The activist Jason Jones put it beautifully in the film: ‘When progress is made in the global north, homophobia hardens in the global south.’” “I also wonder what message our Pride is sending to LGBTQ+ communities across the world, in places where it’s illegal to be gay. “This year I’m going to Pride with my two-year-old niece, which has got me thinking about how there is still no formal LGBTQ+ education in UK schools,” says Ashley. One of the purposes of his film, which will be released later this year, is to remind us of the political origins of Pride, but also why Pride needs to remain as political as ever. “Many also expressed that they expected gays and lesbians to conform to mainstream, heteronormative values, including monogamy, marriage, and children,” he says, adding: “This is not acceptance it is aggressive, imposed assimilation.”Īshley Joiner is a London-based film director who has just completed his feature documentary Are You Proud?, which charts the trajectory of British Pride events from the first – 1972’s UK Gay Pride Rally – to today’s juggernaut of an affair. To say that you are ‘gay-blind’ is insidious because it enables you to turn a blind eye to the persistence of discrimination and it makes you feel exempt from political activism.”Īmin’s research also found that some people restricted their positive views about LGBTQ+ people only to those who were heteronormative, who behaved, appeared, or had values that were more like straight people. “This perspective ignored the real problems and sources of discrimination that queer people experience on a daily basis. Through dozens of interviews, Amin found that in defending their homophobic attitudes, many straight people made similar comments to those we hear elsewhere: “Some interviewees perceived themselves as being ‘gay-blind’ by not emphasising sexuality, much like some white people say that they are ‘colour-blind’ toward racial identities,” he explains. Much more subtle than out and out hate crime (although this is on the rise too), “performative progressiveness" is claiming to be on side with LGBTQ+ rights because a progressive society tells us that we should be, meanwhile enacting homophobic microaggressions, or displaying prejudice when it comes to what we will watch on television, for instance.
Ghaziani came up with the term "performative progressiveness" to describe a new brand of discrimination for a new era of equality in the West. “I wondered: did these people support gay rights in material terms,” he says now, “by donating money to an LGBTQ+ non-profit, for example, or marching in a gay rights protest?” He remembers seeing hen parties filling gay bars (extra annoying given that same-sex marriage wasn’t legalised at the time), as well as straight people bringing their kids to watch a day time drag show, only to be appalled at seeing two gay people being intimate. The queer academic and sociologist Amin Ghaziani has been researching it for years, first inspired by his experiences in Chicago’s gay Boystown neighbourhood in the 1990s.
Of course, none of this hypocrisy is a new thing. calling yourself a vegetarian and eating sausages every Wednesday.” Saying that you support LGBTQ+ rights and not supporting trans rights is like. They call out homophobia when they see it but not transphobia, while trans people face bullying in schools and workplaces, violence, and vitriol in public discourse. “Pride can be a bittersweet pill to swallow for me,” she says, “because seeing the rainbow flag everywhere can be a reminder that there are a lot of people who support the L, G and B but not yet the T. Paris Lees, Britain’s leading transgender rights campaigner explains that things look similarly – if not more – worrying for Britain’s transgender population.