BY Sachini Perera
On a humid and sticky afternoon in June, I was chatting to a friend from the community (shorthand for the LGBTQ community) over some iced milo and passionfruit juice, and she and I were complaining about how many Pride events we’ve been running around to all month. Then we stopped and laughed because what a great problem it is to have. How wonderful it is that public Pride celebrations in Sri Lanka have grown beyond being organized by one or two groups, beyond Colombo, beyond homonationalist groups, beyond English-speaking upper middle class, beyond embassy-sponsored events. I promised myself I wouldn’t use too many words on my Reflection this time so this is not the time or place for me to pontificate on the politics of Pride or what it means to me or doesn’t mean to me (especially in the context of all the dehumanizing rhetoric against the community coming from the Parliament and beyond as I write this) so I’m sharing a few photos and videos from arguably my favorite Pride event in Sri Lanka, the Freedom Pride Parade.
Organized by Generation Pride, a volunteer-led collective of LGBTQIA+ Sri Lankans (and all-round awesome people), the Freedom Pride Parade is the largest public Pride gathering in Sri Lanka. First organized in 2022 alongside the economic crisis and massive people’s protests or Aragalaya in Sri Lanka, the parade is organized with the firm belief and politics that LGBTIQ+ liberation is intertwined with the liberation of all people, bodies and territories. This year’s parade featured messages and demands ranging from decriminalizing homosexuality, rights of garment workers in Sri Lanka’s free trade zones, Free Palestine, ending microfinancing debts to abortion rights, ending IMF-imposed austerity measures that affect the poorest, abolishing draconian laws like the Prevention of Terrorism Act, abolishing the Executive Presidency, and ending arbitrary arrests and police brutality.
The Freedom Pride Parade stood as an embodied, caring (and humid and sticky) reminder that Pride is solidarity across movements, issues and peoples. Pride is building power. Pride is a protest.
The 2024 Freedom Pride Parade led by members of the community including community elder and founder of Companions on a Journey, Sherman de Rose.
Activists locating the parade within the genocide in Gaza and interconnected struggles for freedom and autonomy.
Performance by Bakeriye Kattiya (people of the bakery, in Sinhala), an alternative art group, with a float that presumably depicted queer liberation, being pulled back by demons representing opposing and oppressive forces.
Video clip of the float.
Giant Pride flag….
….that takes a village to carry.
A sample of messages and slogans at the parade.
A parade strong and loud enough to attract the attention of some opposition (and us laughing in the foreground as a coping mechanism).
There was dancing (but of course).
And there was slaying. Ps. Insert something something about police and gender.
This friendly dog who couldn’t get enough of the parade and walked all the way to the endpoint with us (over 2km).
As I wrote in the beginning, what a treat it is to see so many groups organizing around Pride in so many ways, whether it is Heart2Heart or Equite in Colombo or Aruvi celebrating Malaiyaga Pride in Nuwara Eliya, or Jaffna Pride. At the same time, what does it mean to be in our bodies, minds, families, relationships, jobs and everyday-survival-mode when there is such little space, safety and imagination afforded to us to be ourselves outside of the community or the concentric circles of affordances that open up to us depending on class privilege, proximity to power, etc.? At a time when intersectionality is reduced to a buzzword and rarely understood or practiced beyond identity politics, what does it mean to demand that LGBTIQ liberation must be understood structurally and as a shared struggle? And is it really liberation if we’re still shackled by other colonial laws like the Vagrants Ordinance or the Obscene Publications Ordinance, by neoliberal economic policies, by increased policing and police brutality against any sign of dissent, by civil society that is bogged down by respectability politics? Depends on when you ask me — and these days I’m mostly defeated and worried — but gathering together as members of a community along with our allies continues to be an opportunity to ask these questions, look for answers, and sometimes be the answer.