By now you’ll have read that there probably won’t be as many pop acts and entertainment stages on offer at Pride this year, and that  G-A-Y’s Jeremy Joseph isn’t too pleased about it. But before you throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care, stop and think for a moment. Pride is not only about pop acts and the freedom to get drunk on the streets of Soho. There is actually a little more to it than that.

This year’s Pride marks forty years since the formation of The Gay Liberation Front. The slogan is ‘Paint The Town Ruby Red’, which doesn’t really say much about the GLF. Still it’s an improvement on last year, when the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots was completely overlooked in favour of the pointless slogan ‘Come Out And Play’.

This will be my twenty-fifth Pride. I moved to London in September 1984. It was the year of Frankie Goes To Hollywood and ‘Relax’. It was the year Soft Cell finally fell apart with an album called ‘This Last Night In Sodom’. It was also the year Rock Hudson first appeared on ‘Dynasty’ and rumours spread that he was dying of AIDS. Soon the British tabloids would be full of scare stories about the ‘gay plague’ and the country would experience the biggest homophobic backlash since the 1950s. You could forgive me for thinking that I’d arrived after the party was over.

The gay scene in London was very different in 1984. There were no glass fronted bars for gay people to proudly flaunt themselves. Gay pubs had blacked out windows. The West End wasn’t the gay playground it is now. Gay life was mainly tucked away in areas like Earls Court and Kings cross, and took place after dark. Despite years of gay activism, there was still the sense that homosexuality was something to be hidden. When newspapers referred to someone’s ‘gay shame’, they weren’t being ironic.  Bars like The Brief Encounter on St Martin’s Lane were full of married men sneaking off for a queer encounter before catching the last train back to suburbia. All the more reason why we needed Gay Pride.

I attended my first Gay Pride march in June 1985. The march began in Hyde Park and ended in Jubilee Gardens. In those days there was a separate march for women called Lesbian Strength. The lesbians I knew then always struck me as very angry, but that was okay because I was angry too. There was a lot of anger on Pride marches in those days. And there was a chant that left nobody in any doubt abut how angry we were.

“Give me a G! Give me an A! Give me a Y! What does it spell? GAY! What is gay? GOOD! What else is gay? ANGRY!” Who knew then that ‘G-A-Y’ would become the name of club where ‘artists’ like The Cheeky Girls would sing rousing political anthems like ‘Touch My Bum’?

What were we all so angry about in 1984? Where do I begin? An unequal age of consent (brought home to me by Bronski Beat and their album ‘The Age of Consent’). Police harassment (there were no openly gay policemen in those days, though there were plenty of ‘pretty policemen’ who spent their time hanging around public toilets). Queerbashing (I’d been assaulted on three occasions at this point, though further attacks would follow). And that’s before you take into account the lack of employment or partnership rights, or the specifically gay ‘crime’ of ‘gross indecency’ for which Oscar Wilde was imprisoned almost a century before.

Contrary to popular belief, the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967 years ago didn’t make male homosexuality legal. It decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. The legal definition of private meant that public displays of gay affection could and often did lead to prosecution. And since the age of consent for gay men was enshrined in law at 21, at 19 I was under-age and compelled to break the law on a regular basis. Plus of course I was still in the process of coming out, risking rejection from my friends and family. For me, Pride was never simply a celebration. It was an affirmation. 

There were no social networking sites for gay teenagers in the 1980s. There were no gay characters on ‘Coronation Street’, no ‘Queer As Folk’, no ‘Beautiful People’. The best television could offer was Mr Humphries on ‘Are You Being Served?’ Frankly, I didn’t think my needs as a gay viewer were being served. So that was one more thing to be angry about. 

And there was far worse to come. As Manchester’s chief of police James Anderton spoke of ‘homosexuals swirling in a cesspit of their own creation’, and the tabloids called for gay men to be rounded up and quarantined somewhere, the horrors of AIDS hit home. Then Margaret Thatcher went to war on local councils and Clause 28 reared its ugly head. Between them, AIDS and Clause 28 (later Section 28) made homosexuality more visible and gay men and women more angry than ever before. Numbers at Gay Pride swelled. A group of lesbians abseiled into the House of Lords, and stormed the ‘Six O’Clock News’ studio, chaining themselves to Sue Lawley’s desk and prompting her classic comment: ‘I’m sorry, we do rather seem to have been invaded’. The age of queer activism was upon us.

Like many people, I was moved to join ACT-UP by the death of a friend. And then another. And another. By the late 80s the funerals all blurred into one. I was still in my early 20s and I’d seen more death than people three times my age. Meanwhile the rest of the world carried on as normal. There was some ad with an iceberg and the occasional mention of AIDS in Africa, but for those of us living through the epidemic closer to home it was like being in the middle of a war zone.

AIDS activism was as much about finding an outlet for all that grief as it was about raising public awareness. Not that we didn’t try. In two short years we catapulted condoms over the walls of Pentonville Prison, stormed the offices of the Daily Mail and the Australian Embassy, and blocked traffic by lying down in the road. We did that a lot. Blocking traffic meant that you made the traffic news if nothing else. Our rallying cry could have been ‘ACT-UP London, lie down!’ 

On World AIDS Day 1989, a dozen of us handcuffed ourselves to an enormous pink anchor chain, padlocked across Westminster Bridge (see the photo above). We didn’t stay long. The police came with bolt cutters and reeled us in like fish on a line. We were held in the cells for four hours. The man I shared a cell with was clearly ill and was handled with rubber gloves and denied his medication.

Later we were cautioned and released. Returning to the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in Cowcross Street, myself and my cellmate were refused entry by the lesbian on the door. The remains of the handcuffs dangling from our wrists were deemed “a celebration of S&M” and therefore offensive to women. 

Out of ACT-UP came OutRage – same tactics, different agenda. OutRage were about gay rights, pure and simple. The dying days of ACT-UP were fraught with arguments over outreach work and forming alliances with other AIDS organisations. I remember meeting with a woman from a support group for drug-users with HIV, and being told in no uncertain terms that many of her clients were homophobic and I should simply accept this. 

OutRage avoided making the same mistakes. Not that they didn’t divide opinion. Soon the gay world was split in two - supporters of the direct action group led by the controversial Peter Tatchell, and supporters of the polite lobbying group Stonewall led by that nice Ian McKellen. When OutRage supporter Derek Jarman publicly criticised McKellen for accepting a knighthood from a homophobic Tory government, the battle lines were drawn. To some extent, they remain to this day. OutRage still pursue their course of non-violent direct action and Stonewall still politely lobby MPs. 

What has changed is the legal status of gay men and women. It’s taken over forty years since the partial decriminalisation of 1967, but finally the vast majority of the legal battles have been won. We now have an equal age of consent, gay employment rights, even ‘gay marriage’ in the form of civil partnerships. Section 28 has been repealed, and relationships that were once described in law as ‘pretended family relationships’ are now  legally recognised and celebrated all across the country. 

In September 2007, my partner and I held our civil partnership ceremony on Tower Bridge, a short distance from the Houses of Parliament. After the ceremony, the photographer thought it would be a good idea if the entire wedding party went out onto the bridge and stood in the middle of the road for a group photo. So there we were, surrounded by our friends and family, flaunting our love for all to see and blocking traffic at one of London’s top tourist attractions. If you’d told me twenty years ago that one day I would do that without being arrested, I would never have believed you.

That’s something to be proud of. And it’s part of the reason why I won’t be put off from attending Pride this year – dance stages or no dance stages.

Pride is on Saturday July 3. www.pridelondon.org