PRIDE BEFORE THE FALL
It started with Queen Victoria. In 1972, Auckland’s Gay Liberation Movement gathered around her statue in Albert Park,taping messages to her base like“Camp comes out” and “Better blatant than latent”. It was the first action in a new, more forthright demand for gay rights in this country, and visibility was the rallying cry: that gay New Zealanders should be able to come out of the closet without fear of violence, be proud, and, above all, be seen, by New Zealand’s mainstream, heterosexual, predominantly conservative culture.
Which is exactly why the #ourmarch walk in February 2019 started with Queen Victoria, too. This time, the bronze monarch was holding a rainbow flag. The embattled board of Auckland Pride, still navigating the fallout from its decision that police couldn’t march in their regular uniforms in the 2019 Pride Parade (police officers themselves were never banned), had organised a community walk from Albert Park, following the university graduation route, down to Queen St and up to Myers Park. The board’s chair, Cissy Rock, who’d been vilified by many as the architect of Auckland Pride’s downfall, moved through the crowd handing out rainbow flags. The parade itself, with all its sponsors and floats and families lining Ponsonby Rd, originally scheduled for the following Saturday, had been cancelled.
Auckland’s LGBTQI+ community was cleaved in two by the police uniforms decision. For one side, it was an enormous insult and an act of exclusion towards an organisation that had, they claimed, been working hard for years to improve its attitudes towards, and relationships with, queer people.
For the other, though, the request that police ditch their uniforms for a day was a gesture of solidarity: that though things may have improved for some minority groups, there was still a long way to go — particularly when it came to police treatment of Māori, Pacific and transgender communities. New Zealand’s disproportionate prison and police violence statistics, and controversial double-bunking prison policies that put transgender inmates at potential risk, were cited as evidence our law enforcement was far from perfect.
The acrimony within Auckland’s LGBTQI+ community has been extraordinary. Many people who were close to the events — particularly those opposed to the board’s decision — didn’t want to speak for this story, on or off the record. Others who have spoken have often done so with barely concealed anger, or a kind of sad exhaustion. Several board members have given their side of the story, too.
The split was exacerbated by social media, and by a corporate PR panic that saw sponsor after sponsor pull their support for the Pride Parade. Media organisations poured fuel on the fire, too, and it seemed that in the space of just a month — November 5, when the board made its final decision, to December 6, when a no-confidence motion against that same board was defeated — Auckland’s LGBTQI+ community had fallen apart.
“I think there’s a misconception that we were just bored at a meeting one day and made a kneejerk decision to ban the police,” Zakk d’Larté, the Pride Board’s longest-serving current member (first appointed in 2016), says. “It’s almost laughable. They were never banned, which we’ve always reiterated, but that got lost somewhere in the media.”
So what actually happened? The first that most of the public knew about the split was last November, when the board’s decision was made public. But in fact, the lead-up to that decision had been months, and even years, in the making.
And underneath it all were fundamental questions: what are the Pride movement’s politics, and what form should they take, in an era when many rights in New Zealand have already been won? What are the community’s responsibilities to each other in an age of “pinkwashing” and the corporate pursuit of the rainbow dollar? And what does solidarity look like, amid the vicious digital tribalism of social media?
Auckland Pride was born in 2013, the year New Zealand’s marriage equality amendment was passed. It was a celebration of how far things had come for
