There is power in a union.

[commodorified]

The Public Service Alliance of Canada (those nice folks who helped bring you the weekend, the long weekend, paid sick leave, paid parental leave, etc), also brought to Ottawa a free screening of Pride this afternoon.

So, after riding to Elgin Street and dropping in on The First Annual Majestic Family Fun Day: A Celebration of Family Diversity in Recognition of International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia (IDAHTB) & Victoria Day for a bit, we rode down to the Mayfair and, in the company of many other people both willing and able to sing along with Solidarity Forever, watched a brilliantly acted, powerful, funny, defiantly unironic, shamelessly touching movie about urban queer kids in the UK in the 80s and the striking miners in Wales.

It was completely awesome, more due to than despite the fact that if it hadn't all happened pretty much exactly as the movie portrays it your suspension of disbelief would snap somewhere between the time Bronski Beat show up to play a benefit called Pits and Perverts and the point where the Miner's Union shows up en masse to march in the London Pride Parade in '85. (These days, unions - and everyone else - lines up to be in Pride Parades as a matter of community engagement/targeted marketing. Those days were not these days. This was three years before I began to come out, and five years before my first Pride, and even in 1990 in Toronto marching in the Pride parade involved equal chances of heatstroke and having to dodge small missiles.)

So, yeah, Pride. Go see it. it's awesome.

“You have worn our badge, ‘Coal not Dole’, and you know what harassment means, as we do. Now we will pin your badge on us; we will support you.

Comments

[legionseagle]

Is that movie OK though? Given I live in a Britain which has gay marriage but where all the pits are shut, I'm terrified it's going to be a story about co-option of a struggle that was life or death to the communities involved by a savvy group of gay campaigners who then got off the bandwagon without a backwards glance once their fundamental aims were achieved.

I'm not sure

[commodorified]

That I'm qualified to judge that. The interviews, etc, that I've found make it clear that the miners and family members involved at the time still have very good memories and are still glad that GLSM did what they did, and that's the most I can safely say.

My impression - from interviews, not the film - is that Ashton and the others weren't naive about how getting involved in the miner's strike would help them, but they genuinely showed up, did the work, raised the money, and cared deeply about the outcome.

Re: I'm not sure

[legionseagle]

Oh, well, I suppose that's fair enough. It's just been something that's made me steer slightly clear of the film; I understand (again from interviews) that a lot of the GLSM were themselves working class but this review (which was when it first came out here) certainly didn't make it look that way.

Re: I'm not sure

[commodorified]

It does come out strongly in the film, I thought.

A little less emphasised but still there is that GLSM were not only strongly working-class, several of them were (are) committed, educated socialists or communists, not just a random grouping of gays who happened to get caught up in this fight, and I don't feel - being one of them myself, albeit younger - that that strain of GLBT activist ever really got off the bandwagon, though I suspect that the explosion of the AIDS crisis pulled a lot of queer people's attention inwards around then.

It was the queer contingent at PSAC that organised this showing, so. We are still here.

Re: I'm not sure

[legionseagle]

Yes; that'll make me a lot happier about seeing it when it comes on TV. I can sort of see why it might have been promoted in the UK with a sort of whiff of "middle-class kids on a gap year in the Third World, Wales" but it put my back up.

The Labour Party in the early 1980s really were risking losing a lot of votes by putting gay issues front and centre -- one of the faint gleams in a terrible election was that the electors of Bermondsey finally kicked Simon 'The Straight Alternative' Hughes out, 32 years too late -- and I think the AIDS crisis also made that blow up badly in their faces, too; on the one hand, at least they'd created the conditions where safe sex and not having people arrested on suspicion of street prostitution if they had condoms on their person could at least be discussed (and the awful tombstone ads, oh God!) but on the other hand not only did it make it even more of a vote-loser it did, as you say, pull the queer community's attention towards tackling the specific not the general issues of what was wrong with the 80s.

Re: I'm not sure

[commodorified]

Oof I should sleep.

Anyway, what I was trying, badly, to say was that I think that the primary result to union politics is that queer folks came to see labour rights as crucial and joined unions and got involved in union work in largish numbers, which still seems to be true to this day, rather than there being more LGSMs as such, though the fundraisers seem to have stuck around.

Re: I'm not sure

[lexin]

That's very true, including in my union. PCS had a large and active Pride group, which was very influential on the union's thinking.

Re: I'm not sure

[tree_and_leaf]

I don't think it's that. It's a film about solidarity, on both sides (albeit not without pragmatic touches, on both sides). I thought the film told the story quite well - it's not without nuance. By the end, both 'sides' seem to see both their struggles as part of the same struggle, and that's not changed by the fact that they win on one front but lose on the other. The working class backgrounds of many of LGSM's characters are dealt with (I don't know how Kermode missed that*) and the ending is certainly not supposed to be straight-forwardly happy. I think calling it 'feel-good' is a bit misleading. It doesn't duck the fact that the miners lost, and it doesn't see that as anything other than a tragic defeat - but also that there was pride in the battle that was fought.

It's not a perfect film, but I think it's a good one.


* The view-point character is lower-middle, rather than working class - but that, I think, is for exposition purposes - he's only just coming to terms with his sexuality and both the gay community and the mining community are new worlds to him.

Re: I'm not sure

[legionseagle]

It's odd, because if I recall correctly, Kermode was one of the leading voices pointing out that people calling Slumdog Millionaire a "feel-good" movie was a trifle -- incomplete, at best. So I do expect him to know the difference between "uplifting" and "feel-good", both of which terms are used interchangeably in that review, but which I think have important differences between them.

Re: I'm not sure

[tree_and_leaf]

It's strange - maybe he was just having an off day? I usually like Kermode, but I didn't think that was a good (as in, perceptive) review.

