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press reports | ||
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LaDiDah: Something
For Everyone (article taken from rainbownetwork.com) LaDiDah is a group and an
event.
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Anarchists are reportedly planning to disrupt London's Lesbian and Gay Mardi Gras festival. A group called LaDiDah plans to hold an alternative festival outside the gates of this weekend's Pride festival. They will hand out free sex toys and satirical literature criticising the Mardi Gras as elitist, reports gay website Rainbow Network. Some members of the group are said to have been involved with the May Day anti-capitalist demonstrations. One of the anarchists, called Greg, told Rainbow Network the Mardi Gras was "classist, sexist, and biased towards white middle class men who dominate the gay movement". The group has criticised Pride organisers for charging an entrance fee to the event. The festival was free up until 1999. Jason Pollock, Mardi Gras festival director, said: "It's a free world, these people can say what they want. But I have no idea why they are so upset." Story filed: 11:01 Wednesday 27th June 2001
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| from ammo city, the "hip life style mag..."
http://www.ammocity.com/ammo/link.php?itemid=2057
MARDI
GRAS PROTEST | ||
| La-Di-Dah article from
queercompany.com Yes, you read that correctly. Now read on for news of this year's Mardi Gras alternative If a day out at this year's Pride event in Finsbury Park would leave you feeling more 'Mardi' than 'Gras' and you don't fancy forking out fifteen quid to watch 5ive suck up to the queer audience they sneer at, check out the alternative that is La-Di-Dah. Queeruption, the group that puts the rev back into revolution is holding an alternative to all that consumer madness, giving you the chance to 'Reclaim your Pride'. With more than a nod to the memory of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, the White Riots and countless other fights queer people have had to face, the day begins with a march at 11am from Green Park tube, just look out for the 'Pride Not Profit' flags and join in. They're offering a live music and pervy picnic in Finsbury Park near the main space. Free food will kindly be provided courtesy of the good folk at 'Food not Bombs'. home-made - it says here - sex-toy making and cool queer DJs and processions are also planned. There'll also be a space for kids with face painting, games and story-telling. After all that, if you can stand the pace, there's a party from 10pm till dawn and it's all free. So join the 'Freeques' (be free and queer) or be warned: you could dance to Steps, lose your friends and spend a fortune all in the name of gay pride. | ||
| Mardi Gras
party drops the politics
A day of pride, joy and ostrich feathers Amelia
Hill Sunday July 1, 2001
The gods may have sent
clouds, but that did not deter more than 85,000 people joining forces in a
riot of colour for London's Mardi Gras yesterday.
Pink hair curlers and sequinned ostrich feathers were crushed under the
marching feet of the obligatory nuns, sailors and barely-clad S&M
fanatics as they strutted and shouted their way from Hyde Park to
Victoria.
Bemused tourists expecting the usual soapbox profundities of Speakers'
Corner sat, landlocked in coffee shops, watching the dazzling displays of
glitter, sequins and bare bottoms as they passed the windows.
'I never realised there was such a large lesbian and gay community in
London,' said Anne Ford, a tourist from America. 'But if there are this
many of them, I would have thought the power of their block vote would
give them all the equality they want.'
But despite Ken Livingstone's announcement last week that London is to
allow gay partnerships, the closest thing possible to gay marriages, in
September as part of a drive to make the city the gay capital of the
world, many demonstrators yesterday felt that while the battle for
tolerance has largely been won in London, the war for equality is being
lost.
'Presuming you are white, middle class and in London, there's no doubt
you'd get more compliments than hassles even if you want to travel the
Tube in drag,' said Russell Fisher from the Pink Pauper, an alternative to
the now establishment publication the Pink Paper. 'But the tolerance
championed by Ken Livingstone is a weak compromise that enables us to get
on with our lives without being hassled while becoming increasingly
ghettoised.
'Soon we won't have to stray out of the queer community for anything,'
he said. 'That's why even though people assume so many battles have been
won the Mardi Gras is so important. We need to continue proving to each
upcoming generation that queer is a sexuality and not a culture and that
we pass unnoticed among the rest of the population every day.'
Martin Borbone, the blue-suited member of a group of sequinned cowboys
combining the colours of the new rainbow flag, felt strongly there was
still a political message to get across. 'We can party openly every night
in Soho, but we're here today for those who live in towns and villages up
and down the country who still can't admit their sexuality and are forced
to live in shame and secret.
'The problem is that what was once a real demonstration and demand to
be accepted, has turned into a massive party where most people don't even
know or care about any political point.' This fear was more evident than
ever at the once-free Gay Pride celebration, now the £15-a-ticket Mardi
Gras extravaganza at Finsbury Park, where touts crowded to sell tickets to
the hordes for £30 and where, although camp glamour was still in evidence,
the atmosphere was virtually indistinguishable from that of any other
large festival.
'Are gay rights still the point of all this?' asked Carrie Martin, a
22-year-old student happily collecting as many free packets of condoms as
she could. 'I supposed I assumed they had dropped the name Gay Pride
because the whole thing has moved on and become a summer concert like any
other.' Just two years after the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in
Soho, she looked around at the lack of traditional gay messages. 'If they
are gay and proud,' she said, 'they seem to have become rather quieter
about it.'
Her observations were shared by Fisher. 'The original idea behind Pride
was to be ourselves, not sell ourselves, but look around you,' he said,
gesturing towards the advertisements for Nivea, Virgin Atlantic and
Budweiser. 'There's nothing about Aids or even much explicitly about
homosexuality at all. The use of the gay world for this sort of
commercialism is not a sign of enlightenment or liberation,' he said.
'Black street culture in America has been used in the same way, to sell to
a mass market. Racism and poverty is still the lot of Afro-Americans.'
Nevertheless this day of peaceful celebrations, fairground rides and
tight trousers was a success. As a cool wind picked up, sailors gallantly
lent their caps and coats to their fretting sisters. 'Happy Mardi Gras,
girls and girls,' a pink angel huddled inside a greatcoat shouted. 'Happy
Mardi Gras!'
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