As Hans stubbed out his cigarette and went to say goodbye to the organizers of the autism networking event, I considered just how obsessed with Pride he was. He had told me before we’d met that, in 1991, the year I was born, he’d launched something called the European Pride Organization. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, and he and some friends were discussing how they could support LGBTQ+ people in developing Eastern European countries to hold their own Prides. ‘We thought, we’ll make an event called EuroPride which we’ll award to different cities in Europe: the first one was in ’92 in London, ’93 Berlin, ’94 Amsterdam. We used the first ones to set up the systems, to get things organized, and then we exported them to countries that needed them more than others,’ he explained.
I knew that the previous year, EuroPride had come back to Amsterdam, for the first time in twenty years. I asked Hans how it was.
‘It was extremely emotional,’ he said, ‘after all those years . . .’ He trailed off. ‘Come on, I want to show you something.’ He led me inside the foyer of the museum, where a fifteen-foot mannequin stood wearing a dress made up of national flags. They represented all the countries in which homosexuality was still criminalized within the law, said Hans. The dress had been made for the previous year’s Pride, and was worn by a model in the parade. Then it had seventy-six flags on it, but three had since been swapped out for a rainbow flag. That was Belize, Nauru and the Seychelles, Hans told me proudly; they had all decriminalized homosexuality in 2016.
We stared at the dress for a moment. ‘OK, let’s go,’ said Hans.
Cycling through the city behind Hans was a shaky business. He was a native Amsterdammer, weaving through traffic seamlessly, one-handed, smoking a cigarette with the other. Meanwhile, I was clutching my handlebars, constantly poised to brake and lightly sweating from the stress of being a non-cyclist in a foreign city attempting to keep up with the Dutch gay Action Man. My feet couldn’t really touch the ground on my rented bike, so I panicked at every stop sign. But it was the best way to see the city: the dark, narrow stone houses along the canals, the boutiques and coffee shops.
Nestled among all of this vibrancy was the drab old people’s home that Hans and I were due to visit. When we walked in, we were met with a room full of seniors, maybe a hundred people, mostly in wheelchairs pulled up to tables, angled towards a piano. At the piano a man was tapping out a jolly, old-fashioned Dutch song, while, circling him, singing to the crowd, was a slender drag queen in a dress emblazoned with ladybirds. The audience was hardly rapt: about ten people sang along as the rest stared blankly.
‘Are they all gay here?’ I hissed into Hans’s ear over the music.
‘About 85 per cent. The city has a programme for LGBTQI-friendly activities in elderly homes; it happens all through the year. We have eight elderly homes that work with Pride and we have more joining . . .’
After a few numbers, Dolly Bellefleur, the performer, moved on to conducting a raffle, and Hans and I ducked out, finding some plastic chairs to sit on in the beige linoleum-floored entrance hall. I asked him how Pride Walk had been. Apparently seven thousand people had shown up at the weekend, despite the rain. The focus was on the seventy-three countries where homosexuality was still illegal – just like the flag dress – and that year, they’d added an ‘individuals at risk’ programme, whereby attendees carried fifty signs to represent fifty LGBTQ+ individuals from around the world who had either been murdered or jailed for their activities. One such person was the long-blond-haired Iraqi actor Karar Nushi, who was murdered in Baghdad in July 2017 after rumours of his homosexuality circulated. Telling me about Karar, Hans began to sob. I was slightly taken aback that this six-foot, middle-aged man was crying in the entrance of an old people’s home.
‘What makes me very angry is people so easily forget about how lucky we are,’ Hans started, wiping his tears. He looked at me. ‘You know, we’ve been under attack the last couple of weeks; this discussion happens every year about how commercial Pride is . . . people say these companies who sponsor us have no interest and that is not true at all.’
