Should Manchester Pride be a party or a protest?

It’s that time of year again: rainbows festooning the streets, huge stickers in the windows of Starbucks and HSBC making clear that gay people’s money is welcome there. Manchester Pride is back in town. 

It’s been 39 years since Manchester City Council first funded a two-week party on Oxford Street for the queer community, planting the seeds for the Manchester Pride Festival as we know it today. And it’s been just three years since Manchester Pride Limited, the charity running the annual festivities, was mired in a mini-scandal over reports that its CEO had been awarded a £20,000 pay rise while cutting funds earmarked for local LGBTQ charities. The Guardian reported at the time that the organisation donated nearly £150,000 to charity in 2018 — about 6% of its revenue. Then, “despite bringing in a record-breaking £3.94m the following year, when Ariana Grande headlined, its charitable contribution was £121,135, 3% of its revenue.” 

Booking a global star like Ariana Grande seemed to be an inflection point for Manchester Pride, which has grown larger and flashier over the years. In 2019, according to the Guardian, “the charity spent almost £586,000 on artist fees and expenses – more than double the £232,000 spent in 2018.” (Ticket costs skyrocketed after Grande was announced as a headliner, leading to complaints; the pop singer responded to a disgruntled fan on Twitter, now X, saying ticket prices were “mostly out of my control”).

CEO Mark Fletcher and the board of trustees said they were listening and learning. “We engaged with over four-and-a-half thousand people about what they thought about the direction of Manchester Pride and their key priorities,” Fletcher told The Mill’s podcast in 2022. “We were massively overwhelmed by the level of input.” On the podcast, my colleague Joshi asked him about the decision to put hundreds of thousands of pounds into production for a large-scale music event rather than, perhaps, sticking closer to Pride’s humbler and more revolutionary roots. There was “no clear consensus,” Fletcher said. It was “almost 50/50 as to whether we deliver an event on that scale or we don’t.” (Manchester Pride wasn’t able to answer my questions about what priorities they’ve changed, if any, since 2021; a representative told me their team is too busy with the weekend’s preparations.) 

Gay Pride was born in New York City in 1969, when queer patrons of the Stonewall Inn, including the now legendary Stormé DeLarverie, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, fought back against a police raid in the early hours of the morning, preceding three nights of righteous unrest. It was radical grassroots activism and protest by some of society’s most marginalised who sparked the gay liberation movement in the US and, soon afterwards, in the UK, leading to the rights and protections enjoyed today. 

Now, Pride is many LGBTQ people’s favourite weekend of the year: a chance to connect with friends old and new, to feel welcomed and accepted, relax and unwind — and maybe have a cheeky hookup or two. If you were to scroll on Facebook, X or Instagram on the tag for “Manchester Pride,” you’ll see hundreds of people abuzz with excitement for this weekend, asking who’s going where and doing what. Some are seeking friendly strangers with whom to attend events so they won’t have to go alone. Not everyone lives in places that are as LGBTQ-friendly as Manchester; for many, travelling in from less accepting environs for a gigantic, joyful queer bloc party is the best chance they have all year of feeling fully at peace with themselves, and like they fundamentally belong.

Pride can also be an especially important place for “baby gays.” Being able to stroll up to a parade on a public street, where there’s loads and loads of people, straight and gay, cis and trans, can be a more comfortable way to dip one’s toes into queer community than braving a more intimate space, like a gay bar. I went to my own first Pride in its birthplace, New York City, over a decade ago while on summer break from university; I’d been staying with my grandpa in a posh bit of Manhattan, and I remember sneaking somewhat ashamedly past all the little old ladies on the sidewalk in my hot pants and leopard print bra. By the time I’d made it downtown to meet my first ever girlfriend, immersing myself in a sea of other inventively dressed people, I felt like I’d come home. When you’re not yet fully comfortable with or certain about who you are, Pride in all its big, messy, rainbow-overload glory can feel like salvation. 

Certainly, there’s a huge market for the elaborate festival that Manchester Pride has become; it attracts tens of thousands of people every year. But like virtually every Pride event in cities around the world, Manchester’s annual celebration of LGBTQ culture and community inspires spirited debate about what Pride is really for. Namely: should it be a party or a protest? 

Why, many people in the community wonder, have tributes to this radical uprising turned into a capitalist carnival? This year, as in the past, activist groups, charities and other community organisations will be marching in the Pride Parade alongside massive global corporations like Barclays and L'Oréal. While it’s nice to see employees feeling out and proud in their workplaces, who really wants to spend a Saturday being pelted with pandering appeals from big brands? We get that enough from our phones. 

Neen, a 20-year-old non-binary Prestonian who uses they/them pronouns, attended their first Manchester Pride last year. They loved the parade, and all the volunteers working at the festival were lovely. But at the Gay Village party, the heart of Manchester Pride, they found the pubs “massively crammed, like over capacity crammed,” and were scandalised to be charged £10 for a pint of Strongbow. 

