WORKING CLASS PRIDE
HOW DOES CLASS AFFECT THE WAY WE NAVIGATE THE WORLD AS QUEER PEOPLE?
WORDS NIC CROSARA
“Are we poor?” I asked my dad as a child one day after watching an American TV show depicting a nuclear family in a picturesque home. “There are people poorer than us, and richer than us” was his simple reply. So for a large chunk of my life, I assumed we were just minimalists. I remember believing my grandparents were the poshest Brits alive (second only to the Queen) because they had a dining table, a garden and non-essentials such as a sugar pot. Suffice to say I was ignorant of where I resided within the class system, that it existed at all, and all the injustices that come along with it.
“RIOTS AND PRIDE MARCHES, THE IDEA OF PROTEST, CAME FROM WORKING CLASS QUEER PEOPLE”
ACCESSIBILITY
Growing up, my only exposure to queerness was in Friends when Ross would complain about his lesbian ex-wife or Chandler would get embarrassed about his transgender parent. By the time I was studying at university, there were multiple LGBTQI people in every class. Whilst I could attend queer-themed events at the student union or cheap nights at the local gay bar, I still felt somewhat disconnected from my new-found community. Many came from more privileged backgrounds which meant they didn’t have to work or pay to live. Once the layer of race was added on top of this, I very much felt like I didn’t belong. Of course, I still had working class peers. Due to the deadly waiting lists of gender affirming surgery on the NHS, many friends worked multiple jobs and did fundraisers for their life-saving top-surgery.
For Megan, who grew up in Cumbria, there were certainly limitations to access to LGBTQI resources and spaces due to her class growing up: “Everything I learned about queer people was from the internet. My local area really didn’t have funding for these kinds of things, and I found that popular opinion was quite regressive at the time.”