Mike Jackson of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and guests.

Community Journalist
Mike Jackson of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and guests.
In 1991 the first Gay Pride in Belfast took place. It was an event thought to be a non-starter, however the turnout of well over one hundred people for the ‘pride dander’ was simply fantastic. The support from the Belfast public was beyond belief, as was the support in terms of bodies from the QUB Students Union and the Socialist Workers Movement, as well as our guests from Dublin, ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) – and everyone thoroughly enjoyed the dander and the crack afterwards.
How upstart, our own gay publication, remembered our dander:
But a new tradition was also set for that march (dander) – that of the Pride T-shirt. P A Maglochlainn, who was President of NIGRA (Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association) for a substantial number of years, recognised the importance of this inauguration and managed to collect a number of these during his lifetime and even was able to arrange for them to be on show a number of years later in the Central Library.
Since PA’s death, Barry his partner has been working to have his life’s work archived properly, and part of this is to have the T-Shirts placed somewhere so that people can access them and see the wealth of talent that has spread out from the initial showing.
Barry has kindly given me the task of gathering an example of each T-Shirt (or at the very least, a photo) which means that we have a pictorial record of part of our history.
So far, I have managed to collect the following, as you can see there are come gaps, are you able to help with an example of the missing T-Shirts, or at the very least a photograph or jpeg image for the record? If so then please contact me as follows:
Email: dtw.mcfarlane@hotmail.co.uk
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I have two T-Shirts so far which I cannot tie to any year, would anyone have any idea:
Other articles on Pride:
Just short of two years I attended a number of events in Belfast Pride, the 2017 edition. There had been a raft of things to do, and that was by the end of the fourth day since its launch. Like I think most people in the community, I had picked and chosen what I wanted to see; I went along to The ‘Law’ event not realising I needed a ticket (my fault), then I took myself to watch Marquee which was on at the Queen’s Film Theatre (even though I knew it was also being shown on BBC4 on Monday night), and the day before I went along to see the ‘Visage’ exhibition of photographs of six of Belfast’s most formidable ‘Drag’ Queens (Visions of Loveliness), which was being held at the
Artcetera Studio in Rosemary Street, Belfast. This comprised of a series of portrait photographs with each of studies being depicted in both their male and drag identities, which resulted in 6 A1 sized hung photographs and then each photograph has been broken down into stip fitted onto a
Within the Visions of Loveliness exhibition, each photograph was coloured in the 6 primary colours of the ‘rainbow flag’:-
I really enjoyed this exhibition, but what would have possibly made it more interesting is possibly some audio interviews with each of the 6, or even if possible some video interview tapes – possibly generated pre-Pride from questions gathered within the community.
To this also a calendar maybe showing their forthcoming shows for the next 3-6 months would also have been a welcome addition.
This is an area which needs to be documented and explored more, to enable more understanding and acceptance and to move away from the judgemental.
What is it like being gay in Spain? Well like any question of this ilk, it depends on what you are looking for; but for any Spaniard it means one thing – BEING PROUD TO BE A SPANIARD. They have pride in their country and their culture. Some of the major cities have a thriving LGBT culture, with clubs and bars, and other venues, but most often you will find that in Spain being gay means you have to travel if you want to socialise. That is not to say you won’t find gay friends in the small towns and villages, but it is difficult unless you are using the internet and apps on your phone – and remember internet access can be expensive in Spain, but a lot of bars/restaurants/cafes offer free internet so the possibility is there.
The following cities run Pride events during the season:
Indeed this year the Benidorm Tourist Foundation, travelled to Stockholm, along with Turespana and the Valencian Tourism Agency for the Stockholm Pride 2016 LGBT Festival. The objectives of Visit Benidorm where two fold, firstly to promote Benidorm Pride, one of the resort’s most important LGBT assets; and secondly to demonstrate to Sweden’s gay community that Benidorm can offer year-round advantages including LGBT accommodation, beaches, food, sports and leisure opportunities.
By Felicia Blow
My first trip with the Campaign for Southern Equality and my first trip to the Deep South were one and the same. Although I’ve lived in the South all my life, I’ve never ventured farther than North Georgia (well, Florida, technically, but I wouldn’t consider Disney World the Deep South), and making the drive to Hattiesburg, Mississippi earlier this month was daunting for a couple reasons: I get carsick and restless on long drives, and I was a newcomer to CSE where the staff has built strong connections and relationships with Hattiesburg locals. I wasn’t really sure what to expect.
My awesome coworkers Chloe and Ivy, right before we hit the road!
