The concept of Gay Pride was articulated in Britain before there were events formally named Gay Pride. Earlier activities, including the various Gay Days held in London parks, formed part of the wider political and cultural ferment around gay liberation in 1970–71. This article, published in the Gay Liberation Front newspaper Come Together in September 1971, is included here because it gives a particularly clear contemporary account of what gay pride was understood to mean. It presents pride above all as a rejection of the shame imposed on gay men and lesbians, linking coming out, public visibility and collective celebration. In this sense, it shows that the ideas later associated with the Gay Pride events of 1972 were already being explicitly discussed and practised within the British Gay Liberation Front.
Gay Days and GLF
One Sunday afternoon, opposite the plastic consumer-crazy ready made “pleasure” of Battersea Funfair, Gay Liberation Front created its own fun. All it needs is a patch of grass, a sunny day and a group of people who are happy and who know they have a right to be happy.
The day before, a disc jockey on a programme I won’t do the honour of naming announced the Gay Day by saying “another sad gay day, because these people are very sad people.” If you feel put down by that description of yourself, you’ll understand why we have Gay Days: they are a demonstration of exuberance and joy.
Where there is any truth in the “sad gays” sick-joke, lies in the fact that society disapproves of homosexuality, condemns it and so creates shame and guilt in gay women and men. One of the aims of GLF is to give its members GAY PRIDE. The slogan is “Gay is Good”. The way to gain gay pride is to come out publicly, to say: Yes I’m gay and I’m glad I am. The Gay day is a gorgeous, extravagant form of this public statement.
We come-together, we share out what food we have, we play games which “adults” are supposed to have put aside along with their school uniforms: oranges and lemons, throw the ball and kiss who catches it, piggy-back rides, mazes. By these games we question ideas of adulthood, maturity, the way responsibility is supposed to be the same as seriousness and the way spontaneous feelings are supposed to be repressed. We kiss and talk and hold hands and embrace—women with women, men with men, men with women. Thus we question the attitude which divides up sexuality into separate compartments labled “sex”, “love”, “fancying”, “friendship”.
Guilt and shame are the oppressors within us, but you can’t overcome them on your own, in isolation. Maybe you can’t even recognise them; it’s very easy to put off telling friends, family and people at work with the excuse “Why should I tell them about my sex life, it’s not necessary.” But it is. In the face of public hostility, privacy becomes secrecy, and secrecy implies (even creates) shame; You can’t get gay pride and then come out: the two happen together. And when they happen - wow, then you are happy.
Once shame is recognised and rooted out, the question arises: Why was it there in the first place, who put it there? The cause lies in a society which fears you because you don’t don’t fit into its sick norms of behaviour. This begins the next stage of awareness: being gay means criticising society because it is fucked-up and oppressive, it means being so angry that you have to smash what puts us down. It means being no longer content with the safe hidey-holes society so kindly allows us so we won’t bother it (out of sight out of mind): the pubs and clubs and cruising grounds and cottages, the closet parodies of married life, the terrifying loneliness and isolation.
To be ourselves, to express our sexuality fully, to be gay, we must upset the applecart. Gay is angry, gay is happy.
COME TOGETHER
COME OUT
LOVE YOUR SISTERS AND BROTHERS
Source. Come Together: Issue 09, Gay Liberation Front, September 1971.
From: https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/Documents/Detail/come-together-issue-09/615846
Copyright note: This article was published anonymously in Come Together, no. 9 (September 1971), a publication of the Gay Liberation Front in London.. The original author and any current copyright holder have not been identified. It is reproduced here for noncommercial purposes of historical scholarship, teaching and commentary under the fair-use provisions of US copyright law (17 U.S.C. §107). Any rights holder with concerns about its inclusion is invited to contact the editor.
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© Paul Halsall, September Sept 2026
