It’s as regular as rain on a bank holiday - every June, cities around the world see storefronts, streets and citizens draped in rainbow flags, and cheaply produced t-shirts, badges and mugs remind us that “Love is Love”.
These days, or at least during non-plague ridden years, Edinburgh Pride typically starts off at the Scottish Parliament, winding its way through the old taking in Canongate, the Lawnmarket and George IV Bridge before ending up at the University of Edinburgh campus.
The last parade in 2019 - those blissful days where crowds were not only legally allowed, but encouraged - saw over 7,000 people marching to support LGBT rights.
Corporate sponsors, including banks and major businesses, as well as political parties themselves, had placards, t-shirts and more promotional merch than you could shake a glo-stick at.
It’s come a long way since the very first Pride Scotia march set off outside the Blue Moon Cafe in 1995 and was met with hecklers and homophobic abuse with nary a sponsor to be found. Damian Barr, whose memoir Maggie and Me is both a warm and heartbreaking account of growing up gay in 1980s and 90s Motherwell, was at the march that day.
“I remember a sense that this was about saving lives. It felt really urgent and it was really quite scary. I’d never been to Pride before, I’d seen it on television, I’d read about them before, but I’d never been to one.
"And I think it was only at that point that I had a sense of how much shame I was carrying around with me.” He was apprehensive about the public reaction. “Would people throw stuff at us? Would the police stop them if they did?”
In recent years, the function of Pride has become a hotly debated topic among the LGBT community, especially online, with Gen Z arguing that it should be exclusively family- and minor-friendly, with older generations not keen on turning their back on the myriad communities and subcultures who fought for our rights.
One attendee in 1995, who asked us not to use her name, remembers a sense of defiance from the leather community that was echoed across the whole march.
“They already thought we were perverts,” she says of Pride’s original critics. “This wasn’t about changing their minds, of showing the straights that we were ‘normal’. We just wanted to live our lives and be respected.”
Barr remembers “a lot of leather and denim”, both fabrics adopted enthusiastically by the gay kink community as well as topless women among the marches.
These were the people who were unafraid of linking their sexuality in all its forms and their activism. “It felt like a frontline.”
Even the name of the original marches - Gay Pride - is only a fraction of what is celebrated today. Although the 1990s were no picnic for gay and lesbian people, bisexuals faced dismissal and prejudice even from what should have been their own communities.
As late as the early 2000s DIVA, the UK magazine for queer women, saw reader letters condemning the inclusion of bi women who some lesbians saw as straight women trying to be fashionable or who would inevitably break your heart by going back to a man.
These days, although biphobia and bi-erasure are still problems, you’re as likely to see the purple, blue and pink bisexual pride flag being waved as the traditional rainbow flag, or the pale pink, blue and white trans flag.
The proliferation of differing Pride flags has come in for some criticism in recent years - do we really need individual flags if the original was intended to cover everyone? - but Barr says that in Edinburgh’s first march, even the rainbow flag was largely absent.
“The most important thing to me was that I had a red ribbon to wear,” Barr says of that first march. “There weren’t many rainbow flags that I can recall.
"There were lots of Saltires and Union Jacks, pink triangles and red ribbons, and I remember a labrys [the double-headed axe symbol adopted by lesbians in the 70s and 80s] and Celtic crosses. I remember tourists taking pictures of all these men in leather kilts - I think they thought it was a nationalist demonstration, that Pride Scotia was pride in Scotland.”
Before that first Pride, Barr had been on a gay men’s assertiveness training course “run by an amazing lesbian” that tought attendees how to articulate their needs and advocate for themselves and their communities, and it’s clear that this was a key function of the march.
“It was part of a political awakening for me that I felt I never had before. I’d grown up seeing apartheid on television...I remember the Poll Tax riots in Glasgow but then I felt that I had to stand up with these people and for these people.”
Pride may not be happening in its traditional form this year, but it’s vital that we not lose our sense of urgency. In the 90s, there was one clear issue at stake - HIV and AIDS, Barr says “was an existential threat” that made him wonder how much time he or his friends would have. “There was a very clear idea of what we were protesting for.
"We were fighting for this crazy idea of equal marriage and we wanted protection at work and all these freedoms that have since been won, both through activism and work with allies, which are now under threat again in the UK and throughout the world.
"We have a Government right now who is gaslighting LGBT+ community. ‘We’re going to let you donate blood, but make sure to look at the small print. We’re going to cut funding for mental health services, for gender clinics, that Stonewall programmes not be supported by the Government’.”
We may be fighting a war on multiple fronts now, and we may not be able to do it in the streets this month, but the memories of that first heady, terrifying Pride march up Broughton Street towards the Meadows, towards a future where we take some of those early dreams for granted can still fuel the LGBT community and our allies to keep moving forward.
The Edinburgh Pride parade is longer now, and it attracts many more people. But regardless of where the route itself stops, the march can't stop until the battles have been decisively won for the entire LGBT community.
