by Dr Bryce Edwards

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has always been an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in Auckland’s annual Pride Parade. This year, however, she seems inclined to give the controversial “new-look” event a swerve. 

Last week, the organisers of the Pride Festival finally announced what they have planned for next month’s festivities, with the customary central event – the Pride Parade – taking a much smaller role in the week. And although the event is being promoted as being more political in nature, it seems likely that many political people and politicians will be actively avoiding it.

Jacinda Ardern did her best to keep out of the controversy last year over whether uniformed police could march in the parade, saying simply that she believed the experience was “at its best when it’s an inclusive event”. But she seems unlikely to attend herself, telling the Express magazine that “We haven’t set the schedule for 2019. I am hoping to participate in Pride week in some form” – see her interview: Mother of the nation: Express talks to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Ardern made a highly-diplomatic statement to the magazine that is, no doubt, designed to carefully appeal to both sides of the dispute about police involvement in the parade: “I would be happy to see a time when Pride Parade organisers feel happy to include them… For me, the Pride parade is a celebration of diversity and equality for all. It’s also rightly been a place where history – how far we’ve come and what work still needs to be done – has been acknowledged too.”

The magazine reports that Ardern is unlikely to attend this year’s pride parade: “when asked if she would be participating in 2019’s scaled down march, she appears less determined to be involved with this year’s effort”. Furthermore, in a move reminiscent of John Key avoiding Waitangi for Waitangi Day, the Prime Minister appears to be getting around the problem by “removing her gaze from purely being focused on Auckland Pride and looking to support celebrations around the country.”

The “new-look” pride parade was announced on Thursday as an “inclusive” walk replacing the previous celebration. The organisers who have, controversially, banned police from marching in uniform, have come up with a very different event to the traditional one after some confusion about whether the event would even take place, and whether it would be a celebration or protest march.

Many of the details are still unannounced, but the organisers have made the key decision to shift the event from Ponsonby to downtown Auckland. According to Melanie Earley, “The walk will take place on February 9, beginning at Albert Park in the central city and ending at Myers Park” with organisers explaining that “although the parade was traditionally held in Ponsonby many Pride members felt alienated from the suburb” – see: Auckland Pride Board reincarnates parade as walk.

Ponsonby is viewed by some as too mainstream and affluent. Hence, “The decision was intended to encourage all members of the rainbow communities to feel safe and included in the event.” Significantly, the traditional backers of the Parade, the Ponsonby Business Association, had withdrawn their support for the event in light of the ban on police.

The new walking event is being promoted as more engaged with the queer community than corporates, and generally being more “edgy”. Auckland Pride board’s Zakk d’Larté has said the focus would be on getting people to participate, as it would be “less of a spectacle, with floats, for people to watch from the sidelines”. And as well as being “queer, rainbow, beautiful and gayer than ever” the organisers say “It’s going to be a grassroots-led parade”.

But will there actually be much participation? Given the radical change in orientation of the event, together with the loss of corporate sponsorship, and the controversy over uniformed police being banned, some are predicting that it will be a flop. For instance, blogger Martyn Bradbury predicts that the walk “will be poorly attended and media coverage will be deeply negative.” He says that this “could all have a terrible backlash”, as many in the queer community and supportive public might be alienated by the organisers’ actions.

Bradbury has derided the organisers as producing an event for a liberal, politically correct elite rather than for everyday people. In one blogpost, he reflects: “so this is what woke politics leads to, a walk for pride with the Green caucus, half a dozen reporters from The Spinoff covering it and a handful of Action Station activists from Wellington coming up in a bus? This could be the first pride parade in history that actually goes backwards!” He sees “an enormous boycott of the event” taking place.

In fact, broadcaster Duncan Garner has called on the queer community to boycott the event. In an interview last month with Rainbow NZ chair Gresham Bradley (who said there had been a “political takeover” of the Pride Parade), Garner claimed that the current organisers retained their positions through undemocratic means – see: ‘Farcical stitch-up’: Calls to boycott Auckland Pride parade after board wins vote.

