The annual Pride parades celebrated across the globe are not the events they used to be. First held in New York City on 28 June 1970 and going by the name of the Christopher Street Day Marches, they were initially designed to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, when the gay community in that city rose up in protest against police brutality. Yet what began as a show of defiance and demand for equality by gays and lesbians has incrementally metamorphosed into an event which largely celebrates trans people. And many gays are not happy about this transformation. Not happy at all.
This superficiality is most evident by the straight trans allies in attendance, those incurious ideological groupies who have forever aligned themselves to the cause
As an observer at London’s Pride parade on Saturday, I could for sure discern many gays and lesbians who had made their way there to participate in the festivities: a pair of men holding hands on Lower Regent Street, with one supporting the other who had evidently indulged himself too much; a man at Charing Cross Station with a t-shirt bearing the legend ‘Bisexual’; and, later that evening, a couple of women at St Pancras Station, hand-in-hand, their faces painted in rainbow colours. There was even a smattering of the original Rainbow flags, that simple emblem designed to represent those of a non-straight sexual orientation, not those who identify as a different sex.
