Baby’s First Protest

So once again I’m late with this, because I’ve had other stuff going on, but I finally have the time to talk about the protest I went to on the 22nd (yes I’m aware that it’s the 16th now so I’m like nearly a month late but better late than never).

As with most protests, the origins of this one were not great. Here in Liverpool, there’s been a scarily sharp increase in homophobic attacks. There have been four or five really well publicized ones in the past month alone, but there’s been a hell of a lot more that didn’t get flooded on social media. So the protest was organized by a few local queer organizations to essentially say “hell no, we won’t stand for this, it’s our city too”. And honestly, it was awesome.

It was only a fairly short thing. We met in the city centre at one, a couple of local activists did some speeches and then we marched around the city centre being aggressively queer to assert our dominance. Okay that last part was kind of a joke, but we were being very loud and very very gay. There was a lot of support from people who weren’t part of the march, local news teams turned up (one of which caught me walking crotch-first into a bollard on camera — thank you North West Tonight for editing that out) and it was a very positive, if quite short thing.

I’m sorry to say that just a week ago there was another well publicized attack, so the protest doesn’t seem to have changed much BUT there was so much support from so many people including people on the local council and the police, that I’m hoping things improve at least a little. It’d be nice to feel confident and safe enough to go out in my pride t-shirts again.

There’s another march tomorrow to call out our shitty equalities minister, Liz Truss, and drive the movement to get non-binary identities recognized legally. I’m hoping to be able to go along to it, but in light of the recent attacks I’m a little apprehensive since I’ll be going alone. But since it’s an issue that’s very personal for me and a number of my friends, I’ll try to swallow that little bit of fear and turn up.