ABSTRACT

The chapter focuses on how and why Pride organizers mobilize what we call “friends of Pride,” and the opportunities as well as challenges associated with allies. The analysis – which is based on interviews with organizers and key activists in the Czech Republic, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK – reveals two forms of friends of Pride. First, non-LGBT individuals participating in Pride; second, participating groups/organizations that do not have LGBT issues as their main focus. For LGBT movements that seek allies there are two types of challenges: (1) strategies for mobilizing allies and (2) dealing with opportunities and risks associated with different friendships. As to the first challenge, we found that the Pride parades in which the organizers most explicitly employed an inclusive political strategy in general had the highest percentage of allies. Regarding the second challenge, our interviewed Pride organizers and key activists regarded non-LGBT Pride participants as a major asset and voiced no major concerns about “de-gaying” Pride as many queer scholars have warned. Apart from organizers’ occasional doubts about commercialization, some friends were explicitly unwanted, most prominently extreme right and xenophobic populist right parties and organizations, which in some country contexts have tried to appropriate the LGBT issue for their political purposes. The other notable “unwanted friends” were pedofiles/pedosexuals.