Pride events, all over the world, are crucially important for allowing people from LGBT+ communities to feel safe, accepted and celebrated.
But for people who intersect multiple marginalised spaces – i.e those who are both LBGT+ and Black – finding acceptance can be even more challenging.
In fact, some people from Black and other ethnic minority backgrounds have reported experiencing racism and discrimination in so-called LGBT+ ‘safe spaces’.
In response to this issue, UK Black Pride was created in 2005 – founded by Phyllis Akua Opoku-Gyimah, also known as Lady Phyll – with the aim to promote unity and co-operation among all Black people of African, Asian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern and Latin American descent, as well as their friends and families, who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
But the history of Black Gay Pride beyond the UK extends much further back.
The movement in the US started in the 1990s as an alternative to the overwhelmingly white mainstream LGBT+ movement at the time, and a way to push back against the long history of oppression and exclusion of people of colour.
Today, there are around 20 Black Gay Pride events all over the United States. The D.C Black Pride event, which started in 1991, was one of the first and has since grown to be the largest Black gay pride event in the world.
UK Black Pride is now the biggest celebration in Europe for Black and ethnic minority members of the LGBT+ community, with around 8,000 people attending every year.
Black Gay Pride in pictures
How to attend UK Black Pride 2021
UK Black Pride will take place over three days: Friday, 2nd July – Sunday, 4th July.
Building on the success of their 15th birthday digital celebration in August 2020, which attracted 30,000 viewers, UK Black Pride’s 2021 event will extend to three days, recorded live at an as-yet-unannounced venue in east London.
UK Black Pride’s 2021 theme is “Love and Rage”.
The three-day celebration will take place digitally and includes a growing programme catering to a broad range of the communities UK Black Pride represents and makes space for.
The decision to host UK Black Pride 2021 as a digital-only event comes amid uncertainty over the vaccine rollout and UK Black Pride’s communities’ ongoing vulnerability to Covid-19.
Due to questions of privacy, there are not many available photos from the early years of UK Black Pride – as some people who attend these events may not be out to their family, friends or colleagues.
But here is a selection of images from their last in-person event in 2019:
To get a deeper insight into Black gay history in the UK, you can follow the Instagram account dedicated to archiving Black LGBT+ experiences from the 1980s and 1990s.
Black & Gay, Back in the Day is a digital archive created by writer Jason Okundaye and director Marc Thompson, which aims to present a visual depiction of life for many Black and LGBT+ people over the last few decades.
A timeline of UK Black Gay Pride
Now the UK’s largest and longest running trans support group, The Beaumont Society was set up to provide information and education to the general public and medical and legal professions, and to encourage research aimed at a fuller understanding.
The Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexual acts between two men, both over the age of 21, in private.
LGBT+ community members responded to a police raid on the Stonewall Inn with a series of spontaneous acts of violence known as the Stonewall Riots.
The London Gay Liberation Front organised the first UK Gay Pride march in London. The march ran from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park with around 1,000 people marching through the capital.
The UK’s first Black Gay and Lesbian Group was formed.
The Gay Black Group requested funding for a centre which would provide advice and counselling, a helpline, a library and other resources.
The Black Lesbian and Gay Centre received funding in 1985 and was open to all lesbians and gay men. When the Greater London Council was abolished in 1986, funding for the Centre came by donations and membership. The Centre remained active into the 1990s.
The UK’s most expensive Black player for a time played for a variety of clubs between 1978 and 1997. He was known by his early clubs to be gay, and came out publicly later in his career.
He remains the only male footballer to reveal his sexuality while playing professionally in the top tiers.
Marsha P Johnson was an outspoken advocate for gay rights, a self-identified drag queen, and one of the prominent figures in the Stonewall uprising of 1969.
Marsha went missing in 1992 and six days later police found Marsha’s body. At the time, they said nobody else had been responsible for the death, but in 2012, campaigner Mariah Lopez was successful in getting the New York police department to reopen Marsha’s case as a possible murder.
The police subsequently reclassified Johnson’s cause of death from ‘suicide’ to undetermined.
UK Black Pride began in 2004 as a day trip to Southend-on-Sea by members of the online social network Black Lesbians in the UK.
After the idea was formulated in Southend-on-Sea, a committee was formed the following year and the first event took place in Regent’s Park in 2007.
Stonewall, Europe’s largest LGBT+ rights charity, withdrew its support from the Pride in London festival following concerns over the event’s ‘lack of diversity’.
The charity instead partnered with UK Black Pride, and agreed to appoint a full-time member of staff to work with UK Black Pride and ‘BAME’ community groups.
On Sunday 8th July 2018, approximately 7,500 people attended UK Black Pride at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.
The event is now Europe’s largest celebration for African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American and Caribbean heritage LGBT+ people.
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