365 D A YE AYS AR
Feature
It’s been a queer old year 365 days of gay – Danielle Carter has a brief sojourn through the highlights and the lowlights of last year’s LGBT calendar.
Oh my
dear it has been a queer old year. From Ellen and Portia tying the knot in the biggest ever Juliet and Juliet LA love fest that catapulted lesbianism, vegan wedding fayre and dress designer Zac Posen into the consciousness of hetero land, to the arrest and imprisonment of one of our most beloved icons Boy George; this year has been a whirlwind of pink. The one thing that we can say with gusto is that the pink globe definitely likes to shake things up and in just one rotation the Austrian Terminator over saw the reverse of Proposition 8 in California, a backward step that appeared so natural to most of America that even Craig Revel Horwood would have probably described it as ‘flawless.’ From this very depressing state of affairs to the bizarre. Every lesbian in the country is wondering who killed Jenny. Yep, the L Word may not have ended
We all wait with bated breath to see how Obama will reset the agenda for human rights and place LGBT equality at the centre of his manifesto.”
20 | PRIDE LONDON 2009 |
www.pridelondon.org
here but thanks to YouTube we have been afforded the gift of a digital crystal ball allowing us to watch this well loved lesbian ensemble break-up and sink into the sea of the modern lesbian canon without a satisfactory ending that has yet again left a lesbian population bereft. I think it is fair to say that the Sapphic nation has not been as bemused, confused and in some cases amused since Anne Heche jumped back over no man’s land and landed on a man. But despite all of the doom and gloom that has happened there are still a few of us out there rallying and one of them is Chairman of Pride Paul Birrell and his amazing team at Pride London who went out to Vancouver and won us the bid for World Pride 2012. All I can say is if you think Pride is brilliant on a usual day, you aint seen nothing yet. As the journalist for Pride, I can often be found creeping around corners and listening in on the Pride Board’s ‘private’ conversations and I tell you this will be the most amazing event that you have ever seen. So in 2012 London goes gay, this is a must have date for every pink Filofax in the gay isles. But this year not only went Pink it went Black, with Barack Obama grabbing the helm at the White House steering us hopefully away from mass murder to a more hopeful future. We all wait with bated breath to see how Obama will reset the agenda for human rights and
place LGBT equality at the centre of his manifesto. And as Pride goes to Press we have just heard that the ban on Riga Pride has been overturned. Yep the Baltic Pride was banned due to the fact that it was offensive to public decency. Chairman Paul Birrell was one of many who went out to stage a protest against the blanket veto and it was successfully overturned. The blood ban has gone from bloody awful to bloody ridiculous. The ban that stops gay and bisexual men who are sexually active from giving blood is still firmly in place and just one of the causes that Pride London is campaigning against. But we will keep going and hopefully soon there will be a breakthrough. And of course we can’t complete this retrospective without the whole Lindsay Lohan saga which MySpace subscribers have particularly enjoyed over the year. Like watching a car crash the is-she?, isn’t she? story kept us captivated all year but we have finally reached a conclusive conclusion and the answer is yes, she is – really fucking annoying.
Top to bottom: The cast of L Word, Ellen DeGeneres, Barack Obama and Chris Moyles.