Recently, as an American student spending the summer in Dublin, I was lucky enough to experience Dublin Pride for the first time, and see how another country celebrates the event. My Pride experience started the night before the parade, when some friends and I attended Suffragette City, a social that donated all proceeds to the victims of the Orlando shooting. The atmosphere was more relaxed than we expected, but we still danced and had a great time.
The next morning, I met up again with my friends and headed straight to Merrion Square, where we had decided to camp out to watch the parade. The location had a major advantage: Merrion Square Park was where the post-parade festival took place, allowing us to look at the attractions while we waited.
After roughly an hour, when we heard the cheers and air horns that heralded the parade’s arrival, all four of us had gained rainbow face paint, and I had gained a pair of rainbow suspenders. I had also taken perhaps the gayest picture I have ever posed in, with the park’s famous statue of Oscar Wilde. Hearing the incoming parade, we rushed to the nearest exit and settled in to watch the enormous procession of rainbow-bedecked marchers. When the parade ended an hour and a half later, the festival started, with hundreds enjoying a good time. I personally left right after the festival, but many others headed off to the afterparties.
Watching the parade of rainbows and signs, I was struck not only by the enthusiasm of the participants, but also the number of corporations, which far outstripped the number of LGBTQ organisations that Pride traditionally spotlights. And what Queer organisations that did feature were small compared to the groups marching for Google, Dropbox, Eir and Bank of Ireland. In fact, half of the parade page on Dublin Pride’s website was used to recruit corporations. Also marching was one of the alcohol companies plastering the city with rainbow ads—something I overheard people debate, given the disproportionate rates of alcoholism in the LGBTQ community. The increasing corporatization of Pride a community discussion for years, debating whether the focus on corporations defeats the festival’s original purpose, or lets it expand beneficially through sponsorship.
I’ve previously only been to Oakland Pride in the US, and as I watched the Dublin’s parade, it was impossible not to draw comparisons or notice the many differences. Dublin’s festival is the largest in Ireland, while Oakland’s parade is smaller, more community-based and set in September, rather than the customary June. The traditional month of Pride dates back to the first parade in New York in June, 1970, which celebrated the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, a demonstration against homophobic police repression. Dublin’s own Pride Parade, which follows this tradition, has a similar legacy of protest: it begun in 1983 not as a celebration, but as the Gay Rights Protest March.
Oakland Pride had consisted of a smaller march through the city, which arrived for a festival not in the green of Merrion Square Park, but between skyscrapers, with dozens of booths set up on the street, eager to attract people. Oakland Pride had previously taken steps to avoid the corporatisation, so out of the numerous booths set up, only half belonged to corporations—an unusual low, these days. The remainder mostly consisted of local LGBTQ organisations handing out resource cards on everything: support groups, HIV testing, gay choirs and more.
All of these differences compounded to create two very different vibes for the two different Prides. Oakland Pride felt like a tight-knit community event, both more urban and more flamboyant, while Dublin’s felt more organised and relaxed despite its size. The vibe of Dublin Pride could even be called mainstream, given the greater sense of organisation and increased presence of corporations. In contrast, Oakland’s felt individualised, with an aggressive defiance of norms surrounding gender, how much glitter can be worn at once and also how much clothing should be worn at once (although that might have been about the weather).
Whatever their differences in size, venue and vibe, both Dublin and Oakland’s Pride festivals ultimately represent the same thing: a time for LGBTQ people to come together and celebrate ourselves and our struggles. It’s a time of partying, of community, of self-love. Yet it is also a time to mourn the people we have lost—which is why Dublin Pride concluded with a memorial on Sunday afternoon.
During Pride, the rainbow flags raised across Dublin still flew at half-mast for the Orlando shooting, and that fact serves to remind us of the importance of solidarity and, yes, pride, in the face of violence and hatred. They remind us we still have battles to fight across national boundaries, and that the origin of Pride was a protest.
Words: Madeleine Calvi
Photo: @dublinpride Instagram