I wasn’t sure what this had to do with Karar’s murder, but I sensed Hans was getting to it. He explained that, of the €1.2 million Amsterdam Pride costs to run each year, a small subsidy of €200,000 is from the city – ‘that’s the same cost we make for security and stages’ – and the rest is paid by sponsors, usually a couple of big corporations. As in Berlin, people took huge issue with these brands’ involvement. Time and time again, Hans said, he had received criticism for working with them – something he saw as irrelevant when so many people around the world don’t get a Pride at all. He reeled off a number of things their sponsors were doing for the community:
‘Yesterday I spoke to a general manager at IBM. He has three colleagues whose entire job is involved with our community worldwide, to see how we can work together, and also how to make an open, inclusive workplace for LGBT people. No one knows that’s happening, so how can it be for the money? Three years ago, Vodafone changed the coffee cups in their shops across the world to have rainbow flags. Now, this won’t change countries’ laws, but in Bangladesh that one guy who is in the closet might pull out the cup and see the Pride flag, and that might be the closest recognition he gets from his employer there. This is more valuable than any money they can give us. And a few years ago, our other sponsor, KPN, put a 360-degree camera on their boat at Amsterdam Pride, so that you could log in and sail with the boat in countries where you cannot have Pride. They made it so people were safe to log in to the website, and we had thousands of people watching, from Iraq to India, people looking to have a little bit of the fun.’
According to Hans, it was ‘very easy to sit in your comfortable chair in Amsterdam and not appreciate these things’, but I also sensed that he felt personally affronted by the criticism of Pride as a commercial enterprise. Mostly because he’d brought it up before I’d even asked. For him, working with brands was a simple transaction: brands got to sail with the other boats, have their logo on the poster, and Pride got a handful of cash that they were free to spend as they wanted. ‘Sponsors have no involvement in how we do things,’ he assured me. ‘If anything, it’s more the other way around – we demand from our sponsors that they have an inclusive and diverse policy for their workers and staff, that they have the basic needs of LGBTQ+ people taken care of within their company. If they don’t, then we don’t want them as a sponsor.’
Complaining about Pride sponsors was clearly a first-world problem when compared to issues such as the criminalization of homosexuality or the murder of LGBTQ+ people, but the subtler point was that people who were sceptical of the corporatization of Pride, like me, might not be considering the fact that, although sponsors can change Pride for the worse, Pride might be changing its sponsors for the better.
Over lunch, Hans told me why he cared about Pride so much. He was fifty-three. His older sister, who had passed away two years before, had been gay as well. He was lucky in the sense that, growing up, she did most of the ‘awareness creating’ with their parents, the process of attrition that is coming out first. It wasn’t hard for him at all, he said, never a struggle or a fight. At seventeen, his first boyfriend, a blond veterinary student called Eric, came over for dinner. After he left, Hans and his father were washing up, and his father told him to give in to his love for Eric if that was what he wanted. Hans almost dropped the dishes in shock.
He became an activist because his father worked for a company that moved them around often, to a lot of developing countries where Hans saw inequality first-hand. As he grew older, LGBTQ+ rights became his main interest, because it was the social issue closest to home. Especially given that, as understanding and kind as his parents were in regard to his homosexuality, they didn’t have much information to impart to him; he had to hunt out his own history. Many second-generation children born to ethnic minorities were instilled with some background on their race, religion or culture, said Hans, but LGBTQ+ kids didn�
��t necessarily have LGBTQ+ parents. He wanted to create a Pride that showed people the community they came from and where it might be going, something he had craved when he was growing up.
After lunch, we cycled to the gay fetish shop Hans owned. He needed to give his cat some antibiotics (they lived together above the shop), so I browsed while I waited. The room upstairs sold less kinky stuff and more tourist fare: soft porn, rainbow flag memorabilia, gay and lesbian DVDs, gay greeting cards, that sort of thing. I was more interested in the downstairs, a fetish store selling all kinds of specialist items. I browsed the rows of anal dildos, harnesses like the one Hans was wearing and full leather body caskets, which, once bound up, seemed like they might simulate the experience of death. I hadn’t heard of it before, but I had no doubt it was a thing.
‘Do people ever comment on the fact you sell butt plugs and are a cat-loving human rights activist?’ I asked Hans when he re-emerged.
‘They never mentioned it to me,’ he smiled. ‘I don’t think it’s too strange. The fetish scene is about acceptance and accepting yourself and your feelings in society. I call myself a social liberal entrepreneur: I do a lot of activism in my shop.’
Then he told me he’d tried all the toys on sale himself, for quality-control purposes.
