Pride Parades and LGBT Movements

9 Between Politics and Party Our events broadcast to the world that: We are here, we are Queer, and we will no longer continue to be invisible and accept second-class citizenship. The determination of the global LGBTI population to not simply go away or be legislated out of existence is growing. (InterPride 2017, p. 10) These are bold words from Frank van Delen, Vice-President of InterPride. Pride parades are indeed broadcasting to the world, but from the vantage point of different worlds. In the chapters of this volume, we have argued that the national contexts of Pride parades impact upon who partici- pates, why they participate, and how they participate. Our analyses indicate that differences between parades are linked to the broad dimension of more or less friendly/unfriendly cultural and political contexts, outlined in Chapter 3. However our strategic selection of cases also displayed variation within comparable contexts that highlighted the importance of different strategic trajectories among domestic LGBT movements. The origins of these trajectories were traced in Chapter 2. The cases included in our unique comparative analysis were drawn from Europe and Mexico, but we expect that similar broad mechanisms behind variation can also be found in other countries and in other parts of the world. To be sure, even more extreme cases of, for example, unfriendly contexts – highly repressive and even violently hostile – are likely to produce dynamics that were not present in our study. In the countries included in our sample, also in the most LGBT friendly contexts, Pride participants stood out as predominantly young, well-educated and middle-class. We had hypothesized that in the most LGBT friendly contexts the barrier of stigmatization would be easier to surmount and could attract a wider cross-section of the potential LGBT community, more representative of the general population. However, in the words of Walgrave and Verhulst (2009), the “usual suspects” one finds in demon- strations staged by so-called new social movements also dominated in these contexts (Peterson, Wahlström and Wennerhag 2017; Chapter 4, this volume). We found a varied level of participation among sexual 212 Abby Peterson and Mattias Wahlström orientations, with gay men the single largest category, followed by hetero- sexuals, bisexuals, lesbians and various other sexual orientations. Further- more, a majority of the Pride participants, with the exception of the Czech participants, positioned themselves on the left of the political spectrum and supported left-libertarian and Social Democratic political parties. In the two LGBT unfriendly countries of our sample, Poland and Italy, we found the youngest and most left wing participants. Contemporary Pride parades in major cities, in Europe as in Latin America, are typically much larger than those originally organized by the pioneers in the 1970s, and the growth has gone hand in hand with increased rights and acceptance for LGBT lifestyles. Pride parades are both the vehicle for political and cultural change and are also products of these changes. However, as discussed in Chapter 5, behind these numbers are mobilizing processes that vary depending on the cultural context as well as the resources and strategies of the organizers. In the absence of mass-based LGBT organizations or friendly mass media, organizers in some of the less friendly and unfriendly contexts have turned to online social networks as the main source of spreading information about Pride. Still, being informed about a parade is not enough. Even today, many prospective participants in Pride face the barrier of stigma before coming out as LGBT in public. For them, the support from interpersonal networks is particularly important for deciding to participate. In the creation of broad and inclusive Pride parades, Pride organizers not only seek to mobilize people and organizations from within the LGBT community. In Chapter 6 we discuss organizers’ views on the mobilization of friends, both individual friends in the form of non-LGBT persons, and organizational friends in the form of NGOs, private businesses and even public authorities. These different types of allies have raised concerns among some commentators about commercialization, mainstreaming and “de-gaying.” However, even though the organizers and key activists inter- viewed for this research saw challenges in balancing different interests, the spatially dispersed heterogeneity, so characteristic of Pride parades, appears to facilitate the accommodation of disparate categories of friends under the same rainbow-colored umbrella. The national differences were particularly striking in relation to commercial allies, on whom organizers in friendly contexts were more often dependent for staging their large-scale events, giving rise to ongoing critical debates about companies buying goodwill through Pride. In unfriendly contexts such as Poland and where Pride is a newly established tradition such as the Czech Republic, organizers are more wholeheartedly positive to commercial sponsors. However, there few businesses are prepared to take the concomitant risks of stigmatization. We have emphasized that Pride parades are political events. Contrary to many scholars’ interpretations of contemporary Pride parades, Pride parades are highly political, both as challenges to cultural norms and political Between politics and party 213 conditions. As shown in Chapter 7, Pride performances continue to pose cultural challenges to dominant gender, sexual and relationship norms, although differently depending on the degree of friendliness of the context. Under more unfriendly national conditions, Pride parades become con- troversial by their mere existence, and performances are often strategically made somewhat less contentious by stressing similarities with heterosexual majorities rather than differences. In more friendly contexts Pride parades are either relatively non-political celebratory performances, e.g. UK and the Netherlands, and/or contain performances that further challenge dominant norms, beyond prior victories, e.g. Sweden. In Chapter 8, we further demonstrated that – aside from the parades in Haarlem, Nether- lands and in London, both LGBT friendly contexts – the participants often expressed explicitly political or protest-orientated motives for their participation. The high degree of “out-group” motives reported by respon- dents in our study, that is, motives for participation that are directed toward challenging or educating the general public, also witness the essen- tially political content of contemporary Pride parades. Pride parades today are not only fun and a source of entertainment, even though this may be the impression some of the major events superficially convey. However, at least for their participants – LGBT or not – the meaning of Pride cannot be reduced to mere entertainment as implied by, for example, Mason and Lo (2009) in their study of the Sydney “Mardi Gras” parade. For most participants in our study Pride is, in one sense or another, political. On the whole, we contribute to the study of Pride events a mixed- methods comparative approach for taking both holistic and individual features into account when exploring the impact of contextual differences. Since qualitative methods have previously dominated the field, it is worth emphasizing the merits of the protest survey method, which takes the often neglected ordinary individual participants into account in the study of this type of event. We have shown how listening to the aggregate of a large number of individuals taking part in Pride parades nuances and problematizes the pictures painted in analyses purely based on observations and/or accounts of a smaller number of vocal spokespersons. Of course, whereas the protest survey method enables systematic contextual comparison it is also costly and challenging to organize. Similar to other ambitious systematic comparisons of a single type of political event across contexts – including anti-war protests (Walgrave and Rucht 2010), May Day parades (Peterson and Reiter 2016), and anti-austerity protests (Giugni and Grasso 2016) – the number of country cases represented in this study has been too small for successful statistical isolation of different contextual factors on various levels. Doing more surveys in the studied countries as well as in other parts of the world, complemented with in- depth qualitative analyses, would further improve possibilities to more accurately trace the effect of contextual differences across locations and over time. 214 Abby Peterson and Mattias Wahlström We will close this book by outlining a few broader themes that position our study in relation to contemporary challenges for Pride and LGBT movements. With this we would also like to indicate potential areas for future research. Internal tensions As shown in this book, the tensions between politics and party, commercialization and politicization, normalization and transgression, appeared to be at least temporarily defused and smoothed over in the Pride parades. Differences in messages and performances could often be solved by locat- ing divergent groups and categories of participants in different sections of the parade, while the parades as a whole performed an image of unity in their diversity. Is the fit “perfect” between the format of the parade and the message of a unity in diversity as Armstrong (2002) suggests? Enrique claimed that in Mexico City the Pride parade is: one of the moments or one of

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