A Pride of Perverts

The Holy Month of Pride has become a shrine to narcissistic kinksters with a woman problem. It's time to put an end to this shameful spectacle and rebuild what was once a great liberation movement

Brighton Pride (where else?)

The holy month of Pride is upon us once more. For the next few weeks, you won't be able to visit a supermarket, order a takeaway coffee or board a bus in many cities without being confronted by that lurid rainbow flag.

Every time throughout June when I see a rainbow zebra crossing, a rainbow train or a host of rainbow flags all the way down Regent Street, I shall feel it as an attack on lesbians (the old fashioned female sort).

Pride parades are no longer about equal rights for gay and lesbian people. They have been hijacked by sexual fetishists, many of them heterosexual men, and turned into outdoor porn extravaganzas.

Gay Pride has become Pervert Pride. I would earnestly advise anyone with children to steer well clear of these marches, because you are likely to encounter men in bondage gear with bare buttocks and even their genitals on display.

Display table at Pride

The slogans they shout have become truly obscene and aggressively intimidating. Everywhere you turn, you'll see sex toys being brandished, and misogynist placards threatening violence to women who dare voice an objection – such as a male boot stamping on a female head.

Drug pushers swell the crowds, plying crystal meth and the rape drug GHB, for use at orgies known as 'chemsex parties'.

I feel afraid for vulnerable teenagers who, questioning or exploring their sexuality for the first time, go along to a Pride march in the hope of meeting like-minded young people. The parades are now hunting grounds for predatory men, who can dismiss as 'homophobia' any attempt to rein in their behaviour.

If I could ban Pride, I would, to protect young people – especially women, but also teenage boys who are very much in danger of being sexually abused and exploited by much older men.

Women like me are sick of being lumped in with trans-identified people, with kinksters, with those that just call themselves 'asexual', 'non-binary', 'sapiosexual' or 'aromantic' – people who are never going to face oppression or discrimination for their sexuality. The Pride movement is redundant.

Thankfully, I'm not alone, and this year for the first time it feels as though the hoopla has become so distasteful that many former supporters, including sponsors, are distancing themselves from it.

In Plymouth, the Pride website announces their events have been cancelled: 'The lack of national and local funding, alongside a decline in volunteer support, has made it impossible to deliver.'

Lincoln, Southampton and Hereford are all facing similar problems. Businesses that were once eager to be associated with the parades are now just as keen to disassociate themselves.

Perhaps most significantly, in Whitehall civil servants have been instructed not to waste public money on rainbow lanyards.

In part, this reversal reflects the recent unanimous ruling by the UK Supreme Court that ‘trans women’ are not actual women. After years when anyone attempting to articulate the most basic common sense about sexual differences between men and women was subjected to endless threats, abuse and even violence, finally we had a clear statement of what everyone already knew: trans women are men.

British businesses and local authorities no longer have to pretend to believe the impossible, for fear of appearing bigoted. Instead of wasting large sums of money paying lip service to a creepy ideology, they are able to plead poverty and put their chequebooks away.

The Pride movement has also been hit by swingeing reductions in the U.S. budget for international aid, under cutbacks ordered by President Donald Trump. These have already cost Stonewall, the flag-bearer for Pride, around half a million pounds.

But some of the most significant damage has been caused by the steady encroachment of child abusers – or 'minor-attracted persons' [MAPs] as they are trying to rebrand themselves.

Men preying on children, under cover of the gay rights campaign, have been a problem since its inception. They have repeatedly been driven out, but they always come crawling back.

In March this year, the 41-year-old co-founder of Pride in Surrey, Stephen Ireland, was convicted of raping a 12-year-old boy. The assault took place in a flat Ireland shared with another man, 27-year-old David Sutton, who was a Pride volunteer worker. Sutton was found guilty of possessing an extreme pornographic image, and both men had indecent photographs of children. They will be sentenced later this month.

Predatory men like these treat Pride as an opportunity to flaunt target their next victims. Some of them lurk on the fringes. Others get a thrill from shocking decent people, both gay and straight: they've got away with so much in the past 20 years that they feel able to keep pushing, in the name of 'being outrageous'.

My first Pride march was in 1980, when I was 18. It felt then like a campaign desperately needed for women like me. I'd just been sacked from my job, in a fit of righteous intolerance by my employer after he learned I was a lesbian. I'd also been refused accommodation and was effectively homeless, living in a YWCA hostel.

My girlfriend at the time joined me on a march, and it was liberating. We didn't feel like 'lone weirdos' because there was a whole contingent of us. And though there was certainly a sense of frivolity, there was none of the seedy excess – no leather-clad rollerskating nuns, and certainly no public fornication.

Quite a few onlookers along the route clapped and shouted encouragement. I saw for the first time that this was a great way to change hearts and minds, to help people to see that gay and lesbian people were deserving of rights. We weren't a threat, and we were always willing to engage in debate... a far cry from the trans activists who shut down every attempt at dialogue with aggressive chanting.

But even then, I was aware of an element who were trying to twist the campaign. There were men, for example, who were delighted when the age of consent for gay men (previously 21) was changed, rightly so, to 16, to be the same as for heterosexuals, because they wanted to pay teenage 'rent boys' for prostitution services.

For a few years in the 1980s, I enthusiastically attended lesbian-only Pride marches. But the hostility we faced, combined with a realisation that there were much more effective ways to change society, meant these events fizzled out.

Lesbian Strength, 1988

Our campaigning did not fizzle. During my adult lifetime, Britain has seen many important advances for gay and lesbian rights, but there are still important battles to be fought. We need to tackle homophobic bullying, dispel harmful myths about homosexuality, and protect young people from predatory older men.

But those battles won't be won by men cavorting with whips and rainbow-coloured vibrators. That's what Pride Month has become. Its abolition can't come soon enough.