As we got to our last stop, the Mayor’s drinks reception, I told Hans that in Iceland there’d been a huge scandal after the country’s BDSM community had been rejected by the main LGBTQ+ association and banned from walking in the Pride parade. In 2014, the head of Pride had refused to allow the fetish-lovers to take part, deeming it too offensive or risqué. And so in 2015 they didn’t even bother applying, instead deciding to boycott the walk. ‘Prejudice is not exclusive to the straight vanilla world,’ Magnús Hákonarson, chairman of BDSM Iceland, had pointed out. The mainstream LGBTQ+ rights movement in Iceland had been so successful in integrating gay people into society, winning equality by law and marketing Pride as a family day out, they didn’t want to run the risk of tainting their image with a load of mask-wearing, whip-toting fetish enthusiasts. Although in 2016, when I went to Reykjavik Pride, they were present in the parade, so the scandal couldn’t have ended too acrimoniously.
Hans said that everyone was welcome at Amsterdam Pride – explaining why an alternative Pride hadn’t sprung up yet. Pride Amsterdam was just a platform, and via its website anyone could apply to organize an event that would form part of the programme. That was why there were so many. In the canal parade there were more than eighty boats; an HIV testing centre had one, a BDSM group, there was one for the military, one for firemen, one for over-fifties. The sex worker community would even have a boat in the canal parade for the first time that year. The only way in which it wasn’t inclusive was the access to the boats themselves, said Hans. It was incredibly difficult to get on one, he told me. ‘You couldn’t join in unless you jumped in the water and swam behind them,’ he said, in a way that made it impossible to tell if he was joking. This was one of the reasons they’d started Pride Walk, he added: so Pride would be more accessible, like in Berlin.
After I left Hans to go to drag queen bingo (him, not me – I was too exhausted from all the cycling), I kept thinking about that sex worker boat. It didn’t seem particularly inclusive to me that Pride would only have a sex worker boat for the first time that year, in a city so famous for its sex industry, and when sex workers and queer people have so much in common; both groups are destabilizing to mainstream ideas of sexuality and patriarchy, and as such, we’ve historically been both criminalized and ostracized (sometimes quite literally into the same areas, such as gaybourhoods like Soho).
Luckily, I knew some Dutch sex workers, having done a story on sex workers’ rights in Amsterdam the year before. Two of the women in the article identified as queer, so I asked whether they could help me get onto the boat. ‘You need speak to Lyle,’ Hella, one of the sex workers, told me. She would be on the boat, she said, but Lyle was one of the organizers and he had ‘a lot of opinions’ about the inclusion of sex workers in mainstream LGBTQ+ rights.
I called Lyle. Lyle explained that the boat was going to be a big political opportunity because it was a great way to show 500,000 spectators all at once that Dutch sex workers weren’t all cisgender women, that many were LGBTQ+, and that they came in all shapes and sizes. Sure, Amsterdam had its red light district, but this was about taking people out of that and making them visible. ‘Pride is one of the biggest public events in the Netherlands so being there as a sex worker, out and proud, without any masks, I think that’s a very important statement.’
I agreed, but Lyle still took a lot of persuading that I wasn’t going to ruin the vibe of the boat by being bigoted, pushing someone in the canal, or asking sex workers stupid questions like how much they got paid. I even had to quickly pen a letter to everyone on the boat, to convince them in turn that I would protect their names and personal details if they wanted me to. Once that got the all-clear he told me to be at a ferry point about a mile from Centraal Station for 9 a.m. I asked him what to wear and bring and he told me, ‘Whatever you want,’ which I thought was nice and inclusive, but also incredibly unhelpful.
At nine the next morning, no one was at the spot Lyle had sent me to. It was just me, cycling around a closed and empty dockyard, bewildered. Thankfully, I had decided to wear my regular clothes, so wasn’t dressed in anything too ostentatious, which might have made the feeling of being stood up more embarrassing. I had decided to pack two bottles of white wine to help ingratiate myself with everyone on the boat and overcome my nerves about being stared at by 500,000 people – which had nothing to do with being on the sex worker boat and everything to do with being the type of person who desperately craves attention until they actually get it.
After leaving Lyle a few missed calls, I was about to give up when I located the people I was looking for. One of them was Martin – who ran P&G292, the catchily titled government think tank that had coughed up the cash for the sex worker canal boat – and the other was Sharon, our choreographer for the day.