In another blow to the new-look parade, it was reported last week that the Auckland Council is forbidding its staff from attending in anything that might identify them as council employees – essentially a different sort of “uniform ban” – see Express’ news report: Auckland Council employees not to participate in official capacity at pride march.

Here’s the key part: “Auckland Council employees have been told they will not be participating in the February 9th March in any official capacity. Auckland Council employees have been told the Council will not be participating in next month’s Pride march which has replaced the traditional parade. Council employees are still able to participate but it must be in a private capacity with no council logos to be displayed.”

The same article also confirms that the parade is no longer being funded by the Auckland Council: “The news follows Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED) pulling their funding for the event as the new format of a ‘march’ did not meet Auckland Pride’s previously agreed outcomes with the council authority.”

It seems that the overall Pride Festival still has official Council support, but the new-look parade is now officially separate from the week of celebrations. On the Auckland Pride website all references to the parade have been removed, and when the Pride Festival publicity was released on Thursday, it contained nothing about what is usually the main event.

A separate coordinator has now also been hired for the new-look parade – former Green Party activist, Richard Green. Additionally, following ongoing resignations, the board has now been through the employment of two organisers for the main festival, and a third has just been hired – see Express’ Auckland Pride appoint new festival coordinator – the second in less than a month.

The Auckland Pride organising board has clearly been through a difficult time. But in December they survived an attempt to get them removed by a vote of no confidence. Discussing this, the board chair, Cissy Rock, told TVNZ Breakfast that the backlash on the police-ban had been stronger than she had expected: “I expected it to have repercussions but I didn’t think it was going to be like wildfire through the whole community” – see 1News’ After surviving coup, Auckland Pride Board chair remains defiant on police uniform ban, corporate backlash.

The same news item also gives the views of an opponent, Stacey Kerapa, who had previously been on the board organising the Hero Parade, and had worked as a sex worker and transgender advocate for decades.

Her experiences and opinions are also covered well in a very interesting article by Julie Hill: ‘They’re about to destroy nearly 35 years of gay progress with the police’. According to this, “Kerapa has bitter first-hand experience of how brutal police are capable of being to Māori trans people, but the progress made over the years means that the decision to ban uniformed cops is a huge mistake”.

Other members of the queer community have also been vehement in their condemnation of what’s happened to the Pride Parade. For the most furious, see Levi Joule’s How extremists hijacked the Auckland Pride board, railroaded a community and demolished our parade. And for a more unity-orientated critique of what has happened, see Michael Stevens’ Representing a real rainbow.

There have also been plenty of activists standing up for the new-look parade and the right of organisers to ban police. For example, PR professional David Cormack has written about the “commodification of the rainbow culture” and “sickening corporate ownership” which has attempted to pressure the organisers not to ban the police – see: The price of Pride.

And for a sympathetic account of the background to the decision to ban uniformed police from the march, see Sarah Murphy’s Pride and police: The history, issues and decisions behind the debate. She emphasises that this is about long-existing issues coming to the surface of the queer community, including: racism, transphobia, safety concerns, and “pinkwashing”. She points out that much of the debate has excluded young generations in the movement, “with those speaking out generally being older community members and people who are accustomed to having a platform”.

Finally, for one of the best accounts of the whole controversy, see last month’s 20-minute TVNZ item, The Story with John Campbell: The Pride Divide.

By Bryce Edwards.

“All liberation movements fall apart and devolve into factionalism” suggested Kim Hill yesterday in her RNZ interview with Pride festival board chairperson Cissy Rock. Although expressed in rather a negative way, Hill’s statement is one of the clearest observations of the current meltdown in the LGBTQ+ community over whether uniformed police should be allowed to march in the annual Auckland Pride parade. 

