James Ledward

When I agreed to advise on the Pride 'Unity Meeting', I knew well it would be tricky to bring it off and keep everyone happy.

Everyone has their views on this years Pride organisers. Some keep those views to themselves. Rose Collis, a respected local author chose to air her views at the 'Unity Meeting' last week. I think her views mirror those of many people in the community at large, which is why I published her statement in full on the Gscene website over the weekend.

With a community focused magazine I have a responsibility to reflect in full everyone’s views so that the 30,000 readers of Gscene are aware of them and not just the 100 people at the 'Unity Meeting' in Charles Street last week.

For future reference if you want to have a letter to the editor published on either the Gscene website or printed magazine please email info@gscene.com and include your name and full address and mark the letter for publication. As a policy, I will not engage in Facebook exchanges for publication.

Furthermore after learning at the 'Unity Meeting' that only 10 of the Pride Membership had bothered to turn up to their badly advertised Annual General Meeting I felt it even more important than ever to let the views of Rose Collis be aired in public.

In the run up to the 'Unity Meeting' I was also consulted by senior members of the LGBT voluntary sector who asked me if I could do anything to help draw a line under the growing bad feeling and personal attacks that this years Pride was attracting.

I told them I was in the process of negotiating the contents of an Open Letter to the Magazine from Paul Kemp at Aeon Events PR Ltd., owners of the Wild Fruit brand, following his removal from the Park this year by Pride Trustees, wishing everyone good luck for this years Pride, hopefully making it possible after the 'Unity Meeting' to draw a line under the present bad feelings and move forward more positively towards this years event in four weeks time. Paul Kemp's open letter to the magazine was run on this website at the start of last week.

When Scott Burey aka Drag With No Name approached me to help with the 'Unity Meeting', I asked him what exactly he wanted to achieve. He said he recognised that mistakes had been made this year by the Pride board, but he felt if there was no intervention there was a real possibility that Pride would not go ahead. With the information I had concerning Pride’s disastrous contract deals this year, I agreed with him and asked him to articulate exactly what his concerns were. He did and I helped him construct an Open Letter on the basis of what he told me, which was fine tuned by Andy Feest owner of the Queens Arms and Maria Baker owner at the Star Inn. That was the letter that appeared on the Gscene website inviting everyone to the public meeting at Charles Street.

Chris Gull agreed to facilitate the meeting as he had the LGBT voluntary sector forum and LGBT business meetings earlier in the year, to try and establish better links with Pride in Brighton and Hove. I think it is universally recognised that these forums failed in their aims to improve better communication with Pride Trustees and became viewed as talking shops to silence Pride’s critics.

Back to the meeting at Charles Street.

Pride, or should I say the acting chair of Pride Robert James aka as Lady James fielded all the questions during the first part of the meeting.

His basic message was everything was OK and Pride would be the same as last year.

No details were given.

He acknowledged mistakes had been made but it seemed they were everyone elses fault except Prides, even the City Council came under criticism for telling Pride to tone things down on the park which they said led them to the disastrous series of decisions they made during 2009-10. Whatever….

The 'Unity Meeting' was not the time to go over old ground.

It was quite a well-tempered meeting. Brian Ralfe, someone born and bred in the city, added his usually frank observations, explaining that as a community we had been here before, seen new people come and cause chaos at Pride and then move on leaving the community to pick up the pieces.

The intervention of Rose Collis, a respected local author, very old school in her approach, surprised many in the room, including myself. Rarely have I seen a professional deliver a message so effectively, with passion and controlled anger as Rose did.

Afterwards she told me:
“It had to be said.”

She explained that she had come along to the 'Unity Meeting' to listen. What she heard was that it was everyone elses fault, Facebook, the council(!), Wilde Ones, 19Events Ltd, the Women’s Performance Tent, Calabash.

“It reminded me of Blair and Campbell at the Iraq enquiry” she said:
“Mistakes were made. Lessons will be learned. But lets move on’. And not once did anyone from Pride say were really sorry for what had happened”.

She continued:
“For me personally that admission would have changed everything and made my statement redundant”.

A few people with business interests in the event made their contributions and on the whole the meeting ended with everyone singing from the same hymn sheet.

Businesses present wanted and needed Pride to happen to get them through the dark winter months, as did most of the people in the room want Pride to happen also.

Members of the voluntary sector had their say and to their credit stood their ground when the chair of Pride told them they were wrong.

I made my only contribution to the evening when asking the Chair of Pride to confirm if he was calling the women’s tent organisers Sheila McWattie a liar, after he told her she was wrong.

During the interval it turned out that the chair of Pride and the women’s tents organiser were taking about two different meetings, which accounted for their 'misunderstanding'. However, Sheila McWattie stands by her assertion that Pride misled them on the viability of funding for the Women’s Performance Tent this year.

The important thing it that a representative from the diversity areas on the park had their say in public, on the record and challenged Pride's version of events regarding funding issues.

The bottom line is that many people don’t care anymore about Pride, they are so over Pride 2010 after the series of bad decisions the Trustees have made.

