Pride Parades and LGBT Movements

6 Friends of Pride Challenges, Conflicts and Dilemmas Dieter Rucht (2008, p. 198) reminds us that, “seeking allies can become critical for a movement’s survival, particularly when it is in an outsider position. Only by broadening their support can most movements hope to make an impact” (see also McFarland Bruce 2016, p. 115 on straight allies). However, as Adam, Duyvendak and Krouwel (1999, p. 349) explain: the gay and lesbian movement is not only dependent on the solidarity of other social movements and allies; it also has to “fit” into the emancipation model used by other groups in society and recognized by authorities as valid and justified. In this chapter we focus on how and why Pride organizers mobilize what we call “friends of Pride,” and the opportunities as well as challenges, conflicts and dilemmas associated with allies. For LGBT movements that seek allies – both individual and collective friends – there are two types of challenges. First, how are (potential) friends mobilized? Second, how do LGBT movements deal with the opportunities – and risks – that are associated with different friendships? Can friends be too friendly? Do the organizers perceive a risk that the participation of friends can potentially “de-gay” Pride events as many queer scholars warn? Friends of Pride In our analysis, we find two forms of friends of Pride. First, individuals who are not themselves LGBT, but who nevertheless appear to be a significant element in contemporary Pride parades (Wahlström, Peterson and Wennerhag 2018). In Chapter 4 we account for the varying proportions of non-LGBT individuals who participated in the demonstrations in Stock- holm, Haarlem, Warsaw and London. Suffice it here to remind the reader that individual friends of pride are a significant category of Pride participants. Second, we find groups/organizations that do not have LGBT issues as their main focus, but who nonetheless participate in Pride parades. We conceptualize organizational friends of Pride as organizations that act Friends of Pride 145 (or wish to act) as supporters or allies of the movement, but which do not have LGBT issues as their primary goal. These can be private businesses, public employers, sports groups not primarily organizing LGBT people, most political parties (the Swedish Feminist Initiative is a possible exception), labor unions, as well as political, ethnic and other organizations that do not have LGBT issues as their main goals or core identity. However, in our analysis, in order to recognize an organization as an ally of the LGBT/ Pride movement it has to be acknowledged as such by the LGBT movement, and most decisively by the Pride organizers. For example (which we will return to below), pedofile/pedosexual groups, which, after historically having had a (controversial) position within the broader sexual liberation movement, are today widely repudiated by LGBT movements. Using our extended secondary empirical sample,1 we found a wide range of organizational friends in the 11 surveyed parades. WorldPride in London, along with Zurich Pride and Stockholm Pride, appear to have been those most prominently featuring commercial sponsors, including prominent financial, insurance and media companies. Bologna, Geneva, Mexico City, Prague and Warsaw had few or no visible commercial sponsors. Various public employers were especially visible in London, Haarlem and Stockholm, including police and military sections in uniforms. Poli- tical parties (or at least LGBT organizations of political parties) were present in most parades, albeit with varying prominence. Their presence was probably most notable in the Stockholm Pride parade 2014, which was organized only a few weeks prior to a parliamentary election. While most Pride parades featured sports clubs specifically for LGBT people, only in the Swedish parades (Gothenburg and Stockholm) did we docu- ment the visible presence of “ordinary” sports clubs and supporter organizations. Trade unions were especially visible in Bologna, London, Gothenburg and Stockholm. Church groups also had a minor presence in most parades, as well as interest groups such as handicap associations. Most of the organizational friends of Pride were closely related to human rights issues, e.g. Amnesty International, however, we will also discuss other organizational friends that brought in issues that many would consider disconnected from core LGBT concerns. In order to understand both similarities and differences in these patterns, as well as challenges that the participation of various types of friends may give rise to, we will turn to the organizers’ framing of Pride events and their mobilizing context. Contextual factors and the participation of “friends of Pride” The main factor that is important for the participation of allies in Pride parades, we argue, is the character of the specific Pride parades, i.e. how organizers framed the event (see also Chapter 7 this volume). Overall, this regards whether the parades were staged as events primarily intended for 146 Abby Peterson and Mattias Wahlström the LGBT community, or if the organizers aimed