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LAGNA - Robert at Pride London 2005

The LAGNA Outreach officer, Robert Thompson spoke from the platform in Trafalgar Square, after the Pride London march on 2 July 2005.

Here is the text of his speech:

The Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive is a collection of 200,000 cuttings, from the straight press, on anything LGBT since the 1940s.

Tomorrow some of the papers will have articles about today’s Pride events, accompanied, inevitably, by a photo of two drag queens. Nothing wrong with that, but it does seem to be the same photo they’re published for the last five years.

It wasn’t always the case. Straight press interest in the first Pride in 1972 was zilch. Not a sausage of a mention that several hundred homosexualists had been spotted marauding through central London.

Pride picked up more press interest in the 1980s. For example, the South London Press, in 1987 was very keen to report how a family was forced to flee Brockwell Park in terror when hordes of the pink menace descended.

But back to the present. As the cuttings in the collection demonstrate, things have changed for the better since the first Pride in 72. But it hasn’t been a pansy walk along the primrose path to progress. It’s been quite a bumpy ride. Yeah, things are better than 1972, but two drag queens in tomorrow’s papers, notwithstanding, we shouldn’t be too complacent.

Press coverage, the day after, was actually dominated by the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park, with just passing mention of London Pride.

Here how a few media sources reported it:

There was also an excellent piece written by Elton John in The Observer newspaper.

However, earlier in the week we still had a headline "Have a gay old time at Pride" in the Streatham Guardian.

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Webpage written by Oliver Merrington

Updated: July 2005
Minor edits, December 2006