Only 10 people bothered to turn up to the Pride Annual General Meeting. Only 700 people bothered to vote in the Real Brighton, Pride Straw Poll. 5,000 people voted in the recent Golden Handbag Awards, so maybe that is an indication of community engagement on the issue.

The big surprise of the evening was the announcement that there were only six Pride Trustees left organising the event after fourteen originally started at the start of the present campaign. I know personally that at least one of the remaining six trustees has been talked out of resigning recently.

There had been no announcement by Pride that they had such few Trustees left organising the event and there had been no announcement that they needed any help.

Robert James aka Lady James said that the Pride trustees had been afraid to put their heads above the parapet for fear of ridicule and attack.

I admire Robert James the acting chair for taking responsibility for his staff and fielding the questions at the 'Unity Meeting' but I am afraid there are only so many times you can say “I am only an entertainer and don’t know the answer” and keep everyone on board with you with any confidence.

The answers to the problems with Pride 2010 lie much deeper, but now is not the time to get any resolutions.

Scott Burey, aka Drag With No Name started the meeting by saying his main concern was the various Facebook groups that had been set up to express peoples concerns about this years Pride and wished they would desist from their unpleasantness.

The following morning a group a Worthing based bloggers who in my view are clearly briefed by the Pride press machine were out doing their damage on the Facebook Groups.

It is a real shame. We have a community being ripped apart by people, many who don’t even come from Brighton, some who are not LGBT, and I am not clear whether they understand what Pride is about. If they want to help diffuse the present situation I suggest they desist from giving their views on the Facebook groups. Better still why not organise a Worthing Pride and challenge the institutional homophobia within Worthing Council.

In future it is vital to consider if anyone with political links should have anything to do with a community based organisation like Pride. The involvement of a Pride Trustee this year with perceived links to one of the political parties has been particularly unhelpful in maintaining a cross party consensus and in my view delayed council intervention.

It was agreed at the 'Unity Meeting' that after this years Pride, Brighton and Hove's new process for public scrutiny would be engaged with to investigate why problems beset this year organisers. The Pride Trustees have agreed to sign up to this process after the event and have agreed for another public meeting to be called after the event to discuss the process in detail.

That is the time to sort Prides problems out not in the next month.

I privately fed back to leaders of the LGBT voluntary sector before the 'Unity Meeting' that I would find away of trying to draw a line under the present unpleasantness and try to get us to the coming Pride in one piece.

I have decided no matter what the public interest is, in the next month, I will run no more Open Letters. The community have had their say and now is the time for everyone to cross their fingers and hope everything comes together for the big day.

Throughout the year, Pride Trustees have continually played ‘victim’ blaming a small group of individuals who “no longer make money out of Pride” for all their problems.

Everything is everyone else’s problem except Prides. The Trustees lack leadership on the board and their press and PR strategy has been a shameful disaster better suited to the tactics a brothel manager in Bangkok might employ rather than that of the guardians of one of the cities treasures.

Their press strategy was fatally flawed because it failed to recognise that city wide there were concerns about many of the aspects of this year event and how diversity was being reflected on the Park. Off the record concerns have been raised to me from every sector of the community and the media about this years shenanigans. All the media, both local and national have expressed worries at one stage or another about this year’s event. Everyone is so desperate for the event to happen, normal rationale goes out of the window.

As I said at the Golden Handbags last month too many people have sat on the Pride fence. If they had come off and said what they really thought, many of the problems could have been sorted out months ago rather than 41 days before our biggest day of the year.

Prides problems have nothing to do with negative publicity from the press its more about LGBT people taking ownership of one of the communities treasures. This will never happen while the Pride organisation is accountable to the Charity Commission first and the community last.

The Facebook Groups continue to spout their bile and half truths. Few people bother to read them anymore. They just serve to create a record of what has been going on these last 10 months.

What is important is that a few people for once put their heads above the parapet.

I would like to thank Scott Burey, Maria Baker and Andy Feest for calling the 'Unity Meeting' and for Chris Marshall at Charles Street for allowing the club to be used for it. I hope they got what they wanted from it.

I would like to thank Rose Collis for her contribution. Rose is old school and understands what Community is all about. Hopefully more old school activists will follow her example in trying to reclaim this event for the community AFTER this year’s event.

I remind you of the end of my speech at the Golden Handbags Awards last month which was given when 19 Events Ltd were still associated with the event.

"To those out there who have sat on the fence and said nothing, you have let yourselves down first and the community second.

"To the wanabees that Pride provides the oxygen of celebrity to. We have been here before. The legacy of 2010 will be about your egos rather than the community you should be serving. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

"To those businesses who have dipped their snouts into the Pride trough this year for the first time hoping to benefit from the years of hard work that a few descent, honest people put into this event, please remember the eyes of the community will remain focused on you and your actions not only this year but for the duration of your contracts.

"To the Pride Trustees, never forget you are merely the guardians of the event for the LGBT community at large. The model you are working to puts the needs of the charity commission before Brighton’s Gay community and that cannot be right.

Now is the time for silence and action. Leave the unresolved questions to the Council’s Scrutiny Process after the event and try and have a happy Pride.