Sharon was dressed in a black T-shirt that said ‘VOGUE’ – in the same font as the magazine, but in reference to the dance style. My stomach lurched as she explained that we would be doing a dance routine to ‘Lady Marmalade’ to entertain the crowds along the canals, and everyone – everyone – on the boat, including me, had to learn it.
Martin was handsome, in his thirties and blond. He was wearing an ever so slightly shiny suit, which I guessed might have been the glitziest thing in his wardrobe: why else would you wear a full suit on a searing hot day in August? Martin explained that the idea for the boat had come up in a focus group P&G ran with male sex workers about three years earlier, but it had taken a long time to come to fruition, mostly because of funding. The boat had cost €6,000 to hire for the day, not including the sound system, decorations, food and drink. Lyle later told me that funding P&G was a way for the local government to reconnect with sex workers after a restrictive policy had closed down a large percentage of Amsterdam’s windows, creating a lot of hostility in the community. This wasn’t a bad thing, he added, because without the P&G groups the idea for the boat might not have come up.
By 11 a.m., about a dozen more people had arrived, a few blaming a hangover or work the night before for their lateness. There were a couple of middle-aged Hispanic women, a couple of gay boys in tight hot pants. My friend Hella arrived, wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses – because she wasn’t quite out as a sex worker to everyone she knew yet. Lyle arrived, and given his authority on the phone I was surprised at how young he was – twenty-three, he told me, but he looked even younger. He was short and confident, speaking to the Hispanic sex workers in fluent Spanish, before switching to English and then Dutch.
I chatted to a beautiful man called Ricardo, who told me he was from Bonaire, a Dutch colony in the Caribbean, but had moved to the Netherlands to study tourism. I also got acquainted with Foxy, a pink-haired porn star from Utrecht, and a
s Sharon started coordinating us into formation, we decided to crack open the white wine I’d brought.
Foxy told me that she mostly did gang bang or shame porn, as well as BDSM work, which I could have guessed from the ‘joy’ and ‘pain’ tattoos on her knuckles.
‘Don’t you think “Lady Marmalade” is a little trite?’ I asked her, as everyone started rehearsing in the car park. Foxy agreed, but Sharon was beckoning us over. She was very strict in enforcing her routine, explaining that we would have to restart the song and launch into it anew every time we emerged from one of the bridges along the canal over the four-hour period we’d be sailing.
‘How many bridges are there?’ I whispered to Lyle.
‘About fifty, I think,’ he replied.
I looked over to Foxy, who was also trying to copy Sharon, and wondered how this level of humiliation compared to shame porn.
More people were assembling in the dockyard now, canal boats sailing across the water to pick up the various Pride parties. One was made up of drag queens dressed in pink. Another had people all wearing white polo shirts and looked very wholesome, perhaps linked to a brand. I felt we were especially malcoordinated as a group; a motley crew of about twenty people, nobody seemed to be able to memorize the dance routine and everyone was dressed very differently – some in leather, some in sequins, some in jeans and a T-shirt. We also seemed to have fewer people than the other boats, maybe because not everyone wanted to make their debut as a sex worker on Dutch national television. In that moment I felt a pang of respect for the sex workers who had turned up; as many of them reminded me throughout the day, they knew well the stigma that came with choosing to do sex work, particularly as an LGBTQ+ person. Lyle had given me examples of this before we’d met: LGBTQ+ sex workers might be less likely to come out as such to people they knew. Trans women who were sex workers were often prone to violence from men struggling with their own sexuality. And then there were migrant sex workers who had come from homophobic countries and were doing sex work to survive. Being an LGBTQ+ sex worker didn’t necessarily grant you respect from other LGBTQ+ people either. Lyle said he often encountered discomfort in what he called ‘normalized or integrated parts of LGBT culture’: people who didn’t want to associate themselves with what they saw as promiscuity. In that sense, it was a bit like the BDSM organization that was rejected from Pride in Iceland. I could see why that made being in the canal parade so important: by outing themselves as queer sex workers, the people around me were doing what little they could to erode all of these stigmas, not just for themselves but for other sex workers too.
Queer Intentions Page 12