelling with my queer, left-of-centre, siblings-in-arms, sounds like a dream come true. All joining hands and raising our voices to cry "We are here! We matter! We are just like you and we’ve earned our place!” – but unfortunately, I don’t feel like that is the message that is actually being put across.
At Pride two years ago, despite my vod-cran induced blurriness, I have a vivid memory of walking through the West End with my friends, having a (in every sense of the word) gay old time, when I first noticed the dichotomy of the crowd: those there to celebrate Pride, and then your usual Saturday afternoon fare in central London – tourists and families, sightseeing and attending theatre matinees.
On one side of me there was an elderly lady with her two young grandchildren, and on the other: a man wearing triple denim (how dare he?) who was walking another young gentleman as if he were a dog on a lead, adorned in full gimp mask and crotchless, leather chaps. And just to reiterate, this guy is bent over on his hands and knees. Crotchless. Splayed. Rear end… Just no.
This to me is not what Pride is about. Had those little kids been observing a loving gay couple, holding hands and proudly expressing the validity of their relationship, I'd have been like "yeah! This is amazing!" But they weren’t, and honestly, call me a prude, but I just don't think kids should be looking at scenes like that – whatever the sexual orientation of it. They may well grow up to like a bit of S&M, but that should be something they should be allowed to figure out for themselves in their own time.
And if it has that effect on me; a young creative, who lives and works in one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world, who on the whole feels pretty smug about how savvy and tolerant she is – what impression is it going to have on your average Joe Schmo, visiting London on a coach trip from Dewsbury?
Casting my well-rounded mind back to when I was growing up in Cardiff, I ask myself how I would have felt? At that time I knew exactly one black person, and zero gay people (excluding myself, but I hadn't seen Gina G perform "Ooh Aah … Just A Little Bit" at the 1996 Eurovision and figured that out yet). I wasn't hate-filled, or looking to enforce my own prejudices on any group of people, but I was sheltered. Had my first encounter with a large group of gay people been to see them all swinging their latex-clad sex bits haphazardly about the place, I'd have thought, "This is MUNTING!" (A word I used a lot in the early nineties to describe things that displeased me.) In fact, and this is purely hypothetical because who can say for sure, I genuinely think it may have caused me to take a lot longer to come to terms with my sexuality and feel pride in who I am.
Because as a young, confused and sheltered girl, how would I have linked my fantasies of wanting to hold hands with Tiffany off of Eastenders, (and maybe, MAYBE, clammy-palmed, and shallow-breathed, working up to one day discussing the possibility of cuddling each other with our tops off, but bras on,) with a throng of intoxicated, near-naked people, cavorting around in combinations of leather and rubber; and middle-aged men in micro denim hot pants? It would have scared me so far back in to the closet I'd have plopped out the other side in to Narnia.
The issue is that often times, people can equate being homosexual with being a pervert, or sometimes even (very ignorantly) a paedophile. Those people are complete eejits, of course they are, but still, I would like to think of Pride as a time to realign their misguided perceptions, instead of bombarding them with x-rated antics that just makes them think, "So I was right, they ARE all predators!"
And of course not everyone who attends Pride behaves in this way. But I suppose it's only natural that the image of a towering wall of leather with an exposed penis protruding from it is more likely to burn itself on to your retinas over, say, a couple of well-dressed guys drinking a martini and singing along to a Lady Gaga song.
It’s kind of like when you have a really old friend, who you love and can see for all of their incredible qualities, but you also know that to strangers they just come off as a complete twat. And you find yourself constantly saying "no, I swear, they're so lovely when you get to know them." That's what I think Pride is like. It makes me want to sit everybody down and say "I know you're brilliant, but you're acting a bit weird and scary and not everyone is as willing as me to look past it".
I guess I just believe that your sexuality, and your personal sexual desires and predelictions, is two very different things. One is something to be campaigned for in the community, and one is something to be enjoyed privately, with a willing partner(s), observed by people who are of age, and not just some unsuspecting kids on a day trip with their granny to watch The Lion King.
DISCLAIMER: Obviously I will still be attending the Pride celebrations, I’m not mental, I hate it when people have fun without me! But I will be making a very conscious effort to keep all of my clothes on and behave in a way that is appropriate for the PG audiences in the vicinity.
Kayleigh Llewellyn is a writer and winner of the 2012 BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing forum. You can follow Kayleigh on Twitter @KayDLlew
Pictured: Pride go-ers letting it all hang out, Kayleigh in a life jacket, stood inside a shower cubicle, on a cruise ship. As you do.
