While imposed on the gay community under the rule of Hitlerism, it was reinvented as a symbol of defiance and liberation.On August 3, tens of thousands of people participated in the Belfast Pride Parade 2019 in Northern Ireland. It depicts the pink triangle, a symbol that also hung over the door of the Hirschfeld Centre in Dublin’s Temple Bar. The poster for the event has become a much sought after piece of ephemera, displayed at the Ulster Museum and widely reproduced. Rather than concentrating on establishing networks and relationships across the ethno-national cleavage, Pride was directed towards making LGBT visible in public space and for initiating claims for funding for statuary bodies. The focus of Pride during the early years was explicitly political. If Pride is primarily a party today, what was the focus of the day in 1991? As noted by Nagle and Clancy: Despite rumours of potential attack, there was nothing beyond the occasional jeer from the sidelines. It was a busy day in the city of Belfast, where Queen Elizabeth II was visiting, leading to greatly increased security on the ground. There was surprisingly very little reaction from the crowds of shoppers – most appeared too surprised to say anything. The open-top bus we had booked didn’t turn up in time, so we were forced to march through the city centre – no bad thing. I was expecting about twenty-five to fifty people on the march itself, but I’m glad to have been proven wrong, as there were around one hundred and twenty on it. To be honest, on the Saturday morning I was starting to worry that the march was going to be one of the biggest non-events in history. Gay Community News (Irish Queer Archive, NLI)Īndrew Wakefield’s account of the day in Gay Community News gave some insight into the worries of the organisers: ” Having traveled to Pride parades across the island, and on the neighbouring one, the confidence was there to launch Belfast Pride. Just as “silence equals death”, we felt that freedom requires visibility. Mag Lochlainn, an organiser of Belfast’s first Pride Parade, has noted that the influence of London and Dublin Pride was strong on the organisers, noting that “the motivation to stage Belfast Pride has always been to increase the visibility of our local LGBT community in order to claim our rightful place in the life of this city and community.
It was here that the Gay Liberation Society was founded in the 1970s, Ireland’s earliest gay civil rights grouping. While the conflict generally stood in the way of social political activism and organising, political awareness was higher here than in many parts of the island. The origins of the Belfast Pride parade are found in June 1991, when something in the region of 100 people made their way through the streets, marching from Ulster University to Botanic Gardens.īelfast has an important place in the history of modern LGBT activism in Ireland. Still, the ever-increasing crowds at Pride are a sign of changing attitudes. It’s difficult to believe, a decade on, that gay marriage remains a distant dream here. So said the Reverend Chris Hudson of the Unitarian Church, observing Belfast pride in 2008.
It’s a changing city, full of hope and full of joy. And you can see here the welcoming that people are getting, that the gay community are getting on the streets of Belfast. I think it’s the metamorphosis of Belfast, I think Belfast is a wonderful city, a great city with great people.