The dry wit, righteous anger and boundless energy that made UK Pride such a force is powerfully captured in a documentary featuring Ian McKellen and Olly Alexander
What a lineup for Freedom: 50 Years of Pride (Channel 4), a mishmash of cabaret, musical revue, documentary and oral history that attempts to be all things to all LGBTQ+ people, and just about pulls it off. It opens with a montage to the Pet Shop Boys’ Go West that looks like an ad for an extravagant new West End musical, and eventually lands at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in south London, where Olly Alexander, Holly Johnson, Kae Tempest and more, perform, while clips from the documentary we are watching play to an audience made up of people who are in the clips.
It sounds messy, but it is surprisingly invigorating, and it captures some of the energy that has made UK Pride – in its various iterations – such a force. Members of the Gay Liberation Front explain why, in 1972, they marched through the streets of London, flanked by police officers who called them names. Archive news reports from that era, casual in their homophobia, paint a vivid picture of hostility. At the time, explains Peter Tatchell, “we were demonised and reviled”. The date of 1 July was chosen as it was the closest weekend to the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in New York (28 June 1969). Afterwards, they had a picnic in Hyde Park, where people started to kiss in front of passersby.
