If I remember rightly the first Pride march in 1972 was on a blustery, cold day in July.

I was down for the day from Oxford, didn’t know anyone in London, and was suspicious of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) who were organising it and only a few weeks before had told me I couldn’t really be gay if I didn’t wear a frock.

I was only just out of the closet and initially it felt too much too soon but we’d had an Oxford Pride and I knew that you could never be yourself if you didn’t show yourself. That was what Pride was about.

There were dozens of people around the plinth of Nelson’s column. Men dressed as nuns, strong women, radical drag – and there was a good smattering of ‘straight-looking’ supporters, probably members of the rival, reformist Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE). A man in a blazer and a straw boater was introducing speakers. I hung back, still nervous – we were surrounded by police.

We still argue about how many people turned up for that first march. There was no organisation, just word of mouth – turn up and do it.

I remember there being around 400-500 (other sources put the figure anywhere from 700 to 2,000) with others who were following along on the pavement, inspired but inhibited by the police presence. It may not sound like a lot but 500 plus LGBTQ people taking up the whole street in 1972? What a sense of power!

Hyde Park was under louring skies, but the folk were radiant. We played games and danced in circles. Drink was taken, spliffs were smoked, tabs were dropped, and couples snogged in the very spot where, at other times, they could be arrested for importuning. The police did nothing; one of them winked at me.

Pride through the years

Pride through the years

There are still arguments about how ‘political’ Pride should be, but the first march was advertised as a carnival. The politics of fun.

Fast forward through the 70s, and it became more serious. There was law reform to demand. Still we ended in Hyde Park, but now with a makeshift stage and tiny P.A. I first heard Tom Robinson, one of the first openly gay rock stars, sing the LGBTQ anthem Glad To Be Gay here.

Seven years on and Pride marchers came in their thousands – unheard of. I remember looking back along Piccadilly, awestruck, and not being able to see the back of the march. In Hyde Park again, I recall Tom Robinson [again] thanking the thousands of lesbians and gays in the police who had come out to support us. There were red faces all round.

One way or another, Pride got itself divorced from the ordinary homosexual-in-the-street. One year, the route took us past the Coleherne, London’s oldest gay bar in Earl’s Court, and the regulars came out and threw beer cans at us. As Pride marchers, we were politicos rocking the boat.

In 1984, everyone forgot to organise a march, but 1,500 people still turned up because it was the last Saturday in June (Pavlov’s Queers!). That autumn in Jubilee Garden, the great and good from all the LGBT organisations, press and switchboards, agreed it was never going to be like that again – that Pride was too precious to die. We had to get the commercial scene involved.

The result? The next year, Divine serenaded the crowd in Jubilee Gardens from the roof of a paddle steamer, the Beverly Sisters crooned Sisters to astonished plods and Capital Gay, our weekly freesheet, managed to capture spectacular aerial shots of the thousands marching over Waterloo Bridge.

That was the template Pride has followed ever since. As we celebrate the Pride Jubilee, marking 50 years since the Stonewall riots, that mix of pride, passion, politics and play is still present even as the world around changes.

In the late 80s we were marching for our dead and dying, and in defiance of Section 28. The march grew and grew and we kept switching venue for the post-march festival, to accommodate ever-increasing numbers. It’s hard to imagine in these more straightened times, but in the early nineties, when Europride came to London, there were over 100,000 on the March.

Now Pride is a spectator sport, with a limit on the number of people allowed to march. Corporate sponsors feature prominently, some say too prominently, on the floats in the parade. The organisers have half an eye on the show they put on for the thousands who line the route, and half for the telly and Twitter.

Pride leaves a dreadful carbon footprint too – the litter is indescribable. And after the march the entire LGBTQ community is choked into the square mile of Soho, rather than having a proper space to go to. I try to thrust through the crowd and it’s scary. There’s an accident waiting to happen here. In my view, the only solution is to go back to Hyde Park as we did in Pride’s early years.

But there is still nothing like the feeling that you own the streets of London; that you share them with your sisters and brothers in their thousands. The Pride March – or Carnival, or Parade, it’s yours to choose – is the spine of the LGBTQ year.

It gives me a sense of who I am and where I belong, to carry through the rest of the year. Every two years there is a new generation of young LGBTQ+ people, who also need that empowerment, not to mention the many thousands in countries like Poland and Turkey and Nigeria who will see the Pride images in the ether and draw inspiration from them.

I’ll be there, sensibly dressed now, on July 6, 47 years on, on the bus of Opening Doors London, for older LGBTQ+ people. I’ve searched out the megaphone and I’m practising the slogans: ‘We are the people who fought to make Pride possible’, ‘We are the people your grandparents were warned against’

I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Peter Scott-Presland is the author of Amiable Warriors, Volume 1: A Space to Breathe, the story of the gay pioneers who founded the Campaign for Homosexual Equality

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