Leigh Ellis transcript:
M: Hi, I’m Martyna, a young journalist at Nottingham College and today I’m interviewing Leigh Ellis the chairman of Nottingham Pride, hi Leigh
L: hi there, you alright?
M: yes thank you, are you?
L: yes thank you
M: so the first question I have for you today is ‘tell us about your responsibilities as chair person of Nottingham Pride’
L: the responsibility isn’t as glamorous as people like to think it is (.) being the chair person of Nottinghamshire pride involves a lot of organisation but probably we’ll start for 2023 event in the next month, so first off it’s raising the money, it’s always an issue for us because we need to raise funding to be able to hold the event, last year it cost us around 15,000 pound to host the event and as it grows it gets more expensive. That’s the first element of it, then we need to look at the location of where we have pride. It’s very important to me and it’s one of values that visibility is key to Notts Pride and it’s important that we believe, well, I believe that it’s held in Nottingham city centre so that’s why we have it in Hockley. And then it’s the negotiations with all of the authorities around Nottinghamshire to ensure that it can be held safely.
M: Yeah
L: There’s quite a bit to it before we even get to the activism element of it, yeah, that’s basically what I do at the moment. Lot’s of bid writing for funding.
M: yeah perfect, so you have previously stated, moving on from your question that pride is centred around keeping people safe for an interview for nottingham post
L: yes
M: how do you plan on enforcing this for years to come?
L: keeping it safe is vital to, one, our success and two, for people at the event as well that’s why we work really closely with the police and the city council to ensure that we know what we’re looking for because we’re all volunteers this is something I do along my day job so I rely on the experts to advise me. So, on a monthly and a quarterly basis I meet with an organisation that’s a safety advisory group organisation. That’s a collection of people of senior leaders that work within the fire service, the ambulance service within the city council and within the police to ensure that we can keep it safe. For instance, when we’re marching, no one will see but we close the roads down and we ensure that no vehicles can get down there, and that’s to ensure we can pass freely, we stop the trams, we stop the busses, so it all goes towards keeping people safe.
M: that’s great, perfect. So what is it that makes Nottingham Pride so important?
L: for notts pride, and I refer to there’s a big banner outside the broadmarsh that says ‘Nottingham city of rebels’. At Notts pride and Nottingham pride we do it differently, one, our commitment is it’s always free, two that it will be visible, that visibility is key to that education is key to that as well as is celebration. And people often think that education is around us educating, LGBTQ plus people, educating everybody about us and it’s not, it’s about our community coming together and understanding what’s available to them in services that are available and you know I became really inspired by pride when I went in, well my first pride was in 1992 but that’s another story, I came to Nottingham pride in 2012 and I didn’t realise at that time that LGBTQ+ people could adopt and from that, that lead me and my husband on an adoption journey to build our family so you know, and I have pride to thank for that. I want other people to have access to that information ‘cuz it, you know, you can’t always expect that everybody knows everything. That’s why I think it makes a difference that we do it differently, we don’t make people pay, we keep corporate sponsorship down to its minimum so that we’re not beholden to large organisations and having to brand everything with bank logos etcetera, it’s down to, we look for large employers, organisations in Nottingham that provide services to people in Nottingham and provide employment to people in Nottingham to ensure to our LGBTQ community, what a great place it is to live and what it’s like and how they could use their skills.
M: so I’m guessing people really look forward to pride as everyone’s so involved
L: well, I hope so, they turn up. They turn up I mean, if you compare Nottingham the LGBTQ+ city and night time economy in Nottingham against places like Manchester, London, Birmingham, we’re so small. But, having said that, when we put a callout that it’s notts pride, like last year 15,000 people turned up and marched. That brings a problem in terms of safety because we have to get them all up into Hockley but people show up. And that’s why I always refer back to the banner on the broadmarsh it says ‘nottingham city of rebels’, Nottingham people, and Nottingham’s my adopted city, we do it our way. And I love that and yeah.
M: that’s great, so why do you think pride has increased in numbers so drastically over the years?
L: I think we got our allies, more and more people feel comfortable in coming out and you know we are a community, we always have been a community. Lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex, queer, asexual people, we all come together we always have done and we provide the platform at Nottingham Pride because I can’t direct what happened within our LGBTQ+ community, because people have their own politics and their own beliefs, their own feelings around all sorts of things like politics and what’s going on in the world so Notts pride is the platform for people to bring up and speak out, be seen, be visible and be heard.
