It is unacceptable for British Airways to be a sponsor of Brighton and Hove Pride in light of its controversial record of accepting contracts from the Home Office to forcibly deport migrants – including LGBTQIA+ people seeking asylum.
split-at-the-seem: I feel like we need to start doing DIY prides tbf – there’s nothing redeemable about these over blown corporate events
Yeah, agreed. Pride events don’t feel like something that belong to the community anymore. They’re a spectacle. They are isolating and in many ways unsafe for marginalized LGBT people.
We can do interventions, as activist groups have done in several counties over the last years. But the nature of these interventions exposes activists to police brutality, attacks from pride security, organizers and even visitors, and more often than now, Pride organizers cooperate with the cops to enable violence and incarceration where possible.
Though they are intense and risky, I do feel like interventions are important. We can’t let the spectacle continue undistrubed, maintaining the illusion that nothing is wrong.
The other option (ad we can do both at the same time) is to build alternatives, radical DIY prides, but these alternatives must be very careful of being co-opted. There’s no shortage of left-wing moderates who see ‘queer’ as a cool label and are happy to help organize a ‘queer pride’ but have no real commitment to keeping that Pride from becoming another empty spectacle.
BA unfit to sponsor Pride while deporting gay asylum seekers | Letter | World news | The Guardian
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