Visit our Live Blog all Pride weekend at: FactsMCR.com Facts About Manchester Pride and email us there. We have a Facebook group: “Facts About Manchester Pride 2021 - Pop-up Group.” Tell us FACTSHEET 2021 your experience — good or bad. © RGS August Bank Holiday Monday 1990 WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW You can walk into the Gay Village and get into the HIV/AIDS Vigil in Sackville around the public streets without buying Park on the Monday night. a wristband and without any sort of pass. On 22 April 2015, the Local Government It’s your legal right to do this so you can Ombudsman ruled that Manchester City visit premises (businesses and homes) Council had exceeded its powers and that that can’t be reached by any other route. the wording of its Traffic Regulation Order Some businesses, including bars and for Manchester Pride 2014 was “unlawful.” clubs, have allowed people in without a wristband every year since at least 2012. However you have a legal right to reach them whether they admit you or not No wristband has ever been required to The full ruling here: factsmcr.com/go/010 City Council contact The DFT says... Covid Just to liven up things this year the In a recent email to us, the Department You can only be asked for a COVID cer- Council has provided eight differ- For Transport writes that permission tificate when collecting tickets. ent phone numbers for support. The for the road traffic order for this year’s You don’t need one to enjoy your right number to call if you have an issue with event has been granted based on an as- of way into and around the streets of access to the pavements of the Village surance from Manchester City Council. the Gay Village. depends on the day and time. That “there should not be any issues this year with people being stopped from Website Sat 28 August 2021 walking through the streets.” Visit the website for 12pm-5pm 07507 565738 Are the City Council and Manchester videos, articles and 5pm-10pm 07943 190071 / 07940 750114 Pride drinking in the last chance saloon? a short history of the situation. Past an- Sun 29 August 2021 nual factsheets are still worth a look. 12pm-5pm 07507 565738 / 07983 430588 Particularly the one for 2019 which has a 5pm-10pm 07976 582391 / 07814 132590 feature about the police. Ten years of Facts Mon 30 August 2021 Facts About Manchester Pride was 12pm-4pm 07811 846271 founded in spring 2011 by Wynnie and 4pm-8pm 07976 582391 / 07766 777301 Use your camera Geoff. By then some of us had been These phone numbers should be used If you see someone being hassled at campaigning for seven years and had only for access issues. The staff have no the gates to the Gay Village, consider re- found that asking nicely didn’t work. involvement other than during the shift cording a video on your phone . Also you We’ve done our best to report the worked. could record as you walk in through the facts honestly and truthfully, including You could also speak to a police officer gates yourself. Video has played a major much that the mainstream and LGBT if you see one on the street. role in bringing change over the years. media prefer to censor. From gas holder to VIP wristband holder Pride continues its tour of Man- chester’s most derelict city centre spots. This year it’s the site of a dirty old gas works on Medlock Street, where giant “gasometers“ would store noxious town gas that was produced by burning coal. The City Council wanted the BBC to relocate there but the Loose-lipped Village Beeb chose Media City instead. site. Now the gentrified area is sources and others tell Gradually the land is being devel- known as Macintosh Village. Linda the latest... oped and the arts centre Home Residents have just launched a occupies a small corner. legal challenge over a 55-storey Even the greediest Victorian student skyscraper nearer Oxford capitalists didn’t hit on the idea of Road, that City Council planners charging people a small fortune have approved. 