Pride Parades and LGBT Movements

Political Participation in an International Comparative Perspective

Abby Peterson, Mattias Wahlström, Magnus Wennerhag

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315474038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Proceso político

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315474052, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Today, Pride parades are staged in countries and localities across the globe, providing the most visible manifestations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex movements and politics.

Pride Parades and LGBT Movements contributes to a better understanding of LGBT protest dynamics through a comparative study of eleven Pride parades in seven European countries – Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK – and Mexico. Peterson, Wahlström and Wennerhag uncover the dynamics producing similarities and differences between Pride parades, using unique data from surveys of Pride participants and qualitative interviews with parade organizers and key LGBT activists. In addition to outlining the histories of Pride in the respective countries, the authors explore how the different political and cultural contexts influence: Who participates, in terms of socio-demographic characteristics and political orientations; what Pride parades mean for their participants; how participants were mobilized; how Pride organizers relate to allies and what strategies they employ for their performances of Pride.

This book will be of interest to political scientists and sociologists with an interest in LGBT studies, social movements, comparative politics and political behavior and participation.

1 Introduction

“Coming Out All Over”¹

Pride parades are today staged in countries and localities across the globe, providing the most visible manifestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBT)² movements and politics. While Pride parades are the most visible manifestations of LGBT movements, we want to make clear for the reader that our study is not a generalist account of LGBT movements in the countries included in our study. We analyze Pride events in a strategic selection of European countries and Mexico. Our analyses are confined to the parades, even if our analyses can provide (partial) snapshots of LGBT movements in these countries. The main aim of our book is to contribute to a better understanding of LGBT protest dynamics through a comparative study of Pride parades in seven European countries – Czech Republic (Prague), Italy (Bologna), Netherlands (Haarlem), Poland (Warsaw), Sweden (Stockholm and Gothenburg), Switzerland (Geneva and Zurich), the UK (London) – and Mexico (Mexico City), countries which display variation in national level context, while sharing some central characteristics.

As outlined in Chapter 3 our sample includes countries which can be placed into the categories of LGBT friendly, less friendly, and unfriendly political and cultural contexts. We have only included democratic countries and regions where Pride parades are generally permitted and are typically not violently repressed by counterdemonstrators. Hence, our study does not have a global reach, but is empirically confined to the countries included in our sample cases. Nonetheless, the range of political and cultural contexts covered in our study allows us to make generalizations that can extend to Pride events staged in similar contexts. Our central focus is on European countries, but Mexico is included as an outlier, largely to enable us to discuss the analytical generalizability of the European cases (Snow and Trom 2002; Flyvbjerg 2006).

During the post-war period until approximately 1970, homophile organizations in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, UK, Italy and Mexico worked largely behind the scenes lobbying for legislation to improve the situation for homosexuals and working toward providing the lesbian and gay community with social venues (in the former Eastern Bloc members Poland and Czechoslovakia organizations similar to Western homophile groups emerged alongside more radical gay and lesbian liberation organizations shortly before and after the events of 1989). The homophile movements were confronted with the vigor of new social movements and the new left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Young lesbian and gay activists, fostered in these movements, challenged the more reformist tactics and goals of the homophile organizations and either contributed to radicalizing these organizations and/or formed new radical organizations. Homophile organizations and their tactics and goals were far from abandoned, but the movements had irrevocably entered a new phase. It is during this phase that “liberation,” “gay power” and “coming out” emerged in the rhetoric of the movements – the “Gay Liberation movement” was born. And during this phase lesbians and gays “came out” in the streets to publically celebrate “LGBT life and culture and raise the demand for LGBT liberation, including the abolition of discriminatory laws” (Tatchell 2017). The lesbian and gay movements had entered the era of Pride demonstrations.

Since the first Pride demonstrations in 1970 in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago the tradition has travelled globally. Despite its origins in the US, the tradition has become translated into new contexts to suit different national and local settings. Pride parades today provide sites of tension and ambivalence – between commercialization and politicization, festivity and protest, normalization and contention, “liberation and legitimation” (Rayside 2001, p. 25) – and have assumed different dynamics in different cultural, political and social settings (Browne 2007; Ross 2008; Enguix 2009; Duggan 2010; Calvo and Trujillo 2011; Binnie and Klesse 2011; McFarland 2012; McFarland Bruce 2016). We explore how variation in mobilizing contexts influences the expressions of these tensions and how these tensions impact on who participates in the Pride parades and the kinds of strategies that the organizations staging the parades employ in their political performances of pride.

