Margate Pride also expects participants including any businesses or groups holding stalls “to align with its environmental and sustainability policy to reduce, reuse, and recycle”. “Free to attend and open to all, Margate Pride is the festival with heart.” “Set in the camp seaside town of Margate, the festival is known as an authentic, grassroots celebration, drawing together diverse elements of the community, with everyone from the local RNLI and other emergency services to local artists, community groups and activists joining together to support the cause. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.
Rather than just popping a flag into marketing material for four weeks and watching the fight commence, Big Tech could do well to apply its smarts to calming what has become a festering pit. Social media companies, which profit from the engagement generated by every argument and trolling session, see those showing nuance and tolerance silenced in favour of unbridled mud-slinging and pile-ons. It also needs to ensure trans people’s health and wellbeing is improved while also doing a hell of a lot more to support women who still suffer in a sexist society. While the government has promised to ban conversion therapy, it needs to adequately explain why it won’t extend this to trans conversion therapy. It’s not legal to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people in the NHS, yet bizarre rules mean that lesbian couples, despite tending to have two wombs between them, have to leap more hurdles than straight female peers to gain access to IVF treatment. While it’s illegal to commit hate crimes, hate crimes against the community are rising. You see, though it’s illegal to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people at work, it still happens. At least when brands were aiming for our pockets, they gave a little bit to LGBTQ+ services and charities too. Because brands can tell me they’re making my life as a lesbian that much easier with these symbols or they can put their money where their mouth is.Īnd sadly, that’s the thing truly missing this year. Though rainbow flags, correctly applied, can help make me feel acknowledged and accepted, I’ve never been convinced that ephemeral tat is going to encourage homophobes to like me.
It could be that these brands are wising up to the fact they’ve never done enough for a community that they’re asking a lot from – not only do they want our money, they also want our social activism! Or perhaps it’s just not worth the hassle of getting called out in articles like this for getting it wrong. After all, what’s the point in flying the flag if, in practical terms, all it means is big banks’ underpaid call centre workers trying to upsell me rotten schemes won’t automatically call me “sir” when they hear my deep voice? What use is a double-decker bus wrapped in a giant rainbow logo if nothing is being done to ensure the safety of its LGBTQ+ passengers? What’s changed? Perhaps brands have realised that the cynicism of these tokenistic gestures is almost as blatant as the garishness of the rainbow. Brands see our potential buying power (we don’t typically tend to have children, and the white gay men among us don’t always do too badly, income-wise) and want a slice. Now, lucky us, LGBTQ+ people are a defined and targeted market for advertisers, with legions of friends and allies desperate to flag their support. The uprising became a launchpad for America’s gay rights movement. Starting on 28 June and lasting for five nights, LGBTQ+ New Yorkers stood up to the police, who had made a habit of raiding gay bars and arresting punters. Pride is meant to commemorate the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots.
Even though – as I’m rudely reminded every cold, dark mid-February when my toes freeze to the bone – LGBTQ+ people exist all year round. Harder to swallow, though, is that this, the symbolic apex of corporate piggybacking of Pride, a perfect demonstration of how far brands had gone in their quest for the pink pound, was only around for a month. Launched in June 2019, it was like a fresher, less salty BLT, incredibly easy to gulp down on the go. No, not the community rather, the M&S lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato sandwich.