‘What I was told about lesbians really did shock me. It can’t be true, can it? You’re all vegetarians?’: Greywashing Gay Shame in Pride

Abstract

Celebrated by film journalists as the feel-good film of 2014 ( Kermode, 2014; Osboldstone, 2014), Pride depicted the unlikely alliance between a group of London based gay activists and the miners from a small, Welsh village during the miners’ strike of 1984. However, the film can also be read as a nostalgic representation of a specific agenda of British Gay Liberation politics in the early 1980s – a period in which one of the main trajectories of Gay Lib was to attempt to eradicate the stigma and shame from the identification of being gay. This article will argue that the film’s inclusion of the fictional character of Gwen is an effective technique of focalising the gay pride mantra through the point of view of a very endearing, older woman whose unassuming and innocent perspective on gender and sexuality politics emphasises the key point made by a faction of Gay Lib at the time: sexual object choice should be no more remarkable than a preference for a specific type of gastronomic fare. This narrative technique can identified as greywashing.