Ardmag Strength Edition : Jun 2022

Memories of early prides in dublin While the Parade is undoubtedly the visual centrepiece of Pride each year, it wasnt always the huge celebration we see today. Activist Bill Foley describes the early days of Dublin Pride to Rebecca Kelly for the Dublin Pride magazine 2021. www. dublinpride.ie Before the floats and the block parties, Dublin Pride began as a protest, with a small number of LGBTQ+ people taking to the streets of the city demanding liberation.

Activist Bill Foley recounts his own experiences in both organising and attending the many LGBTQ+ marches of the 1980’s and explains just how different these events were from the Pride Parades we’ve seen in more recent years, in both the scale of the march as well as public reception. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Bill was involved with a group called Gays Against Repression. He explained that these early protests weren’t exactly “parades” in the way we’d think of today, recounting “One year we simply decided to wear carnations and walk through town, starting at Stephen’s Green and wandering down Grafton Street just saying things like ‘Happy Gay Day’ or ‘Gay Pride’ to people as we went by. There were about ten of us in attendance, so it wasn’t very big.”

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