Pride in the 90’s: “We Knew What It Meant to Draw the Wrong Kind of Attention”
By Phil Clements, Document Control & Archiving Manager, Co-Chair of OMG UK LGBTQ+ Advisory Committee at Omnicom Media Group
How very awkward. How terribly unnerving. Police on horseback towering over us, blocking our path.
Thousands of people were slowly shuffling away from Clapham Common on an immense high after a tremendous day of Pride celebrations. I’d watched the Kings Cross Steelers give a rugby demonstration in glorious sunshine. I’d danced along to EMF and sung along to Gene at the Popstarz tent. I’d been in my element at that most queerly curious of parties back in 1996. It felt like a real statement: so many different facets of the community reflected in one big festival. But now we were stuck here. Huddled together. Confused. Eager to leave, but unable to do so.
As even more people exited the Common, the throng grew denser. It started to feel suffocating. We looked up at the mounted officers, wondering why we’d been hemmed in. We looked at each other with growing anxiety - that creeping feeling of being trapped. Those high spirits had suddenly transformed into burning tensions. The tube station toward which we steadily swarmed was full. Or so we were being told.
But this was the 90s. Section 28 was still a vicious reality. The more tawdry tabloids regularly ran homophobic articles calling LGBTQ+ people degenerate, untrustworthy, predatory and insidious. They implied our freedoms would be the end of everything and that borderline criminality was the core of our natures. Columnists penned thinly-veiled hate pieces suggesting it would be better to have teenagers contract HIV than allow safe-sex education to cover same-sex activity. AIDS had been labelled a gay plague – the disease we deserved for being so sinful. We knew what it meant to draw the wrong kind of attention. And we knew why there was little point in reporting our experiences to the local constabulary. So, unsurprisingly, when we were being told our movements were being restricted for our own good, we were not entirely convinced.
We’d waited for what seemed like forever and a day. Patience was fraying at the edges. The clock was ticking and each passing minute felt a little longer. It occurred to me at that moment that had I been surrounded by an exodus of straight men, inebriated and frustrated, then this would almost certainly have devolved into ‘an incident’. Had I been standing among a crowd of drunken, heterosexual football fans of the day, then no doubt some of those people would have started hurling abuse, throwing cans, throwing punches. Violence would have erupted, as it inevitably did in my hometown if the England team lost. Or if the England Team won. It would be the kind of regrettable thing you’d catch at six o’clock, as a newsreader solemnly described ‘the disturbance’ in unimpassioned detail.
Was I on the verge of being arrested in a street brawl? I certainly hadn’t come dressed for that. We waited nervously. Ripples of uncomfortable laughter. Trust stretching to its limits. And then one bright spark of a policeman broke the silence in the most remarkable way.
From high up on his horse, he started singing:
“At first I was afraid, I was petrified…”
And the crowd continued:
“…Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side.”
And so began an enormous singalong. And the restlessness and fearfulness of the crowd ebbed away as they suddenly understood they could get through it if they just provided their own entertainment for a while longer.
It dawned on me how incredibly civilised these people were. Even after all they’d been through in life; the emotional batterings, the physical batterings, the cold-blooded coverage in mainstream media pushing paranoia as establishment figures abused their powers and conspired against them. And yet here they were, still managing to hold their nerve. Coming out and staying out, but not lashing out. And in that moment, I felt genuine pride.
