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Ashton was aware that this discrimination was experienced by other socially disadvantaged groups and that, to challenge hegemony, it could be beneficial for disparate minorities, whom the ruling class would prefer to see disunited, to coalesce for effective politics. A key tenet of 1980s Gay Liberation was the belief that lesbians and gays were not merely united by a shared same-sex sexual desire but by ‘the social experience of discrimination and prejudice’ ( Watney, 1994: 17). Ashton was a socialist, originally from Northern Ireland, who recognised that strategies of oppression were exercised by the ruling class against a range of minority groups. Mark Ashton, a 24-year-old gay activist from London, founded the support group ‘Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners’ (hereafter LGSM) to raise money for the miners’ strike. One strategy to bypass this problem was that support groups could give financial aid directly to specific mining communities. During the strike, it was pointless for support groups to send money directly to the miners’ union - given that the Thatcher government froze the funds of the National Union of Mineworkers. The Feel-Good, ‘Alternative Heritage’ Film of the Year: PrideĬelebrated by film journalists as one of the most uplifting films of 2014 ( Kermode, 2014 Osboldstone, 2014), Pride narrates the events from the miners’ strike of 1984 when a group of London based lesbian and gay activists raised money to support families that had been affected by the striking action. 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. While the main theme of Pride is that alliances can blossom between diverse communities, the film is also a nostalgic representation 1 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 eradicate the stigma and shame from the identification of being gay. This article will argue that this sequence is a key example of Pride’s strategy of focalising gay liberation politics through the perspective of a charming, and most importantly, older character: a narrative technique that I shall label greywashing. However, this expectation is reversed by Gwen merely inquiring about the lesbians’ preferred choice of cuisine.
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Gwen frames the question with a statement that this information was very shocking to her – thus leading the spectator to infer that her query will be something related to sexual acts. In one of the laugh-out-loud moments in Pride, the character Gwen – an older woman from the mining town of Onllwyn – asks a charmingly innocent question of her new lesbian friends while they’re enjoying a drink together in the village club. This narrative technique can identified as greywashing. 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. 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. 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.