I grew up deep in the South Wales Valleys, like the Little Britain sketch where there’s only one gay in the village, but a bit less offensive.

Growing up, I didn’t really have any materials that reflected either side of my identity, unless you count the fact Doctor Who is filmed in Cardiff. But in 2014, suddenly I did. Pride is the best film about being gay, and it’s also the best film about being Welsh. It treats each faucet of its identity with reverence and tenderness.

The basic plot of Pride is this; during the Miners’ Strikes of 1984-85, gay activist Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) sets up the Lesbians and Gays Support Miners group (LGSM) and they travel to the village of Onllwyn in Neath to help with the cause.

LGSM’s arrival splits the small town down the middle, prejudices are raised, barriers are broken and the film ends with the National Union of Mineworkers marching in the Gay Pride Parade of 1985 (this actually happened, btw).

There’s so much to unpack in the film – the dichotomy it draws between the oppressed homosexuals and the working classes in Thatcher’s Britain, the looming AIDs crisis and the strength of working-class women – and one post could never do justice to what Pride means to me, and how it makes me proud.

But this is, of course, Pride Week and we may have already explored the coming out stories that helped change societies’ view of queerness, but its time to take a more personal, insular look at how culture can help you make sense of your own identity.

It treats the Miner’s Strikes with the respect and horror they deserve

The Miner’s Strike of 1984-85 changed South Wales forever. Even today, they are not the same, nor will they ever be. Job creation was decimated, livelihoods were destroyed and it fostered an intense environment in which traditional constructs of masculinity and femininity became hyper-realisied and enforced.

When Margaret Thatcher closed the mines, she destroyed lives, and continues to do so long after her death. Pride realises this. Onllwyn, the village featured in the film, is a society in purgatory before LGSM arrived.

Although the events of Pride do not rectify the wounds of the Miners’ Strike – nothing ever could and this is not a Ryan Murphy revisionist drama – they don’t shirk away from it either. People are starving, they are fed up and they are constantly at odds with law enforcement who are encroaching on their rights.

Wales is a not place often mined for period dramas (although The Crown gave it a very good go), but Pride imbues every frame set in my homeland with warmth; the sun often rolls down the hills, lighting up the landscape. It portrays the land as a beautiful but damaged place, and that’s exactly what it is, even to this day. Beautiful, but in many ways still broken.

The film is set before the height of the Aids crisis – but its ghost is a constant presence

Aids killed an entire generation of gay men, there is no getting away from it. The first case was diagnosed in 1981, although the disease wasn’t taken seriously and many patients were simply left to die.

I’m extremely lucky to be a gay man in a society where HIV and Aids are no longer a life-ending illness, but Pride doesn’t shy away from the reality that the members of LGSM are getting ready to be embroiled into a war and battle for their own health.

One of the most affecting takes of the film is showing the extremely triggering and horrific Aids ‘awareness’ ad commissioned by the British government, in which the word is cut into a stone monolith. Death, it means. If you get Aids, you will die – it terrified people. We see three prisms of the impending crisis in the film; Joe (George Mackay) is newly out and exploring his sexuality, he’s coming of age in a decade where most of his friends will be affected by this disease and anti-gay rhetoric is already common. Then there’s Jonathan Blake (Dominic West) who is actually a real person, the second person to be diagnosed with HIV in the UK, a survivor in the truest sense. And, most tragically of all, there is Mark (Schnetzer) who we learn at the end of the film died of Aids two years after the events of the film took place.

It’s a shock in the otherwise jubilant end credits, but it was foreshadowed when Mark meets his ex (Russell Tovey) in a gay club, he is cast in shadow and crying. The ghost of Aids – the deaths to come – quite literally haunts you.

It’s a tribute to the strength of the Welsh Mam

There’s no-one better than a Mam, especially a Welsh one.

The Welsh Mam is a very specific sub-section of working class life, and Pride affords her all the respect and reverence she deserves. These are women that brought and held up the mining community in a time where no-one else was looking out for them.

Sian James (Jessica Gunning) is the perfect example of this, a fish out of water when the LGSM arrive, but nevertheless committed to helping someone in need. The film even touches on what happens to working-class women when they can be, so often than not, influenced by prejudices, stemming in part from that hyper-realisation of male and female gender traits that we talked about earlier. But here, she is something to be proved wrong and banished, as it should be.

Welsh life is all about community, and the Mam is at the heart of it, its sword and shield. Watching Pride always makes me want to give mine a big cwtch.

Pride shows us that our differences bring us together, not divide us

Ultimately, Pride places two things together that should repel each other – a working class community and the gay rights movement – but they end up attracting and benefiting from each other no end.

The film is not an exercise in education, it doesn’t really want to teach you anything, except that our differences can bring us together, not divide us.

Above all, it just wants to make you feel proud, and it certainly does that for me. So go on, watch it for me today, tonight, and celebrate Pride Week the best way you can – with pride.

Pride is available to stream via Amazon Prime Video.

Source: Read Full Article