Marching Season with a difference

Derry’s first-ever Pride March was a soaraway, scintillant, sensational success. The half-dozen young LGBTQ activists who had insisted on marching when older campaigners cautioned that there was no tradition of marching for gay rights in Derry could feel triumphantly vindicated at the end.

We took the old civil rights route, from the Waterside Station, across the bridge, through Ferryquay Gate, around by the Diamond and down to the Guildhall, making the connection with October ’68, asserting the entitlement of gays to claim that tradition. The other feature the march had in common with ’68 was a band of Free Presbyterians telling us we were on the high road to hell. At least this time they didn’t join with the police in an assault force against us.
In fact, the police were so friendly it’s obvious they’ve been taking courses in cunning.
Free Pees apart, there wasn’t a cross word to be heard.
Summoned to the stage to say a few words, I paused to catch breath at the scene spread out before me. The Guildhall has never looked so gorgeous, all the angle-headed hipsters of Derry’s high society assembled in the gaudy colours of freedom, a sea of smiles to meet the shine of the benignant sun above, chief organiser Cha Gillespie, mistress of all she surveyed, wicked grin and dinky cap, bright-eyed as if transported.
Later, we gathered in the courtyard of Kerr’s Kaff – aka Cafe del Monde – for incantations, booze, puffs and magic dragons, and a set of songs to warp the world from Adamantine Connor Kelly, resplendent in the ruffled raiment of timeless romance.
Everybody agreed we’ll have to do it again next year, and the year after that, by which stage there’ll be millions of us, and Cha will be Gay Impressario of the Epoch, and Connor might be mega.
We mustn’t allow joy to blind us to the dark side, to the most glaring contradiction in Irish public life.
Pride is applauded through the streets. Homophobia scarcely dares speak its name. So why is it that, as the suicide statistics strongly suggest, some young gays would still rather die than admit their sexuality?

Most of the quarter-million who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to mark the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech appeared to believe that all Hispanics living in the US without papers should be dealt with by armed vigilantes if the National Guard isn’t mobilised pronto by Barack Obama, a Muslim, to round them up and boot them out.
It will have seemed to most in Ireland that these opinions sit strangely with the legacy of Dr. King. Rally leaders Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin will not be seen widely, either, as King’s natural successors, Beck being a right-wing Fox radio shock-jock, Palin one of the least likely Alaskans to have had a MLK poster on her bedroom wall.
The Beck/Palin argument is that King aimed only at equality before the law – not at economic reform or at any shift in US foreign policy. On this reading, to link King’s legacy to redistribution of wealth or to opposition to war is, in Beck’s words, to “purposely distort Martin Luther King’s ideas...
“The civil rights marchers weren’t crying for social justice but crying out for equal justice... Social justice means taking from one section of our people and giving to another.”
One reason the Beck/Palin take on the civil rights movement has achieved some traction is that it can, at a push, be fitted into the mainstream view of King as having confined his aspirations to equal rights at lunch counters and in buses and for black and white youngsters to walk together to the same school. The quotes which have rung down the years form soft pillows of words for all to rest their heads on. “To transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood...”
But not so. By the standards of Beck and Palin, King was a left-wing extremist, a campaigner for social justice in exactly the sense which they deny, a supporter of militant trade unionism, a believer in radically redistributive economics, a passionate opponent of the Vietnam War.
He denounced the US government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”, and called for “a true revolution of values [which] will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth”. He preached a national health service, publicly-financed housing for all and a national minimum wage.
His general purpose was to alleviate “the twin evils of racism and economic deprivation”.
It has suited a range of interests to allow a distorted version of King’s thinking to seep into the accepted narrative of history. Beck and Palin are merely taking advantage of the context created for them by some who now affect dismay at their theft of the civil rights legacy.
Of course, King’s movement is not the only civil rights campaign from the ‘60s to have been distorted beyond recognition to suit the political agenda of opportunists in our own time.

I suppose somebody must be interested in the Ryder Cup. Otherwise, how come such coverage of the dork Montgomery dithering over his “picks” and choosing three “vice-captains” to help manage a 12-strong team? Never heard the like of it. Load of oul’ shite. Likewise Formula One.