As we packed up the car, I volunteered to take the first shift driving to keep occupied. I marked each border we crossed – city limits, county, state – as the highway wound us back and forth out of the mountains. We had a short, but sweet stopover in Birmingham for the night, where we ate at a delicious Asian food truck with extremely generous portions. It was an unexpected find and reminded me of something I’d see back in Asheville, with its love of fusion food and novelty eats. I dove into the heaping plate of pork eggrolls, grateful for good food and a break from the car ride, and by then I’d started to feel settled into the trip. There are few better ways to get comfortable with a group of people than by traveling together. We jammed to Top 40 in the car and crammed into a hotel room on the outskirts of downtown, Ivy taking one for the team, sleeping on a stiff, squeaky sofa bed.
I would have regretted the short amount of time we spent there if I hadn’t known we’d be returning in a month for Birmingham’s own convening. So the next morning, we arrived in Hattiesburg and immediately got to work, shopping for snacks and setting up the space for the next day’s convening at the Spectrum Center, a fairly recently opened LGBT community center – and the only one in Hattiesburg – run by Sara and LB Bell, longtime leaders in CSE.
We had a late night and an early start the next morning to get the food set up and tie up loose ends before people started arriving, so I downed some coffee and we were off and running. I had to do some public speaking at the start of the convening, which is never my first choice, and I characteristically rushed through it, but since I started in August, the whole staff has been great at getting me to do things I’d usually shy away from. I got through it and spent the rest of the day in a picture-taking frenzy, uploading things to Facebook and Twitter, inviting people to come out.
As it was, we had an amazing turnout; there was barely enough room for everyone to sit in the small house-turned-center. It always energizes me to be in a space full of folks who are engaged – with the work and with each other – and who are committed to learning, working, and making change. There’s something undeniable about it, and dropping in on sessions throughout the day showed me how much people were taking away from this event that I’d had an, admittedly small, hand in helping to create in the last month and a half.
Awesome attendees after a great day of learning and connecting.
There’s something exciting and warming about bearing witness to a sense of community among others; I’m always glad to be invited into those spaces, and in this one I felt immediately welcome. It’s something I love about the South, and it’s more than just run-of-the-mill Southern hospitality. For some, the notion of Southern Pride might seem like a paradox in and of itself, but those of us from these states know there is reason to be proud, both of where we come from and of who we are. The next day at Southern Fried Pride, Hattiesburg’s first ever Pride celebration, it was evident how many people had banded together to make this possible. How much love, and, as it soon became clear, how much courage and conviction it took.
Nationwide, tensions are high around rights and safety for LGBT folks and people of color, and day after day there is news of another mass shooting. Two had taken place just the day before. So when protesters arrived, their intentions unclear and their affiliations muddled – Christian, Confederate, Klan – I was terrified for a moment. Even with the local police presence and relatively small number of protesters, the fact remained that we were a group of people of all kinds of racial, sexual, and gender identities, and the cause for concern was not unwarranted. A few weeks later one of the protesters was arrested for bombing a Wal-Mart in Tupelo, Mississippi after the store’s decision to discontinue selling confederate flags. Sometimes that gut feeling just can’t be ignored.
But as the day wore on, it seemed their only goals were intimidation and attention. Some of them set up in camper chairs and took selfies with their flags (I can only imagine how one would caption that), and ultimately, after entering the parade through downtown – some trailing behind, some directly inserting themselves, rubbing shoulders with us – they packed up early and headed home.
There were four hours left in the day for Pridegoers to celebrate unopposed, but the contrast between the great hospitality I experienced and the sharp hostility of their presence stuck with me. I knew I’d be back to this region again in a month’s time, in Birmingham, and wondered if we’d face similar resistance there. It’s a fearful and confusing time to be living in, but it’s important to hold that tension and uncertainty while we figure it out
Pride History
Gay Pride’s origins can be traced to riots at the Stonewall Inn, Greenwich Village, New York City on June 27th 1969. Homosexual clientele and people of colour who frequented the bar, resisted assaults and corruption of police, resulting in three nights of rioting which is regarded as the conception of the modern gay rights movement. The Gay Liberation Front commemorated the first anniversary of the riots with a march from Greenwich Village to Central Park, while gay activists held a march in Los Angeles. Other cities and towns followed suit and the trend spread worldwide, with marches being held annually as a means to inspire a growing gay activist movement. Various titles for the marches such as gay freedom day and gay liberation day were abandoned in the 1980’s, due to a shift by less radical members of the gay movement and the parades are now commonly known as Gay Pride.
P. A. Mag Lochlainn, the President of Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association, explained how dander, a Northern Ireland euphemism for walk was “deliberately chosen for the Belfast parade as a break from the monotonous marches hitherto seen in this city.” The dander marks the finale of Belfast Pride Festival which comprises a week of social events, exhibitions, talks and cinema. It would be a different experience for me this year by acting as a participant observer, filming the parade, taking photographs and conducting interviews for this website. It was my fourth attendance at Belfast Pride and I had already been present at Dublin and London Pride that summer. So what is it about Pride that has me and hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, parading through city and town centres, many in costume, waving rainbow flags to the sound of pop music? As I stood in Writers Square waiting to interview P.A I remembered what he had stated in a prior interview. “Visibility is life, invisibility is death.”
