And welcome again to IoT's regular Saturday Session, in which we peel back the dignified facade of narrative and I talk directly at you about something rather than obliquely through the voices of our characters. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed we didn't have a Saturday Session last week - this is because last week was Newcastle Pride, and that's sort of what I want to talk about here.
Obviously enough, given the subtitle, the cast of IoT are, basically, a bunch of queers. Many of them are both queer and trans; the only cis character we've heard from so far is Kizz, a lesbian weed dealer (whose name is not meant to be a bad misreading of 'cis', which I've only just noticed). So it feels relevant to this blog to talk about the fact that I was both at and not at Pride this year.
I was at Pride because I took part in the parade, which is my favourite thing about Pride most years. Pride is a march, Stonewall was a riot, we don't win our rights by being nice and quiet. One thing I share with Ruby in IoT is a belief that taking to the streets is important, the physical space you can take up and hold is an expression of your commitment to queer liberation. So getting to do the Pride parade, getting to hold up traffic in town on a Saturday at the height of summer, that is an important expression of power and intent. This year, in the wake of Orlando and the Referendum, it seemed even more important. Racists have felt more free to utter their hateful bollocks since the Leave side's narrow victory, but I think I've noticed more homophobia and transphobia too. The kind of people who complain about 'political correctness' feel as if they've won (I think their victory will be rather Phyrric once they realise they've fucked the country into a shit-can, but for now they're riding high). I sensed a little hostility from some of the people we passed, and if you know anything about me, you know that only convinced me all the more of why we needed this parade.
But the parade is only part of Pride. The other half is the 'festival', and I use quotation marks because Newcastle Pride is one of the most tacky, rubbish, disappointing excuses for a festival I've ever been to. Full disclosure: I have performed at Pride in the past, once in the women's tent and twice in the trans tent, partly because I was asked to (I'm polite; if you ask me to do something, there's a good chance I will), and partly because the women's tent and the trans tent were the only places at Newcastle Pride where you wouldn't hear shit music. I mean you might still hear shit music from outside the tent, but inside it would be gravy. I don't know why getting a sufficiently high number of cisgender gay men together causes their aesthetic appreciation of music to drop to a level so low that the phrase 'Headliners - the VengaBoyz!' becomes a tenable proposition, all I know is that women and trans folks seem to be immune to it. Admittedly there was a little too much earnest acoustic guitar emoting in the women's tent at times, but at least it was fucking live.
You'll notice I'm using the past tense to describe both the women's and trans tents at Newcastle Pride, and the reason for that is that Northern Pride Events Limited, the private corporation which runs the event, decided they were going to have neither a trans nor a women's tent this year. Which meant that anyone going would only be able to experience the main festival.
Newcastle Pride likes to bill itself as the UK's largest free pride, and you get what you pay for. Which means indigestion-inducing food, overpriced drinks (I like fresh fruit as much as the next fat bitch, but if I'm paying five quid for a can of Pimm's decanted into a plastic glass the fruit should only be a fucking garnish, not half the receptacle), the kind of fairground rides you usually see set up on wasteground at the end of an industrial estate, corporate stalls selling all kinds of rainbow tat because smaller, more interesting and, let's be honest, queerer groups are priced out, and z-list pop stars interspersed with the cream - or, to put it more honestly, the putrefying, stale yoghurt - of Newcastle's unbelievably dull, conservative, lowest common denominator drag scene.
Yeah. I'm not a fan.
Tara Stone goes into a lot more detail about the problems with Newcastle Pride here. Perhaps the biggest issue is transphobia - 22 transphobic incidents were reported during the 2015 event, and I have no doubt the figure for this year will be higher. One friend of mine actually had to deal with transphobic harassment from one of the security guards at this year's shindig. So it's little wonder that this year's event saw the first Newcastle Alt-Pride, a volunteer-organised collective picnic outside the main site for anyone too trans, too bi, too female or just too queer to consider hanging around a shitshow like the main festival. That's where I hung out on the day, and its where my characters would hang out too.
There is a reason this blog is subtitled Living Queer in Times of Crisis. This blog isn't aimed at the kind of cisgender gay dudes and straight tourists who think the tepid, embarrassing corporate mess that is Newcastle Pride stands for anything other than ripping off enough dehydrated Geordies to make a dent in its debt-to-capital ratio. This is for the kids outside. It always will be. Because it was the outsiders who made Pride possible, and it's the outsiders who are truer to what Pride should be about than a private corporation running an employment scheme for bad comedians who went into drag because it was that or joining Ukip as far as last scoundrel refuges went.
And if you're from Northern Pride, and you're reading this, and you're thinking what a bitch - I thought you liked bitches, hun? Or is that only when the bitch in question is a cis man dressed as a misogynist caricature?
So yeah, that's what I think about Northern Pride. If you have an alternative opinion, or a tale of being excluded from Big Cisgay Party Time of your own, or you just want to know when Ruby and Valerie/Emma/Kizz/that crazy racist chick from the anti-EDL protest are going to make out, or whatever, either comment on the posts - if you must - or email me at TrespassSaturdays@gmx.co.uk so I have something to put in next week's Saturday Session instead of just having another big ol' rant.
Keep trespassing,
AJ
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