Sheffield Radical Pride "The fight's not done yet": Taking the pinkwashing out of Pride

The first Pride was famously a riot. In New York, 1969, when trans women of colour Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera led a group that beat back police officers when they raided the Stonewall Inn, a local gay bar. It led to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front and sparked years of Pride marches across the world.

Today, however, Pride is far from its grassroots origins and its meaning has been stripped away by "pinkwashing" and corporations falling over themselves to be the best ally each June. Sheffield Radical Pride are a new group of activists who want to change that and say they will return Pride to its street movement roots.

“Pride events the UK has seen in the last few years have been increasingly commercialised and no longer about the community coming together, celebrating their shared identity and protesting against the conditions that oppressed them” says Matt*, a trans activist and one of the organisers. They stressed the organisers want to stay anonymous for safety reasons and to keep the focus on their activism and politics.

In Sheffield, recent parades have seen tension between a more corporate vision of Pride that celebrates queer liberation as if it has already been achieved, and its original intention as a protest that resists the ways LGBT+ people are still marginalised. In 2018 the organisers banned political groups and stated banners and placards must be inspected by the Parade Manager.

Since the pandemic, Sheffield has struggled to organise a Pride march and plans this year appear to have fallen through. Instead of reviving the existing plans, Matt says Sheffield Radical Pride want to organise their own event because “there's a lot of evidence that trying to work with corporate Prides have too many barriers.”

Matt gives the example of Toronto Pride in 2016 where Black Lives Matter protestors blocked Canada’s largest Pride parade after the organisers allowed the police to have a float. After thirty minutes the organisers relented, only to back out from their agreement days later. The following year, the Toronto Police Service’s float was noticeably absent but Matt says the reliance on sponsorship and corporate partnerships only leads to performative actions like this instead of addressing the roots of queer oppression.

Whilst their plans go against the grain of Pride parades that most people have become used to, Sheffield Radical Pride organisers see themselves following a proud tradition of Sheffield’s left-wing activism and queer history. In recent years Steel City Queer History have tried to trace this history and have a section in their zine dedicated to queer activism in Sheffield.

Most campaigns to reclaim Pride push for change within the existing events but Sheffield Radical Pride want to create something entirely new that they feel is owned by the community.

To kick off their launch, the group has called a trans rights march through the centre of Sheffield on 1 April, following Trans Day of Visibility today.

Matt says the way Prides have been corporatised to present an acceptable, often white, middle-class and cisgender image of queerness means they can often exclude big portions of the LGBT+ community.

Over the past year there have been a few pro-trans demonstrations in the city, most notably the vigil for Brianna Ghey and a protest demanding conversion therapy be banned for trans people but these have all been reactive.

Sheffield Radical Pride want to get on the front foot and start pushing for trans rights instead of rushing to organise counter protests.

The group expect their Pride will happen later this summer and expect to announce a date soon.

*Not their real name