Fifty Years of Pride

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Archive on 4: Fifty Years of Pride

BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4, Fifty Years of Pride

Damian Barr examines how Pride has helped bring about change for the LGBTQ+ community.

This year marks an important milestone for the UK’s LGBTQ+ community - 50 years of UK Pride. Damian Barr examines its impact on society and how it has helped bring about change.

It’s 50 years since first ever Gay Pride march in July 1972. The event in London went on to inspire marches not only across all four nations of the UK - albeit decades later - but around the world. Damian Barr examines the impact of Pride on society over the past half century. 

Gay rights were slow to be granted. From the 1954 Wolfenden Report through to the 1968 Stonewall Riots in the US and the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK in 1967, change has been incremental. In 1972, the Gay Liberation Front staged the world’s first ever Gay Pride march in London. 

Interviewees include people who took part in that first demonstration. We also hear from Stonewall, the Queer Museum, and those who helped create Black Pride, as well as Gay’s The Word bookshop, which was used as a meeting place by those who organised Pride in its early years.

The 1980s saw Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28 law and the AIDS crisis with Pride growing in size. 

In the 1990s, Pride came of age as LGBT equality groups began to mobilise against the injustices of the 1967 Act. Yet the event also entered a new commercial phase with the pink pound dominating. 

In the 2000, campaigners began to see restrictive laws repealed - equal age of consent and a lifting of the ban on gay people in the armed services, civil partnerships and ultimately marriage.

The programme ends by asking where we are now and what the future holds. 

Is there still a need for Pride? And, if so, what are the issues it should be pushing? Should it perhaps return to its original non-commercial protesting roots? And what does Pride mean to people today?

Presenter: Damian Barr
Producer: Howard Shannon
Series Producer: David Prest
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4

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