Comment from Peter Kay
Time August 21, 2008 at 5:54 pm

Not this old crap again. Manchester Pride has *always* been commercial. Brighton isn’t but has an appallingly low level of donations (average: 20p) and a lot of money from the council.

The stupid idea of getting people to pay for being in the parade has been reversed.

If you really want to find an alternative, then run an alternative pride on a Different Weekend. There is a pointless them vs us attitude when it’s entirely possible for people to want to go to both commercial, and non commercial events..

Comment from Jen
Time August 21, 2008 at 11:03 pm

Entirely with Peter on this. If you are in any way making a positive contribution to the world, why keep trying to spoil someone else’s party rather than getting up off your backsides and organising your own? There are 51 other weekends of the year when, if their claims are to be believed, they could be organising a bigger, better, more political, better attended and more meaningful alternative event. But they just never get round to it.

If this lot get their sainted way then Manchester Pride shuts down and… er… well, that’s it. One commercial and Labour-centric event raising the profile of the LGBT community in wider society (thus giving a lot of people their first chance to step out of the closet and test the water, to mix my metaphor horribly) would be gone, but nothing actually there to replace it.

The thing is, there are a variety of things ‘wrong’ with both LGF and Manchester Pride that it might be sane to protest about and seek to change; but any such activity is given a bad name by the shout-down-any-alternative-viewpoint stance of a small but vocal clique with an entitlement complex, a loathing of diversity, and a complete inability to stick to the facts in their criticisms.

They’ve ruined Get Bent, which was a fantastic grassroots event, and they’re still hellbent on spoiling Pride too.

Comment from Agprov
Time August 27, 2008 at 7:12 pm

Shame about Pride: it’s something even we benighted straights could attend and enjoy and feel a sort of inclusion in!

But something is wrong somewhere. A friend of mine related how sdhe was invited to help cash up the takings at the end of the Saturday, even though she was only slightly known to the organisers. (In itself, a bit careless?) Shown where the day’s tkings were to be cashed up - an insecure out of the way Portakbin sort of affair at the end of the Pride site - she was unhappy that there was no lock on the door and that she was expected count up quite a few thousand in cash and notes on her own, without the usual check of having a second person confirming the count and the amount. She also noticed how rudimentary the accounting procedure was - all she was expected to do was “note down the total on a slip of paper and we’ll fill in the rest of the detils later”. As any sensible person would have done at this point, she made her excuses - well, she outlined what she thought was wrong about the whole procedure - declined to be invbolved, and left. She felt that the whole thing was either staggeringly inept, or a convenient robbery was being set up and it needed somebody to happen to, or the organisers were not 100% on the level and were looking for an innocent to set up to take the fall for some serious cash shortfalls later. She wondered if this is why Pride appears to be so expensive on the day but makes surprisingly litle for charity (except perhaps private-enterprise charities involving a few well-placed peopel creaming it off the top)