750 letters of to stand on a toxic wasteland in objection were received. the pretence of it being a “VIP“ It looks like thousands of apart- experience. ment windows will be in direct line Hello my lovelies. I’m back Councillor court case But it’ll feel familiar to any older of fire from the two-day Pride pop queens who attend. When it was concert. Some just yards from the Which Manchester councillor with a bumper crop of dirt derelict in the 90s the Dunlop rub- stage. Which can’t be a lot of fun? was taken to court for copyright for Manchester Pride 2021. ber works (insert your own joke I suspect this will be another infringement in 2015? I’m going to need some extra here) was a notorious cruising one-off location for Pride Live. Shake ‘n’ Vac after this... The case was heard in the High Court, Chancery Division, Intel- Unexpectedly groped in the lectual Property Enterprise Court. Pride parade puzzle Canal Street area Where he was found personally jointly and severally liable along- © RGS Some years ago one of the Facts side his fellow director and their campaigners who, frankly, was no dissolved limited company. spring chicken, arranged to meet Total damages of £2,716 were a man who had connections with awarded to the photographer who Manchester Pride. After an inter- had spent £1,800 chartering a hel- esting discussion they wandered icopter to shoot the aerial photos along to the Gay Village. that were stolen. As they turned onto Canal Street the campaigner was astonished And for bonus points why hasn’t to feel an unwelcome hand on his this been reported anywhere, bottom. What a charmer. despite this charity trustee never And they wonder why people being out of the news? don’t want to “engage“ with them. Criminal Manchester Manchester Mardi Gras parade 1998 If I had a photo... Back in the 1870s the Manches- ter Evening News wrote a ten part People can’t understand why the of thousands of people together.” series on criminality. It saved the usual Saturday parade has been After the bankrupt Mardi Gras worst city centre area until last cancelled due to Covid “safety 1999 the organisers claimed and, you’ve guessed it, the final concerns.“ Could the answer be that a “staggering 600,000 plus” part features Canal Street. that Pride’s habit of grossly exag- people had been “on the city’s gerating attendance figures has streets” for the “biggest-ever“ finally bitten it in the bum? parade. Which would have been Any rational analysis of the more than one quarter of the parade route must conclude that population of Greater Manchester. 1999 — the year Mardi Gras was “Very few grades of life are the crowd on the pavements Never mind staggering, they run from the town hall, Councillor lower,“ the article tells the reader. is just a few tens of thousands would have been swaying like Karney was the chair and nothing As well as Ginger Liz and Cock- strong. But, even in response to acrobats — standing on shoulders was raised for good causes. ney Jim it mentions a man known the cancellation, Pride suggests three persons high across the Questions were asked about as Dirty Alf. that the parade brings “hundreds entire road and parade route. spending. The BBC focused on Despite his name, Alf has a the £21,000 cost of a big video “gorgeous“ front room filled with screen and £25,000 spent on mirrors, mahogany, a gilded Monitoring Julia Grant? performers. chandelier and “fanciful china In the box of Council documents The Council must have thought ornaments.” Rich curtains are the financial documents were that were found by Facts is a “festooned“ and there is a “ soft page torn from a magazine. It safely shredded. But one of the yielding carpet.“ Facts campaigners discovered dates from around 2000 — the “Vice reigns triumpant here,“ year when Julia Grant and her copies in a box in the library, 17 writes the journalist. “Criminal- years later. team organised GayFest, much to ity that can scarcely be touched the annoyance of the City Council. I couldn’t help but notice one upon.“ item in the accounts — an invoice In the article, a local gay journal- You know what that might ist who was also a BBC presenter from the Manchester Evening mean... News. Charging Mardi Gras £75 talks about which pubs he likes for a “photo Cllr P Karney.“ to go to. “Hollywood Showbar is a tives department. Visit our Live Blog all Pride week- place I regularly visit,“ he says. It suggests that people who end at: FactsMCR.com. And we That paragraph has been circled went to Julia’s premises were for the attention of two people being monitored at a high level have a Facebook group: “Facts Hard to believe the City Council within the Council who were within the Council. Something one couldn’t give Mardi Gras a free About Manchester Pride 2021 closely involved with Manchester might have expected in Com- picture of one of its own most- - Pop-up Group.” Tell us your Mardi Gras the previous year. munist East Germany rather than One of them in the Chief Execu- popular councillors? experience. Manchester. PAULA PICKS APART POSSIBLE PRIDE PROFLIGACY MANCHESTER PRIDE IN 1985? Charity money withheld for years More rewriting of LGBT history by the M.E.N.