Manchester Pride have announced that political parties are banned from their event this summer – alongside some other Prides. We get where they are coming from: many political groups are being actively damaging and hostile to LGBT people at present, encouraged by a largely hostile media. It reminds many of us of how things were in the 1980s and 1990s when Labour and the Conservatives united to introduce Section 28 and then keep it law for a fifteen years, harming a generation of bi and gay kids.
That said we question the wisdom of this choice. Some parties and groups are hostile, others less so, and we are reminded of how in the 1980s some “Stop Section 28” campaigns specifically excluded bisexual people from joining in with their work. Their argument was that bi people didn’t face quite the same challenges in society as lesbian and gay people. This relied on the idea that biphobia was “homophobia lite” which has since been extensively debunked in research but was widely accepted at the time.
The battle against Section 28 was lost – and we were stuck with it for more than a decade. In that battle pushing away allies in a puritan spirit did not make winning any easier: the same applies today.