at attracting broader groups to attend the parades. Whereas it is important to identify factors in the external context of Pride mobilizations that precondition their character, we argue that these mobilizations must also be understood as the outcome of fundamentally strategic choices by organizers. We agree with James Jasper (2004) insofar that such choices should not be reductionistically treated as an outcome of external structures. Instead one must acknowl- edge the agency involved in strategic decisions made by organizers to deal with genuine dilemmas. Some, if not most, of these dilemmas are common to many other mobilizations, but their specificity must be understood in order to make sense of the varying character of Pride parades. The diversity within LGBT movements enhances the abilities of the movements for coalition building with other social movements and political parties (Salokar 2001, pp. 261–262). Diversity within the movements is the political (and social) precondition for the bridges they forge with allies. During the early Pride years in the 1970s there arose conflicts within lesbian and gay liberation movements over the role of bisexuals and non- homosexuals. It was argued that individuals without experiences of homo- sexual oppression could never understand what it meant to be gay (McLean 2015, p. 151). First in 1993, in conjunction with the LGB march on Washington D.C., bisexuals joined in the “alphabet soup” to become recognized, albeit marginalized, members of the US movement (Ghaziani 2008). Trans persons, while not always welcomed with open arms, arrived later to the fray (van der Ros and Motmans 2015). The strategic mobilization of straight allies was even later to occur. We argue that the increasing mobilization of friends of Pride is a relatively recent phenomenon, which gained in strength first with the so-called normalization of homosexuality strategy, together with the shift from sexual liberation to an emphasis on the human rights discourse in LGBT politics more generally. In our empirical samples, all of the organizers, some more and some less, strategically sought to mobilize friends of Pride; decidedly less in Mexico City. Enrique explains that in Mexico City Pride is an “insider” event. Like everyone is invited to the party, but this is a gay party and this is undoubtedly a gay event. I have many straight friends who come to the march with my boyfriend and I, and they love it. We have a party afterwards and they join, but they know that this is an explicitly gay event and there’s no intention of erasing that or watering it down. The Pride parade organizers’ approach to individual friends In this section we will focus on the organizers’ framings of Pride parades in London, Haarlem, Stockholm and Warsaw, since these are the only parades for which we can relate an actual outcome in terms of the proportions of individual friends of Pride in the parades (see Chapter 4, this Friends of Pride 147 volume). The president of the Stockholm Pride Association stressed that the Pride parade in the country’s capital had deliberately chosen to be both “close to the establishment,” thereby encouraging elite allies, and “oriented towards the broader masses,” thereby encouraging mass allies. Victor explained the broad political platform of Stockholm Pride in the following words: “Regardlesss if you are a corporate director, a Con- servative Party leader or a Social Democratic Party leader, Pride week should be on your agenda.” According to Victor, the Stockholm Pride organization bears the responsibility that the events during the week and the parade itself are so politically relevant that political parties are eager to participate.2 Expressly deploying what Bernstein (1997) calls a “identity strategy for education,” Tasso clarified that for Stockholm Pride and West Pride in Gothenburg the goal was to change the attitudes of the general populace and therefore he explained that they have to mobilize a broad cross-section of Sweden’s organized civil society. “For my part I am not interested in a separatist movement.” When the Stockholm organizer compared their parade to other large Pride parades in other parts of Europe, she also underlined that what makes Stockholm different from, for example, London, Madrid and Barcelona, is the more prominent role gay clubs and other companies connected to the LGBT community play for organizing the Pride parades in those cities. When comparing the Stockholm event with these parades, the Stockholm organizer thus portrayed other parades as more oriented towards having parties in the streets and going to clubs, and emphasized that these clubs are “in general gay clubs.” This seems to suggest that Stockholm Pride has deliberately tried to be inclusive and also attract participants that do not necessarily want to participate in the (gay men–dominated) club scene of the LGBT community. The organizers of the Warsaw Equality Parade also stressed that they try to have a broader framing of their parade, but for other reasons, and in another situation, than the parade organizers in Stockholm.

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