Re: I'm not sure

[legionseagle]

Well, it certainly sounds as if he saw a radically different movie from you, commodorified and lexin

Re: I'm not sure

[commodorified]

Go see ours, definitely. *nods seriously*

[lexin]

It isn't like that, it really isn't. It does make it clear that these activists stuck around.

[legionseagle]

Oh, good. I really was put off by Kermode's review. I don't know if it's Kermode, who's usually pretty sound on that sort of thing on his Wittertainment podcast, or if the Guardian thought mentioning socialism too often would freak their advertisers and so subbed him to death, but it's full of the sort of phrases that make the blud thik etc:
"the unlikely union between striking Welsh miners and out-and-proud gay Londoners "
"George MacKay is Joe, a just-turned-20 mummy’s boy on the brink of coming out"
"gobby Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) and his friends at London’s Gay’s the Word bookshop"
"Onllwyn, a mining village in the Dulais valley, which seems to view “gays” and vowels with equal suspicion."*
"Cue much La Cage aux Folles-style culture-clashing between the macho miners and metrosexual activists, mediated by theatrical luvvie Jonathan (Dominic West), who busts some outre disco moves with oddly unifying results."

And so on and so forth.



*I have a particular hatred of journalists who make that particular joke about Welsh vowels; it's an official language of a component country of the UK and how fucking difficult is it to remember "w" is pronounced "oo" anyway?

[lexin]

I dunno, it's clear Kermode loved it - and there's a lot to love in this movie. It's a really good, feelgood movie about left wingers with a great sound track. And there aren't enough of those, IMO.

[legionseagle]

Oh, I know the love comes out -- there was just something about how he kept banging on about "London" and "metrosexual" that didn't make me imagine Militant kids from Southwall or Elephant.

[legionseagle]

Perhaps I'll take a look in Fopp & see if they do a Blu-Ray.

[commodorified]

I hope you'll post a review if you do! As you know, we go hard for both the queers and the unions around here, but Canadian labour history and UK labour history have, I think more divergence than GLBT history does, and there are a lot of things I sort of took on faith, watching, because what I know about The Strike isn't nothing, but it's fairly broad strokes. So I'd very much like to see how it all seems to you.

[commodorified]

Do you, by chance, wish to own said soundtrack?

I am being extremely frustrated by the fact that it's in the UK iTunes store but not the Canadian one, and I can't seem to find it anywhere else.

I would be more than happy to cover the 5.99 GBP purchase price if you wouldn't object to putting it in my Dropbox for me. We would then both have it.

[lexin]

I bought it; I'm more than happy to share it with you if you can give me some kind of hint where the files might be hiding. I'll then drop copies in my dropbox and you can download them. No charge.

omg UR BEST

[commodorified]

If you bought it on the apple store it should be in your iTunes, once it's downloaded.

ETA: or, possibly, I don't understand the question. is it "where's my soundtrack?", or "where are the copyable files?"

In the second case, you can drag them from iTunes to a desktop folder for upload, which will copy rather than move them so you don't lose them yourself.

Otherwise there should be a folder in your iTunes system files marked 'music' and then it's probably under Compilations or Various Artists.

[commodorified]

It's been 1985 in this living room all night!

[commodorified]

One of the characters does make a vowel joke. Only once, and while he's very nervous about meeting the miners, and also has gotten everyone lost by misreading the map, but it does happen.

Welshness is not a running joke.

[lexin]

There is one other Welsh joke, but it's about the issues that the North and South Welsh people have with each other. And it is funny.

[commodorified]

Oh Lord, I'd forgotten that one. I spat popcorn.

[amazon_syren]

But there *are* a tonne of Welsh Tropes in it. The singing. The fact that there secretary is a straight-up Bard (not officially, but a poet-historian? Bard). It's not treated as a joke, but the stereotypes are still in there, right along with the flaming theatre fag and the dyke drama.

[commodorified]

I just had to come back to go "buh?" at 'metrosexual', which I must have blown past originally.

Kermode doesn't know his history. That is not metrosexual anything: it is straight-up blatant political faggotry of the highest order.

[stardreamer]

That quote sends shivers down my spine. That's the sound of history being made.

[commodorified]

As it mentions at the end of the film: in '87 the Labour Party finally enshrined equal rights for gays in their platform. The deciding block of votes was the UCM.

[legionseagle]

As I said above, that might have been when it got onto the platform but it was certainly happening at grass-roots level within the party significantly earlier; they selected Peter Tatchell to fight the Bermondsey by-election in 1983, for example.

And section 28 came in the 1988 Local Government Act in May 1988 and that wasn't just in response to conference in 87; it was much more a response to what had happened in the individual London boroughs following the breakup of the LCC in 1986.

[commodorified]

I think they actually say it had been proposed before, but that it was the support of the UCM that caused it to pass that year.

It was the bit on the end titles right after they tell you Mark Ashton died two years later so, um, I may have been seeing the screen less than clearly?

[tree_and_leaf]

I couldn't swear to it, but I'm pretty sure you're right.

[nenya_kanadka]

I loved that movie. It was so awesome. <3

[buddleia]

I was highly suspicious of this film. I'm just too young to have been there on the marches but I was sure as hell around in the grubbiness of the 80s. I was worried it would be twee and sanitised and the promos didn't help. I loved it so much I nearly cried. I came out of the cinema full of rekindled fire for community and socialism and all the stuff we used to read about in self-deprecating shaky-line wimmin's comics in the late 80s.

[amazon_syren]

I fucking love that movie.
I learned Bread And Roses specifically because of it.
Oh my heavens, my heart. <3 <3 <3