iansie.com: gay london (updated)

Gay Pride

2005
Update (21/8/04): The board of Pride London have announced that it will promote a Pride Festival Fortnight during the last two weeks in June 2005 culminating in Pride Day on Saturday July 2nd.

2004
Update (21/6/04): The 2004 Pride celebrations in London - "Big Gay Out" - consisted of the usual march and a rally, plus a party in Finsbury Park, on July 3rd. (See for a report.)
Brighton Pride is scheduled for August 7th (See for a report),
And there is a Soho Pride on August 1st. (See for a report.)

2003
See Blogadoon for a rant about 'Mardi Gras', which was held in Hyde Park (hurrah!) but got throughly rained on (boo!). Brighton Pride, by contrast, was held in the full sunshine of the hottest day of the year, and was great - but I didn't write about it.

2002
See Blogadoon for blow-by-blow accounts of the 2002 debacle at London's Hackney Marshes; Brighton Pride was fantastic.

2001
See Blogadoon for blow-by-blow accounts of the 2001 march and the Mardi Gras party in Finsbury Park; see Blogadoon for Brighton Pride.

Here's how I wrote about Pride and Summer Rites in 1999:

It's deepest dankest February [1999] as we go to press, so the festive delights of an English summer (fleeting at best) are little difficult to fathom right now.

But soon, come spring, the sap will stir and young person's fancies will begin to look forward to what are supposed to be the twin highlights of the London gay calendar: Gay Pride and Summer Rites.

Or maybe not.

London's Gay Pride has had mixed fortunes in recent years. Unlike cities with a strong carnival tradition, London has never quite resolved the contrast between the post-60s out'n'proud street-demo side of things on the one hand and the ever-so-80s party-in-the-park hedonism on the other.

Things climaxed in 1997 with a march followed by the largest party ever on Clapham Common, the numbers swelled by hordes of straight couples with their children. The children, at least, could be forgiven for failing to recognise that this was supposed to be a celebration of alternative sexualities rather than a come-one come-all free festival.

And after the party, the inevitable come-down. Despite attracting nigh on 300,000 people, commercial sponsorship so high-profile that many people felt demeaned by it, and beer prices that made the West End look cheap, it finally became clear that, yet again, Pride had made a substantial loss. Months of bickering and mutual recrimination followed.

1998 grasped the commercial dilemma by the horns and decided that the party in the park would, for the first time ever, be a ticket-only affair. Tickets went on sale in pubs and clubs all over the country; a relatively meagre 25,000 were sold. At the last minute the local council and the police decided they, too, wanted a share of the bonanza and delivered substantial bills: suddenly, the maths looked silly. Pride 98 was cancelled.

The march went ahead as planned, followed by a Reclaim-the-Streets style occupation of the roads around Soho Square; the radicals declared it the best Pride ever, the party crowd felt hard done by.

Parallel to these events, the smaller and more intimate London based Summer Rites festival was quietly thriving, seeming to many to offer everything that Pride had lost.

Unlike Pride, where you expected to see everyone you'd ever fancied but only ever saw that bore you bumped into in Brighton, Summer Rites had a genuine community feel to it. (It began just three years ago as South London Pride.) For a post-political crowd, inured to spending upwards of a tenner to get into Trade, the modest entrance fee seemed cheap at the price. By deliberately restricting the scope of their ambition, and never pretending to offer anything other than a sunlit club on a summer's afternoon, Kim Lucas and Wayne Shires had cannily built a loyal following that eagerly looked forward to last year's Summer Rites in Brockwell Park as the perfect antidote to the fiasco that was Pride 98.

Unfortunately, it rained. And rained and rained and rained: a wash-out.

Who can tell what will happen this year? As we go to press, a new-look Pride 99 is being planned for early July, with ambitious plans to close off large parts of Soho for a mammoth street party and a much smaller party-in-a-park. Summer Rites, we imagine, will book Brockwell Park in August once again and pray that it doesn't rain.

If you want to visit London for one or other of these events, call Gay Switchboard to keep up to date with the latest plans. If you're already in the country, keep an eye on the gay press for further details. And, as ever, hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

Re-reviewed 2/3/02:
This is one of the few original entries from 'Gay London' that is now thoroughly out-of-date.
Mardi Gras (as Pride is now known) has grown too big to be fun and Summer Rites ran into terminal money problems and is now defunct.
RIP.