M: do you think that’s gone well over the years, maybe, pride had helped people come out?
L: yeah yeah, I’m sorry I answered your question there, didn’t I? For visibility one of the key things, people will say why don’t you do it in the park or why don’t you sort of like give it a festival atmosphere? Do you know what, when I was 16 there was nothing more than I would’ve loved to than walk down the street and holding my then boyfriends hand and telling people this is who I am. And that’s why we do it and that’s why I think people turn up. So whether you’re making your transition or you just wanna feel what it’s like to be in a restaurant with your friends and whatever gives people the opportunity to do that. The older hipster guys and women they all gravitate around pubs and dancing, that’s fine, it’s about being seen and being visible and that’s why we keep it that way.
M: great, do you think the younger LGBTQ community is supported and represented enough?
L: no, I think there’s more that we could do. For sure, I mean, our younger generation, I’m probably 3 generations ahead of that and things to some extent, what we’re trying to do well what I try to do is there’s an element where things are different. There are a lot of freedoms now in the UK than there were when I was 16, 17, I mean you wouldn’t have experienced or even heard of ‘Clause 28’ where it was banned in schools, you couldn’t even speak about it, you couldn’t be taught, gay bars they had to have their windows blacked out, you could be molested and we were meant to feel ashamed about who we were and do you know what, we need to keep that link there but we also need to celebrate where we are now. But if you look at what’s going on around the world, you looks at what’s just happened in Italy, you look at what’s happening in Russia, Czech half of our commonwealth countries…
L: it’s a crime to be lgbtq+. People are being killed in iran, gay men, lesbians so it’s just we’ve got to I’m there and I’m the elder
M: yeah
L: directing I,t all I need now is younger people to say’ well this is how we want to take it forward’. We always have to remember our history because if we forget it, it could happen again and that’s important and when it’s time for me to move on from Nottinghamshire Pride I hope that I leave it in the hands of somebody that will respect that.
M: Yeah, perfect
L: Yeah, there is absolutely more we could do for younger people, and we ask every year for people to get involved and it would be wonderful if people got in touch.
M: Yeah perfect. So, how do you think the community engagement has changed over the years, overall regarding pride?
L: well, when we first started, I took on Nottingham pride in 2013 and we had our first event in 2014. Prior to that it was a party in a park, predominantly I would say white gay men and we really wanted to change that because that’s fine we can all party in a park what we need to, and I go back to visibility, education and celebration we need to connect with all our communities. What we’ve seen over the years is representation in different marginalised groups in what people would say minority groups so we’ve seen more and more attendance and representation at notts pride particularly for our black and people of colour community. I mean just as recently as 2014 it was minimal now, we have groups, we can position them at the front of the march and we can celebrate that. We see a lot more trans representation and I mean this year we brought trans people to the front of the march, I mean the flag felt like it was a mile long but it was a really long trans flag and they’re things that other prides you’ll not see do. It’s the pride flag at the front of the march and nothing else but there’s all sorts of facets to our community but we need to celebrate it all
M: so, what do you think makes Nottingham pride so special?
L: I think in the early years when we started, it’s always been unique, if you look at the history of Nottingham pride it started in Hockley and it started on the steps of broadway, the cinema, it then moved to the castle, then they moved it to the arboretum and then to the forest. It’s always been centred around being on a park. I think when we then moved it to the city centre we got a lot of kick back for that, a lot of criticism of people saying ‘well were not going to bother anymore’,’ were going to go to Birmingham and Brighton’ and that’s fine but when you go Birmingham you’ll pay £50 and when you go to Brighton you’ll pay £90 and you’ll need to find accommodation but this is how we’re going to do it. Sometimes you have to hold your nerve and eventually people understood what we were trying to do, that this was an opportunity to really change the way a part of our city looks and if you see it now Notts pride influenced the rainbow road, you’ll see that Hockley is a much more diverse area and that’s the difference and people kind of got that and got into it. We started with 6,000 people marching in 2016 and an additional 30,000 people on the day of pride in Nottingham city now that’s fantastic for us but if you think about the economic benefits in terms of businesses and the city council that’s a huge opportunity for people to embrace our community and start to think going on that matters because all of these people are here.
M: yeah so, I can see that there have been so many good things that have come out of this. Have you been through any major challenges though that you have faced planning the events or during the events?