You can listen to the fascinating 23-minute encounter here: Cissy Rock – Pride Parade wrangle. The interview, which is sometimes terse and difficult, is a useful discussion of the colourful contemporary politics of identity, gender and sexuality that is part of the culture war tearing the queer community apart.

Of course if this current schism in the LGBTQ+ community proves anything, it’s that there really is no “queer community”. Instead there are broadly (at least) two different queer communities: a radical one and a mainstream one. And increasingly, it seems, the two sides can no longer be contained in one movement, let alone one Pride event.

The anti-police faction is championing a more anti-Establishment movement of protest, activism and an anti-authority ethos. This approach has a strong history in a movement that has had to fight in countries like New Zealand against a status quo that was opposed to their very existence.

The pro-police faction of the queer community now generally works alongside, as well as within, Establishment institutions such as the police, the armed forces, and corporations. After many important victories and a profound shift in public opinion, this element of the struggle has taken on a more politically mainstream character. This has meant that gay pride events have also gradually become less overtly political, and more mainstream.

These two radical and mainstream “factions” have always been there, but what’s changed is that it’s now simply proving too difficult to bridge these two sides together anymore. This has best been acknowledged by Green MP Jan Logie who says that the Pride board that organises the parade is making huge efforts to “hold together our communities, which have very different histories and realities” – see Jason Walls’ PM Jacinda Ardern says the Pride Parade is ‘at its best when it’s an inclusive event’.

The same article quotes other politicians expressing their disappointment and dismay about the Police and other institutions no longer participating in Auckland Pride. But should we be surprised about this major division in the queer community? Arguably, not.

A couple of weeks ago, when the issue first became public, I argued that the notion of a unified queer movement is akin to the idea that Māori form an homogenous group. As the Māori Party discovered, Māori as a putative political force actually can’t be easily contained in one political party: “The Māori Party was a lesson in this – it sought to represent Māori as some sort of homogenous voting group, but the contradictions of its support base meant that it broke apart (most notably with the more radical Hone Harawira departing)”

Likewise, there are very different political views and realities in the queer community, and these reflect the different demographics involved – see: The Schism in the LGBTQ+ movement over police (paywalled).

The evolution of sexual and gender progress in terms of civil rights and societal acceptance means that the whole basis of the “queer community” has changed. With important victories being achieved, the Pride march, for example, has come to reflect the mainstream majority of queers. It’s become a celebration rather than an activist event.

Politicians from all sides of the political spectrum now participate in Pride events, and large companies have become sponsors. The military, police, and prison officers have attended – increasingly in their uniforms. As part of the pride scene, now, there are rainbow coloured police cars and ANZ’s “GAYTMs” for withdrawing cash.

Not everyone in the queer community has welcomed this evolution. The more radical activists have been uncomfortable with the idea that “diversity” means banks, police, and other authority figures getting a place in their parade. For such radicals, these “oppressive” institutions are engaging in “pinkwashing” – in which institutions or corporations are seen as attempting to win over citizens and customers with superficial marketing.

There are other ways of thinking about the dispute. The Southland Times sees it as less about ingrained ideological differences in the movement, and more about the occasional problems of bureaucracy and democracy in all institutions – see: A momentarily pallid rainbow.

Here’s the editorial’s main point about the “whole shemozzle”: “Perhaps the Pride community is no more immune to eddies of disagreement, personality clashes, mishandled meetings, oldsters and youngsters exasperating each other, than the rest of us. In which case we’re seeing nothing much more than it being their turn to screw up, as malfunctioning committees are prone to do. Maybe, as one wag has noted, it’s just the case that the committee needs diversity training.”

The mainstream voices

To get a perspective on why many in the LGBTQ+ community are frustrated by the exclusion of the police from Pride, see Aziz Al-Sa’afin’s opinion piece: The not-so-inclusive Pride Parade. In this, Al-Sa’afin explains why he’s boycotting the parade. He complains about the radicals that are now organising the event: “They do not speak for me. They do not speak for my friends. And, quite frankly, they do not speak for the entire LGBTQI community.”