Despite the still severely restricted rights of LGBT people in many states worldwide, LGBT movements have had considerable success in many democracies resulting in rising levels of tolerance toward lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender individuals, anti-discrimination laws, and in many European countries, recognition of same-sex relationships (registered partnerships and/or same-sex marriage). However, these successes have been unevenly distributed between countries. In many countries LGBT movements are still struggling for basic rights that are fully recognized in other countries. The successes have also created concomitant dilemmas for the national movements with regards to their collective identities and future goals, creating tensions between more counter-cultural and radical factions and those who appear to be relatively content with the increasing normalization of LGBT persons and homosexual relationships. In order to increase our understanding of the conditions for LGBT movements to gain recognition and how national and local factors shape the composition and strategies of LGBT movements, we conducted a comparative study. Our book focuses on Pride parades, which we argue is one way to capture differences (and even similarities) in LGBT movements from an international comparative perspective studying a shared manifest expression of the movement – the Pride parade and its performances of LGBT collective identity, its organizers and, unique for our study, Pride parade participants.

Across the world LGBT movements are creating political identities based on sexuality, gender identity and community. And at first glance the parallels in the development of different national LGBT movements may seem striking. Such similarities are, however, only on the surface. We have found fundamental disparities between the countries. Processes of transnational diffusion of ideas, strategies, symbols and slogans will be investigated, as will the way in which LGBT movements in different places influence and learn from one another. At the same time, movements are also strongly influenced by local, national and regional political and social structures. All LGBT movements show a clear national or regional imprint, manifesting what Adam, Duyvendak and Krouwel (1999) have called a national “paradigm.” Pride mobilizing strategies vary based on national/local cultural, political/legal, and institutional contexts (McFarland 2012, p. 630). Pride parades have travelled to different political and cultural contexts in which the events have been strategically translated – framed – by organizers to adapt to these differing contexts. As Johnston and Waitt (2015, p. 117) point out, “the politics of gay pride festivals and parades is always located; place matters.” The politics of gay Pride parades are “dynamic, changing with audiences, participants, sponsors and organizers.”

We have sought to uncover the dynamics producing similarities and differences between Pride parades, using a unique individual protest data-set and qualitative interviews with protest organizers and key LGBT activists – combining quantitative survey data from our CCC research collaboration (“Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation” [see www.protestsurvey.eu]) with qualitative data in part collected in the CCC collaboration and some collected specifically for this book. By using our CCC database we capture participation in specific Pride demonstrations in the study’s seven European countries and Mexico; rather than measuring intentions we have comprehensive data on the individuals who actually participated in these Pride demonstrations. This survey data is unique as it provides answers to the following questions: Who are the Pride demonstrators, what are their socio-demographic characteristics, what are their political orientations? Why do they demonstrate? What are the attitudes, motives and beliefs driving them? How were they mobilized, through what channels, by which techniques? These are among the focal questions in our book. (For a description and discussion of our methods and empirical materials we refer the reader to the Appendix in this volume.)

Previous research

The US lesbian and gay movement(s) has been dominant on the world scene. There has been a noticeable “Americanization” of homosexualities, especially in its cultural manifestations, for example, in the appropriation of the symbols and language of the American LGBT movement (including rainbow flags, certain clothing styles, the words “pride,” “coming out,” “Stonewall” and “gay”). Subsequently, much of the research on lesbian and gay politics has a US focus (e.g. Blasius 1994; Ghaziani and Baldassarri 2011; McFarland 2012; McFarland Bruce 2016), however this body of work is complemented by an increasing number of country case studies (e.g. Hallgren [2008] on Sweden and Fojtová [2011] on the Czech Republic).

In addition to these national case studies we find a growing body of work with a comparative focus. Katherine McFarland Bruce (2016) sketches the early establishment of Pride events as a parade during the early 1970s before moving on to her comparative study of Pride parades in New York, Atlanta, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Fargo, ND and Burlington, VT. While McFarland Bruce’s (2012, 2016) study is confined to the US, she captures the widely varying cultural climates and political preconditions for the cultural challenges posed by the parades. In all of the parades she studied, participants communicated both a message of defiance emphasizing difference with the heterosexual majority and a message of education, performing sameness with the heterosexual majority. However how these two strategies were combined and performed differed across the contextual variation in her analysis. She uncovers how LGBT movements in these cities adapt their performances to their contexts.