L: yeah every year, every year raising the money you know that’s always hard. When we started in the early days, we tried to do fundraisers. Honestly nobody wants to give you their money you can put collection tins on bars, there’s just not enough bars and not enough collection tins that we could put out. if you try do fundraisers it’s just not enough, what we needed to tap in to was the funding that’s available through the arts council and through the national lottery communities for all. They’re challenges because you put your bid in and you never know if they’re going to accept it and you have to change it every year make it different, make it exciting, do something different and this year the difference was that we put video screens up which is something that we’ve never done before. We were lucky enough to get some sponsorship from organisations around Nottingham as well, but I’m a bit stubborn and one of my key points is that we don’t accept too much from corporate sponsorship because if we get too much we’re then just a corporate event and that’s not what I want to be otherwise I think notts pride would be in its billions by now but it just would be a drab event. It wouldn’t have the grass roots feel that it has, that it’s about people coming together so yeah that’s a challenge every year. Challenges around working with the city council, we put on our banner that it’s supported by city council but they give us the biggest headache ever around if we put a stage on the street we have to ask a year in advance and we have to fill out no end of forms, we have to pay a fee and then they still argue about it, who’s going to do what that and as well rubbish collection I mean they’re just challenges around the event. We’ve been really lucky that when you go to other pride events where the community start to erm, there’s a bit of tension between certain groups because we’ve never said who can and can’t come. People will pick up if there’s somebody there that shouldn’t be there, if there is somebody there who shouldn’t be there we will know about it and they will be gone but that generally won’t be from the lgbtq+ community. I’ll give you an example, when we started the march this year there’s a renowned individual that speaks a lot around religion but actually speals a lot of hate, draws you in with singing then when you listen to what they’re singing you’re thinking ‘what am I listening to?’ and that happened to us, they came and started and you know what everybody just gathered together, someone had a music system they put Kylie ‘spinning round’ on as loud as they could and everybody danced and that’s how it works for us. I think that’s why thankfully the challenges tend to seem to be around the money to do what we want to do. We’ll always have enough to be able to do something but if you want to make it look a little bit more erm we had confetti cannons if you want a confetti cannon we’ll have a confetti cannon just got to raise the money.
M: Yeah, I can see the community has helped a lot to overcome the challenges
L: yeah
M: Yeah, perfect great. So, do you have any plans for pride 2023 and if so what are they?
L: well at the moment were looking at whether or not we can start to introduce some sort of award event to celebrate the diversity and the great work that organisations and that people do. We can start to do that, it’s going to take a bit of firming up. Notts pride will look similar to it did this year we may need to think about the march around where we end because there’s quite a lot of people these days we need to keep people safe. Just who we get to perform when we look at performers for Notts pride it’s really important that its lgbtq+ people from Nottingham to perform on the stage we doadd a bit of flavour every now and again we brought in tom aspaul this year from Birmingham and they performed at the common world games as an lgbtq+ performer erm and they were great
L:..Person that came from Leicester but the rest of our performers were Nottingham’s best performers. Who we wanted to give them the opportunity to be on stage and perform in front of their own community and be seen and heard and again sometimes we get criticism for that.
M: Yeah
L: You know, why have we not got Nadine Coyle or well you can go and see Nadine Coyle any time you know people who need the opportunity, that's their opportunity.
And I think as we’ve gone through the times er people start to embrace that and get into it and you know that’s great to say
M: That’s great. Have you ever had like any volunteers?
L: We do have about 100 volunteers that turn up on the day. Erm when we look for volunteers that want to help us as part of the charity and erm plan the event I think their expectations are that em they’re going to have to come and do all this activism and its
not its about how many crowd barriers do we need what are the police telling we need what we need to put over on Maid Marian Way. The Activism comes from the event itself it comes from being given the opportunity to do things like this. To go sometimes get invited to the city council where they talk about erm experiences and also from the work that you do is where you start to get involved in sort of like shaping some of that but again you know im not the expert in everything i can only give in from my perspective and as I already said my viewpoint is you know dont turn your back because you know what happened in the 80s or 90s can happen again erm you know or worse so we’ve always got to be looking forward and making sure that erm our younger LGBTQ people can see that and they can start to shape the future.
M: Perfect. Well thank you so much for coming in I’ve learnt a lot from you today, I hope everyone else that watches does as well. Thank you so much.
L: A pleasure.
M: And yeah haha.
L: Thank you.
M: Thank you.
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