Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck the state sticker

The first Pride was a riot. In New York, 1969, when trans women of colour Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera led a group that beat back police officers when they raided the Stonewall Inn, a local gay bar. It led to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front and sparked years of Pride marches across the world.

Today, however, Pride is far from its grassroots origins and its meaning has been stripped away by “pinkwashing” and corporations falling over themselves to be the best ally each June.

“Pride events the UK has seen in the last few years have been increasingly commercialised and no longer about the community coming together, celebrating their shared identity and protesting against the conditions that oppressed them” says a trans activist and one of the organisers of Sheffield Radical Pride. “Our vision is to remind people Queer liberation isn’t over and the fight is still ongoing, especially for trans people and gays who don’t fit the acceptable image of queerness […] We wanted to unite the queer community and draw visibility to our lived conditions.”

Text from/more at
https://nowthenmagazine.com/articles/sheffield-radical-pride-the-fights-not-done-yet-taking-the-pinkwashing-out-of-pride