“It’s just a bit sad, really,” Neen tells me. “I just think it’s a bit sad when it’s very obvious it’s a money grab and doesn’t feel like it’s what Pride is about. To me, Manchester Pride seems to be about straight girls going out on a sesh, getting drunk and coked up with their gay mates.” As someone who dresses alternatively, they also felt an uncomfortable amount of stares.

“It feels a bit like a zoo,” says Zander (not their real name), 28, who went to their first Manchester Pride last year having avoided it for years, certain it wouldn’t be their scene. “I want to be able to put my hair down, and the last thing I want is to feel like a spectacle. People looking in at my community like, yeah, oooh.” They remember trying to navigate Canal Street through the crushing crowds, blocked-off streets, skips everywhere. “I'm like, Am I in a video game? Just chaos. It was like 4am in the darkest corner of a festival mixed with like a zombie apocalypse film, like it was so loud. Everyone was, like, hammered; broken glass everywhere. People are being sick in the corner. Everything’s super expensive.” 

A few years earlier, Zander had started volunteering at Platt Fields Market Garden in Fallowfield, hoping to make friends, and they were pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of the other volunteers were queer. When Pride weekend that year rolled around, the group started chatting about their plans, and it turned out everyone was getting out of the city. Nobody wanted to be “anywhere near” what Zander calls Big Pride. “It felt like a really good excuse to go and do something nice somewhere else. But that led to a conversation about why we feel like that, and what we’d like to see instead from Pride. And it was one of those really rare opportunities and moments where you've got a group of people who've got the capacity and the want and the time and the drive to do something.” 

Since none of them felt truly represented by Manchester Pride, “why don’t we just try to do something here that serves our community?” So the friends established the Queer Roots Collective and threw their first weekend-long Alternative Pride festival (one of many smaller Pride-adjacent events cropping up around the city). It’s returning next weekend, on 7 and 8 September, at Platt Fields Market Garden, where activities include “butch craft visible mending”, a dance workshop, circus skills class, nature writing, life drawing, and performances from artists and musicians: two days filled with “queer joy, wisdom and activism”. 

One of the many lovely aspects of Alternative Pride, Zander says, is all the free activities on offer. That’s after the cost of a ticket, which are sold on a sliding scale of £10, £15 or £20 pounds.

Manchester Pride, meanwhile, is charging £52 for final-release tickets to its Gay Village party. Organisers seem hyper-aware of criticism from some would-be attendees who think the ticket prices are too high, so they’ve tried advertising their attempts to make the party as “cost-effective as possible.” In one cringily defensive marketing email from earlier this summer, when third-release tickets were £45, the festival encouraged some “Queer Maths!”: £ 45 / 3 days = £ 15 a day… £ 15 / 30 performers per day = 50p per performer… 50p / average 45 minutes per set = 1p a minute… (And that gets you the chance to see Sugababes, Rita Ora, Jessie J and Loreen - and even includes a £2.50 charity donation!) So it’s basically free.” 

I saw a few tweets from people who weren’t impressed with this tactic: “Looking down your nose in some ill-judged ‘jovial’ ad campaign to guilt people into buying your ever-increasingly expensive tickets. Read the room!” On their website, the organisation notes that they’re a charity, so ticket costs allow them “to deliver a safe, community party-as-protest celebration for the whole community to enjoy.”

Not everyone is down with the “party-as-protest” vibe that Manchester Pride is trying to foster. Every year, at every Big Pride, there are debates about capitalist pinkwashing, but this year Israel’s war on Gaza has further inflamed intra-community tensions. Many opponents of corporate involvement in Pride overlap with people who are unhappy about certain companies’ alleged complicity in genocide. A number of performers booked for Manchester Pride have dropped out this year, including drag queens Bimini and Ginger Johnson, citing their support for BDS — the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement, which calls for a boycott of Israeli and international companies that are accused of being complicit in the violations of Palestinian rights. On the official BDS list is Booking.com, the main sponsor for Manchester Pride this year, which advertises room listings in the occupied West Bank. (In 2022, in response to international pressure, Booking.com announced it would designate its Israeli listings in the West Bank as “occupied territory” and warn potential customers of “an increased risk to safety and human rights”, before backtracking a month later after pressure from the Israeli government. Earlier this year human rights groups in the Netherlands filed a criminal complaint against the website for profiting from war crimes; Booking.com has denied violating any international laws.)

“In this withdrawal, I stand with the No Pride in Genocide movement internationally and locally in Manchester,” Ginger Johnson wrote on Instagram about pulling out from her performance. It’s not just performers who don’t feel comfortable with the way Pride is being funded, either: Manchester’s branch of Amnesty International announced last week that they were withdrawing from the parade because of the event’s sponsorship by Booking.com. 