Adam (1995) offers a global perspective on the emergence of gay and lesbian movements. In focus for Adam’s book and the later work of Chabot and Duyvendak (2002; see even Swiebel 2009) are processes of transnationalization in gay and lesbian politics that can occur by groups deliberately working together and coordinating activities across national borders (for example the formation of the International Lesbian and Gay Association – Europe [ILGA-Europe]), and/or through a process of diffusion of ideas and action repertoires. These latter researchers point out that the processes of Europeanization and transnationalization are highly linked and influence the strategies pursued by LGBT movements. An additional number of important studies have emerged which interrogate similarities and differences in gay and lesbian movements. Adam, Duyvendak and Krouwel’s (1999) anthology offers a comprehensive study of the impact of national contexts on the formation of gay and lesbian politics. The anthology edited by Tremblay, Paternotte and Johnson (2011) includes fifteen countries, where the authors were asked to address whether the LGBT movement had been influenced by the state and whether the state had in turn been influenced by the movement. Engel (2001) compares the post–Second World War histories of the American and British gay and lesbian movements with an eye toward understanding how distinct political institutional environments affect the development, strategies, goals and outcomes of a social movement. Using a similar institutional perspective Ross and Landström (1999) compare the lesbian movements in Canada and Sweden and Smith (2008) assesses the lesbian and gay movements in the US and Canada. Holzhacker (2007) compares the Lesbian and Gay movements in Italy and the Netherlands. Perhaps the most important comparative study of LGBT movements is Omar G. Encarnación’s (2016) ground-breaking work on the interaction between global influences and domestic factors in shaping LGBT movements and gay rights policies in Latin America. What all of the comparative studies mentioned above have in common is that they are all qualitative case studies relying on observations, interviews and/or printed materials. Our study complements this work by combining qualitative data with quantitative survey data on grassroots participants in the Pride events included in our study.

The collective performances of pride

Benjamin Shepard (2005) points out that the gestures of one set of participants in a demonstration influence other participants and others whose opinion they seek to influence.

Thus, social movements and protests are essentially constructions of countless performances. … With its emphasis on spontaneity and improvisation, protest as performance breaks through barriers to change public opinion and create change.

(ibid., pp. 452–453)

McFarland Bruce (2016) emphasizes the element of fun for instigating social and cultural change. Having fun in new ways is a tactic, she argues, that urges societies to change. Fun “acts out the world that activists hope to make a reality” (ibid., p. 21). In short, Pride performances seek to represent the idea that another world really is possible. The annual parade format has proved to be the ideal vehicle for mobilizing the LGBT community to culturally challenge the hetero-normative norms that pervade societies, to make demands for citizen rights, and for building collective identity. Pride parades as annual ritual celebratory events focuses the LGBT movements struggles. Encarnación (2016) explains Latin America’s enthusiastic embrace of Pride parades:

Like good old lefties, LGBT groups understand the power of mass protest, especially in the streets. But their approach to taking the streets is not to go on strike, interrupt traffic during rush hour, shut down schools and hospitals, or vandalize private property, but rather, throw an annual gay pride march.

(p. 30, citing Javier Corrales)

The underlying script for Pride parades is the idea of coming out (Ghaziani 2008; Chabot and Duyvendak 2002; Herdt 1992, p. 54), that is, the individual and collective processes of publically performing pride – acts of self-affirmation in which Pride participants declare their presence openly and without apology to claim their rights of citizenship. Coming out performances have the explicit intention of increasing the visibility of the LGBT community. “Demonstrating that ‘We are everywhere’” (Murray 1996, p. 133) was central to the early gay liberation marches as it is today. “Impatience with closetry has mounted” (ibid.). The pioneers of Pride events were no longer content to seek comfort and support in underground subcultures, nor are Pride participants today content to remain in the closet (Humphreys 1972). They are “coming out all over, not in acts of confession, but rather to profess and advocate the lives they live and the values that those lives express” (Kitsuse 1980, p. 8). John d’Emilio (1998) forcefully argues that gay liberation transformed the meaning of “coming out.” During the 1950s and 1960s coming out meant the private decision to accept one’s homosexual desires and to acknowledge one’s sexual identity to other gay men and women. Gay liberationists:

recast coming out as a profoundly political act that could offer enormous personal benefits to an individual. The open avowal of one’s sexual identity, whether at work, at school, at home, or before television cameras, symbolized the shedding of self-hatred that gay men and women internalized, and consequently it promised an immediate improvement in one’s life. To come out of the “closet” quintessentially expressed the fusion of the personal and the political that the late 1960s exalted. … The exhilaration and anger that surfaced when men and women stepped through the fear of discovery propelled them into political activity.

(pp. 235–236)

Pride parades have been, and are, the polyvocal manifestations of LGBT communities. Hence, we are confronted with multiple performances that do not fit neatly in binary categories of politics and party. Indeed, politics and party or the carnivalesque glide often seamlessly into one another – they are not discrete categories. Furthermore, neither political performances nor performances of the carnivalesque are in themselves uniform categories. The political messages performed in the parades vary. Some of their messages are more accomodationist: “two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight,” seeking a normalization of their sexual identities. Other performances are more politically confrontational. Pride participants are also publically proclaiming: “I’m here, I’m queer, get used to it,” thereby defying the cultural imperative of heteros...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: “Coming Out All Over”
• 2. The Histories of Pride
• 3. Context Matters
• 4. Who Participates?
• 5. Pride Parade Mobilizing and the Barrier of Stigma
• 6. Friends of Pride: Challenges, Conflicts and Dilemmas
• 7. Performances of Party and Politics
• 8. The Meanings of Pride Parades for their Participants
• 9. Between Politics and Party
• List of Interviews
• Appendix
• Index