Cut, Paste, Resist

Community and Pride

This year marks the 5th Porty Pride celebration, a milestone that feels especially significant for a grassroots, community-led festival built on care, creativity, and collective joy. What began as a local celebration has grown into an important inclusive space for LGBTQ+ people, allies, families, friends, and neighbours to come together in Portobello. 

At its heart, Porty Pride has always been about community: creating a space where people feel seen, safe, and connected across generations. Yet Porty Pride also exists within a much longer history of queer activism in Scotland, one shaped not only by celebration but by resistance, solidarity, and mutual support.

Queer Liberation in Scotland

For many people, Pride history in Scotland begins with Pride Scotia, the country’s first official Pride event held in Edinburgh in June 1995. However, queer liberation movements had already been active for decades. In 1970, activists Bob Mellors and Aubrey Walter founded the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a movement radical in both its politics and imagination. Rather than simply asking for tolerance or legal reform, the GLF demanded liberation, aligning itself with feminist movements, anti racist struggles, workers’ rights campaigns, and broader fights against inequality.

This intersectional understanding that systems of oppression are deeply connected remains central to queer activism today. Queer liberation has never existed in isolation. It has always been tied to questions of class, race, gender, disability, housing, healthcare, and access to safe public spaces. 

Community-led Pride events like Porty Pride continue this legacy by centering inclusion, accessibility, and collective care, rather than the corporate spectacle and ‘pink washing’, often seen from large brands and institutions. 

As Porty Pride celebrates its fifth year, it feels important to recognise both how far queer communities in Scotland have come and the challenges that still remain. At a time when LGBTQ+ rights, particularly trans rights, continue to face political and social hostility, grassroots spaces of solidarity and care matter more than ever. 

Creating Space

Pride began as both a protest and a community. Perhaps its greatest strength lies in its ability to bring people together across generations, identities, and experiences to celebrate queer lives while continuing the ongoing work of building a more inclusive and joy-filled future.

The 1980s marked one of the most difficult periods for LGBTQ+ communities in the UK. Against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, fear and prejudice were amplified by politicians and the media. Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced the infamous Section 28, or Clause 28, in 1988, legislation that prohibited local authorities and schools from ‘promoting homosexuality’. The impact was devastating, particularly for young queer people growing up in silence and shame, often without access to information, support, or representation. Yet even in the face of hostility and institutional oppression, queer communities continued to create spaces of resistance and survival. 

In Scotland, protests such as the ‘Lark in the Park’ demonstration at the Ross Bandstand in Princes Street Gardens in May 1988 became important public moments of visibility and solidarity. Alongside these demonstrations, quieter forms of community building were taking place every day in queer bookshops, cafés, bars, arts venues, and community centres. 

These spaces mattered because they allowed people to find one another. They became places where friendships formed, activism was organised, knowledge was shared, and futures beyond isolation could be imagined. Volunteer-led organisations like Porty Pride and community-driven businesses like Tribe Porty support this ethos today, fostering environments where queer people can celebrate and live without fear. 

Print Culture

Print culture also played a vital role in queer community organising. Long before social media, zines, flyers, newsletters, and independent journals allowed LGBTQ+ people to tell their own stories in their own words. Publications such as Gay Left (1975 to 1980) and Sappho (1972 to 1981) explored the intersections between sexuality, socialism, feminism, and anti-capitalist politics, while DIY zines created democratic spaces for personal reflection, creativity, and grassroots political discussion.

For many queer people, the alternative press became a way of documenting lives and experiences that mainstream media ignored or erased entirely. These publications were collaborative, personal, affordable, and accessible, passed hand to hand through communities and created networks of solidarity long before digital platforms existed.

That history feels especially important now. Originating as a bookshop in the 1980’s and now archive, Edinburgh’s own Lavender Menace continues the work of preserving queer stories and ensuring these histories are not forgotten. More importantly, they remind us that queer history is not only shaped by major political events or famous figures, but also by everyday acts of care, creativity, friendship, and collective organising.

An Invitation 

To honour this history and recognise the importance of the alternative and informal press, our team here at Tribe Porty will host a queer zine-making workshop alongside a wine tasting session with Kirsty from Bludge Wine. The themes will centre on queer history, activism, and joy, and we will also be launching our co-worker Danielle Mustarde’s new magazine, Tell Me How You Really Feel.

Through these events, we hope to create and celebrate new work that follows in the footsteps of the queer people and allies who came before us.

Friday 5th June, 7-9PM. Book your spot here.

Special Note: Lavender Menace’s funding is at risk – help save them & protect queer history!  To donate to their fundraiser, head here.

Thanks for reading,

Sonny

As always we’d love to connect and hear your thoughts, let us know what you think and what you want to see more of at Tribe Porty. You can read our latest Annual Report here. 

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