The body politic

Olivia Laing was 11 when she went on her first protest march. Accompanying her mother and her mother’s friends on a Pride march in the UK in the late 1980s, the author and cultural critic remembers the glamour and excitement, but also a furious energy.

“It was the time of the Aids crisis, so it was a bleak and terrifying time. Pride was so different then. It was oppositional and very, very angry, but also very joyous.”

Laing remembers Pride as a powerful countercultural movement. But she also remembers the uneasy time of Section 28, a law introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government to ban the “promotion” of homosexuality. “I remember there was a debate at my school about whether gay people should be allowed to have children. And I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is terrifying’. It’s actually really hard to convey to young people how there isn’t quite that