P. A. Mag Lochlainn has sat on the Belfast Pride committee since its formation in 1991 and explained how a delegation from the Belfast gay community had attended London Pride for several years before deciding to host the first Belfast Pride festival. He told me, “the motivation to stage Belfast Pride has always been to increase the visibility of our local LGBT community in order to claim our rightful place in the life of this city and community. Just as “Silence equals Death”, we felt that freedom requires Visibility. Our enemies used to be able to maximise homophobia, i.e. Baroness O Cathain alleging in the House of Lords that “every political party” in Northern Ireland was against LGBT rights, when in point of fact the DUP was the only political party doing so. Pride proved these bigots were lying, and encouraged our local LGBT groups to trust in the good sense of the wider community.”
He remembered the first event was hard to organise and had little if any funding, but with the help of the Socialist Workers Party at Queen’s, a week of community and educational events took place. The first parade saw just fifty or so marchers leaving from the University of Ulster in the Cathedral Quarter of Belfast city centre. They carried a low budget banner and wore t-shirts and lapel buttons saying Gay Pride Belfast 1991. The ‘A’ in gay was represented by a pink triangle, a symbol of homosexuality. Not many spectators watched the parade as people on the streets did not understand what it was, or what is was about. P.A. explains how he has always encouraged non-threatening or provocative engagement with onlookers in order to win hearts and minds. “If you get a smile back from the crowd,” he informs me “then you’ve won.”
They marched to Botanic Gardens amid opposition from churches and paramilitary threats of ambush at Sandy Row, due to a Junior Orange Order March scheduled at the same time. In an amusing twist to the tale P.A. recollects how the police had asked for the parade to be postponed but could not give the reason why. It turned out that the marchers would not be the only queens in town that day as HM Queen Elizabeth II would also be in Belfast, ”she was not specially invited,” jokes P.A. The heightened security helped alleviate fears of violence and held church demonstrators in check. On its completion “the marchers felt wonderful and there was a sense of disbelief we had done it,” says P.A. That first small march seemed a far cry from the 2008 parade which I now filmed making its noisy and colourful way towards me from Royal Avenue. A mass of spectators converged at city hall cheering and clapping while Christians demonstrated with banners calling for homosexuals to repent their sins. Then Tina Legs Tantrum, the local celebrity drag queen drew up, atop a float dressed in silver sequence frock and white wig, waving a rainbow flag to the jubilation of the crowd. For a moment my anthropological research ceased as I became swept away in the atmosphere. “At streets parades, those instances that result in feelings of belonging rely upon moments were actions, performances, emotions come together in a particular rhythm to create a sense of being special, or social camaraderie (Duffy Watt & Gibson, 2007: 7). Hence, I argue that this as a fundamental reason for the success and continuance of Pride.
Research from Thomas Fegan – BELFAST GAY PRIDE PARADE 2008
#ProudToLove homes in on the individual, zooming in and out of the legislature and always maintaining a human element. 9/10Marking LGBT Pride Month and the Supreme Court ruling to recognise same-sex marriage across the US, YouTube has released a heart-warming #ProudToLove campaign, showing their support.
In just under two and a half minutes, audiences are drawn in emotionally through scenes of overwhelming positivity and love as top vloggers from around the globe come out to their closest friends and family.
Honest and truly intimate, the campaign is shot in a documentary style and exudes authenticity.
The video includes the likes of Orange Is The New Black star and LGBT advocate, Laverne Cox, as well as Ellen DeGeneres and Ellen Page, alongside regular couples.
The responses from both the cast and the audience are genuine and heart-felt, channelling messages of love and positivity. As one mother points out, “My son is not an issue. He is a person.”
Indeed, #ProudToLove homes in on the individual, zooming in and out of the legislature and always maintaining a human element.
YouTube has utilised its platform to the max, combining meaningful storytelling with a strong social campaign, with online news sources including The Huffington Post, sharing the film with its global readers and amplifying the message.
The video also includes beauty blogger, Ingrid Nilsen, who recently made the headlines after clocking up 9m views for her coming out video.
Here is a campaign that reaches vast audiences, capitalises on talent and engages viewers in a meaningful way.
We’re making our message loud and clear: Target proudly stands with the LGBT community, both as a team member and team player through all that we do – from our volunteer efforts to our long-standing partnerships with groups likeFamily Equality Council and Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, to the very products we carry in our stores and online.
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