A couple of queer mates take a VHS camera to Brighton Pride for a laugh, and capture the 500-strong march on its way from Hove peace statue past Brighton clock tower. See Brighton Pride as you may never have seen it before, in some of the earliest known footage.
Filmed and stashed away, I rediscovered it in a drawer in 2012: 17 minutes of slightly shaky footage. Initially I made a 3 minute film out of it, but when I shared it people wanted to see the whole march, so it’s now 10 minutes long. I’ve labelled it a ‘home movie’ as there’s nothing very profesh about it!
Apologies for the quality but it was filmed straight onto a VHS cassette in a camera the size of a small washing machine perched on my shoulder. There’s also about 10 seconds where the image jumps about a bit, just after Peter Tatchell starts a speech. I hit the special effects button by accident. Sorry about that.
We follow the march to The Level, where a host of delights await us!
The Brighton AIDS memorial quilt (1993) is briefly visible in the film, being carried along Victoria Gardens. There are a number of people in this film who are no longer with us, which I guess is inevitable over time, but especially in the early 1990s. Unless you were lucky, contracting HIV/AIDS was likely to be death sentence at this point, it wasn’t until 1996 that a combination of drugs started to turn that around.
All these years later it turns out to be the earliest film of Brighton Pride. That makes me feel a little bad, I wish I’d tried a bit harder, interviewed some people or something. It is what it is…
Show me more!
Well… seeing as you asked so nicely… there are seven photos of Brighton Pride in 1994 taken by Jay Brady which you can see in the Queer Heritage South digital archive. You can see there was a small stage at the event, which doesn’t feature in my film. Not for any reason, probably just shyness on my behalf.