Also strongly opposed to the ban on the police, Levi Joule, a former editor of New Zealand LGBT publication Express, has hit out at the radicals: “Those views are outdated and out of touch with the vast majority of our community who pay taxes, raise children and have careers. The LGBT community is colourful and includes people from a range of political perspectives, religions and ethnicities” – see: Let uniformed LGBT police parade their Pride.

Joule makes it clear that the positions of the two sides are rather intractable: “it appears a small group with extremist agendas are once again dictating to the rest of the community who can and cannot participate in our parade and festival, regardless of what the overwhelming majority of LGBT people want. Similarly, a small group had prison officers banned from the 2017 parade, attempted to forcibly disrupt the Israeli embassy from marching in the 2014 parade and have asked for a number of corporations they don’t like to also be excluded.”

Mainstream allies are also putting the spotlight on the radicals in the movement, arguing that they are extremists – see, for example, David Farrar’s blogpost, So how extreme are PAPA? He argues, “The banning of the Police wearing uniforms at the Auckland Pride Parade has come about due to capture by an activist group called People Against Prisons Aotearoa. Now their agenda is not just banning of Police uniforms at the Pride Parade. They are at what is basically the lunatic end of the political spectrum. Don’t take my word for it. Read their manifesto.”

A number of international mainstream figures are being asked to comment on the dispute – see Aroha Awarau’s Rupert Everett on Auckland Pride Board’s police uniform ban: ‘We can’t pretend they don’t exist’.

It’s possible that although police might not march in the Pride parade, there may be a protest fancy-dress “police” force participating in February – see: Facebook group set up to ‘Attend Pride Parade dressed as a policeman!’ in wake of ban.

The radical voices

With a large number of the corporate sponsors pulling out of the Pride parade, ActionStation organiser Laura O’Connell Rapira has launched a crowdfunding campaign to replace lost business sponsorship – see Amy Williams’ Crowdfunding for Auckland Pride parade raises $3000 overnight. The money raised now totals about $16,000.

And along with Kassie Hartendorp, O’Connell Rapira has explained the opposition to Police marching in uniform: “Police uniforms represent oppression and violence to many rainbow folk and people of colour. Because the history of police toward rainbow folk and people of colour is violent. In the 1940s and 50s, it was still legal for gay men to be sentenced to whipping, flogging and hard labour” – see: Police and Pride: We need to heal our relationships first.

There are a number of leftwing activists in the radical camp, and activist Eva Allan has explained their strong differences with the more mainstream faction: “At the core of the current dispute is a failure of the privileged within the LGBT community to compromise in order to allow wider participation in what should be a more open, less pinkwashed Pride Parade. This is a continuation of the old politics of respectability, where wealthy LGBT people largely ignored the plight of the less well off in the community” – see: No Pride In the Police.

Laura O’Connell Rapira has also penned a political poem that nicely encapsulates the radical view – see: Brown bodies and blue uniforms.

Overseas allies are also being pulled in to give support for the radical position – see Mandy Te’s RuPaul’s Drag Race star films video in support of Auckland Pride Parade’s uniform ban.

There’s a serious ethnicity component to opposition to police involvement in Pride. Waikato University’s Leonie Pihama has outlined her problems with the police and justice system that are relevant to the decision to exclude the police – see her blogpost, A day in Twitter-Verse.

Pihama argues that many police efforts to be more sensitive to her community are just superficial: “Painting a rainbow on a car does not make that a different kind of Police diversity car, it is still a car that Takatāpui and LGBTIQ are placed into for arrest. Just like painting koru and the word “Pirihimana” on a Police car does not make it a ‘Māori-friendly’ car, it remains a Police Car.”

Finally, veteran leftwing commentator Chris Trotter has come out in support of the radicals, and he explains how “the rainbow community turned out to be so conservative” and says there’s a need to make more progress on the civil rights of those at the sharper end of current discrimination – the “trans community” – see: The Perils of inclusion.