The only gays in the Village
It has been a busy week, concentrated on, in and around Manchester Gay Pride, the annual ‘outing’ of all things camp and tacky for which such events have become infamous. ‘Gay’ apparently now means “pink, sequinned and with more feathers than granny’s eiderdown”. If I wanted to look like a flamingo I’d eat more shrimp.
Pride 2004
The Pride ‘celebrations’ take over Manchester’s Gay Village for the Summer Bank Holiday weekend, with a parade, through the city, of floats (or more accurately a traffic jam of cannibalised lorries with balloons, streamers and banners), whistles and much waving of disposable gay pride flags. The Village becomes impenetrable and the whole city turns into a trembling mass of ‘pseudo-support’ for the gay community.
It is sad that for many of the gay men of Manchester though, the so-called ‘Gay Village’ has become an inhospitable place these days, invaded with clucking, squawking hen parties and swathes of Neanderthal straight men, grunting and dragging their bleached blonde conquests by the hair – obviously going ‘clubbing’ (with the original definition of the word). We’ve been forced out, banished, exiled from Oz wondering where Dorothy took a wrong turn off the Yellow Brick Road. Some Saturday nights you can walk past the bars and wonder if you really are the only gay in the Village.
For those who don’t know, Manchester’s Gay Village is centred around Canal Street (apparently the ‘C’ is silent, as is the ‘S’ in Street) and spreads to include venues in the surrounding vicinity. The history of the Village is a study in changing attitudes to gay culture, at one time being the clandestine and ‘underground’ meeting place for gay people through to its height at the turn of the century and the unfurling of the rainbow flag along its cobbled streets where the balconies and pavement tables, echoing the café culture of Central Europe, were seen as progressive, and touching on ‘trendy’. We were Queer as Folk and the height of fashion.
Canal Street
But later years have seen a change to the whole dynamic of the area and not, in my view, always for the better. In simple terms, what happened was this: single straight females found that Canal Street offered them a safe environment for a night out, without the risk of any unwanted male attention. I guess there is an irony in that on Canal Street we wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole. Of course, once the ‘blokes’ found out about this they too made the area the focus for their libidos and swarmed in for the easy kill. The pressures of commercialism and our new-found equality left us powerless to prevent it.
We got it wrong. We said we wanted ‘equality’ but that is a knife that cuts both ways. What we really wanted was ‘rights’; the right to express our feelings openly, the right to have our relationships recognised in law, the right to ensure that our partners benefit from our pensions and wills, but absolutely NOT equality. Heavens above! What idiot ever thought we did? Equality takes away the things that make us different. Equality does not allow us to have gay bars, men-only venues and exclusivity. It stops the sparkle and homogenises the homos. On paper at least it means that we should be able to walk into any pub, cinema or restaurant and hold hands or kiss just as straight couples do, but it also means we have to allow them to do that in our places as well. And that is what is slowly and surely strangling the Village.
EuroPride 2007
As I said, it was Manchester’s Gay Pride this weekend and the Village was cordoned off for the event. I have very mixed feelings about Pride. It is a huge party, lots of fun for thousands of people; it brings business to the city and a much-needed injection of cash. The pretext is to raise money for local gay charities and that is a laudable cause, however I question the validity of fencing off ‘our’ part of the city and charging us entry to the street where we can walk for free 51 weekends of the year. I wonder how much of the entry price goes towards security, providing the cordon, staffing the ticket offices and access points, paying Police costs for closing the roads, making up for lost revenue in parking-spaces, clean-up bills, promotion, administration…? Could the money not be raised in other ways for a fraction of the cost?
I suppose my core issue though is with the parade and the message it now sends to the world. I have marched in Gay Pride parades in the past, years ago, when their purpose was to affect change, to turn our alleged ‘wrongs’ to rights and change attitudes. These were protest marches, with a clear message. But surely that isn’t needed anymore? Methinks we doth protest too much. Part of my problem is the way the media portrays such events. I bet that if you saw any press coverage of Pride then the foremost image will have been of a drag queen with a huge feathered headdress: it always is.
Pride 2004
But that is not what being gay means to me, not at all. I don’t relate to glitter and glamour, high heels and headdresses, feathers and fringes, make-up and mincing, fag hags and hag fags. And I don’t want the Pride march to reinforce those stereotypes. Of course other types of gay men marched in the parade but it isn’t shocking, illegal, deviant or sickening to be ‘normal’ gay these days, which is why the media have to pick on the most outrageous fringes to concoct a story because just the ‘gay’ element alone isn’t enough.
For example, see the image chosen by the Manchester Evening News to portray Pride : http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1134315_city_shows_its_pride_
Okay, so 22 Police forces were represented in the parade, but so what? That shouldn’t be newsworthy anymore and there is a danger that it is us who are perpetuating the stigma when the world has moved on.
Celebrating being gay is fine, but let’s try to make sure that we don’t lose sight of what we really want; our rights, our relationships, our bars, our clubs and our community. There is a huge difference between tolerance and acceptance, equality and rights. What about the guys who attended Pride? Where will they be next weekend – supporting their local gay bar by attending in the aftermath of Pride and then continuing to attend so that the bar CAN remain open and true to its meaning, or sitting at home watching “X Factor” and moaning that, “there’s no point in going out”? David and I do our bit with our monthly club night, trying to provide an excuse for people to come out, but there is a limit to what we can achieve and gay venues need support the whole year round, not just once a month and not just at Pride.
Pride brings a lot of business to the Village, but for weeks afterwards the city shudders like an addict in withdrawal, suddenly deprived of the huge fix that was just injected into its veins. Has Pride become that ever more ravenous animal that has grown so big and so hungry that it devours without discrimination?
Maybe if the cordon was there to keep straight people OUT for a weekend then Pride would take on a very different meaning and we might just remember what the Village and its surrounding venues are all about. But of course, that will never happen – that’s discriminating against straight people.