Immy Terial, a drag queen who performed at Pride last year for the queer Asian takeover (“Which was fab!”) was asked to perform again this year and was “very excited for this opportunity.” As a “baby queen in the scene,” she says, she found last year inspiring: “I got to represent a cause very close to my heart: trans rights and the importance of speaking up for our community. I was also lucky enough to share the stage with incredible POC [people of colour] talent like Lucky Roy Singh, Val, House of Spice and so many more. It was beautiful.”

This year, however, Immy has been donating, attending protests, and participating in BDS boycotts due to the devastation in Gaza: “Every day, we see new images of Palestinians, among them children, being murdered and treated in the most horrific and unimaginable ways. For the first time, a genocide has been live-streamed to us in real time.” So, in considering whether to return to the festival this year, “I sent a strongly worded email to the organisers of Manchester Pride addressing my concerns and asking them to drop [Booking.com] and anyone involved with aiding and abetting this genocide. This includes political parties like Labour and the Tories, whose rhetoric has enabled the colonial settler government.”

Manchester Pride organised a meeting for the multiple performers who’d expressed these same concerns — a meeting Immy found “very disappointing. Lots of corporate jargon which didn’t make much sense.” After going back and forth for about an hour, Immy asked directly if Booking.com would be dropped as a sponsor, and she was told that wouldn’t be happening. 

“As such I respectfully let them know I cannot accept such money raised from genocide and will not be performing,” Immy told me. “I also encouraged them to carefully consider the negative impact that political organisations are having on our community and to follow Bristol Pride’s lead by not allowing them to walk in our Pride parade.” (Other cities, like Norwich, have also banned Labour’s participation this year.)

Immy was excited by the possibility of getting involved in Alternative Pride protests and celebrations, but she was disappointed by some pro-Palestinian activists who have “gone out of their way to put POC performers on blast on social media, in a way I feel was not necessary.” She received hateful messages on social media even after she’d dropped out, since people were working with old information. “POC people in Manchester’s queer scene are still very marginalised. We are not made to feel safe attending predominantly white queer venues and events. In fact, I myself have received racist remarks from other queer people on several occasions at such events. As such and as performers, we have had to make our own spaces in order to perform.” 

Will Belshah, an artist and activist who’s organised this year’s Reclaim Pride protest march alongside other community partners, which sets out from Sackville Gardens at 1pm today, believes things like this can get complicated. “A lot of people have fought for those spaces,” he says. “So I don't think it's fair to necessarily put that on the artist. And actually, I think it's important to be present in those spaces.”

“We don’t want Pride to fail,” Will emphasises. “We want Pride to change.” He has hopes of collaborating with official Pride organisers in the future and building bridges. After 2021, he thinks Manchester Pride’s community engagement had some positive results, “but it started to slip last year. What I saw was it going back to being much more commercially focused, less inclusive, you know.” He was one of the many Pride sceptics I’ve spoken with who say Manchester Pride feels more like a gay music festival that perhaps shouldn’t pretend to be doing anything revolutionary or claiming to celebrate what Pride originally stood for. 

James, 31, felt too self-conscious to go to Manchester Pride when he first arrived in the city for university. After a stint back home with his parents, he moved back to Manchester and “I knew I had to go, even if it was just the parade. We stood just outside Albert’s Schloss on Peter Street and I think we went to the Northern Quarter afterwards.” For his first Big Pride experience, “I had a great time.” 

Of everyone Pride serves, it’s younger queer people who might benefit the most. But baby gays eventually grow up, and Pride in Manchester and around the world is growing too — if not necessarily for the better. “I'd say the experience has definitely changed over the years,” says James. “I think I've been to at least five of the parades over the past seven years, and it feels like the shine is coming off a bit. It definitely seems from social media that Manchester Pride is the one you have to be at, and I think at some point we have to make better provisions for having so many people packed into small places along streets and the village itself. I'm much more drawn to the more quiet events like the vigil, but I'm put off by the thought of being hemmed in by so many people. Maybe I'm just getting old.” 

Immy, like so many other queer people, will be spending Pride weekend with her chosen family. Hers is the Manchester ballroom community, and they “will be vogueing and celebrating in our own way.” If I were back home in New York this summer, I’d have skipped the Big Pride stuff myself, choosing instead to attend the Queer Liberation March (a protest, not a parade), or, more likely, absconding to the gay beach in Brooklyn with my friends. 

“I've come to realise that when people say 'the LGBTQ community', that doesn't really mean that every queer person should be your friend or that every queer person needs to be at Pride or queer events to be validly queer,” says James. “Community is something you have to build for yourself with your friend group and the people you choose to surround yourself with.”

“Some people love it,” says Zander, about Big Pride, and “that's okay. Who am I to judge?” But they’re grateful to have the Queer Roots Alt Pride festival next weekend to look forward to. “I'm doing what I love. I want nothing more than to be creating safe, authentic queer spaces that are called for by those underrepresented parts of the community. And I really believe that we all deserve a space where we can rest and we can play and we can learn together, and we can find the people that we need.”