LADY PHYLL
The UK Black Pride Co-Founder speaks to Otamere Guobadia about the genesis of #BlackPride, trans erasure, unwanted (and wanted) racial stereotypes, and why queer people of colour deserve acceptance, not tolerance, from the whole LGBTQ community.
As a proud queer woman, and a queer woman of colour, Lady Phyll is the definition of a trailblazer. Here she speaks to Otamere Guobadia about cocreating #BlackPride, shared lived experiences, trans erasure, and why she won’t stop fighting until all forms of discrimination and racism are eliminated.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that we live in perilous times. We live in a climate of queer phobia and transphobia that not only dominates our headlines but that forms part and parcel of a most grievous and sustained assault upon the LGBTQ body politic. At times like these, it’s easy enough to lose perspective. But out of such times rise heroes of necessity, the fire of bigotry tempering warriors, and thrusting greatness upon people of the most ordinary circumstances. The moral arc of the universe is long, and the work of bending the arc towards equality is no easy challenge. Battles for tolerance are lost and won every day, but the wider war will be won by characters with sufficient spirit and gravitas to move us into this brave new world, where we might otherwise find ourselves frozen in injustice. It takes a particular kind of person to impress upon the moral fabric of our existing world — to radically repoint the needle towards a fairer one. Lady Phyll is undeniably one of such people.
UK Black Pride Co-Founder. Trade unionist. Proud Ghanaian. Mother. She’s a woman of multitudes, stacked upon multitudes. UK Black Pride was an endeavour of love, born of the most life-saving and essential of needs — a desire to find community, and to find communion within that. Choosing integrity over accolade, Phyll Opoku Gyimah (a.k.a Lady Phyll), famously made headlines when she decisively and publicly turned down her MBE, refusing to accept the honour of an empire whose laws have both historically imperiled, and continue today to marginalise queer people of colour, both here and abroad. But she was making waves, long before and far beyond her radical declination.
“In founding UK Black Pride, you’ll have to really understand and recognise that this is more about a collective, a group of people,” she explains. “You know, the reason I always put co-founder is because the ‘co’ is about our community. The community founded this.”
Officially instituted in August 2006, UK Black Pride was, and continues to be, a passion project in the truest sense. Much like Lady Phyll herself, the project’s trajectory has been a steady ascent from humble beginnings. What began as a loose constellation of online conversations aiming to redress a lack of space for queer people of colour and in particular, queer women of colour — a carved out niche for them to revel in the intimacies of shared lived experiences — has blossomed into thriving physical community, and a beautifully transformative cultural enterprise.
“[At the time we were] working with a number of organisations, especially Black Lesbians UK,” she enthusiastically recounts. “I said to my ex-partner and [some of the other organisers at the time], ‘Why don’t we take this online activity offline?’ So we started doing things for same-gender loving women, football sports, basketball, tennis, pick mix, film screenings, and I said, ‘Well, actually I’d love to go somewhere where we can organise a bigger trip’.” The rest is, as they say, history.
That inaugural pilgrimage took them to Southend-on-Sea. “People ask, ‘Why South End?” Phyll cranes her head affecting their quizi-callity. “For a number of reasons,” she immediately counters. “Being a working class girl, growing up on Woodberry Down estate, my parents could never afford to take us anywhere so our holidays were not going back to Ghana, because we couldn’t afford that, but it was [places like Margate and Southend] so I said, ‘Let’s go to Southend.’
The brave choice to make this trip didn’t occur in a vacuum, nor was the trip purely about pleasure — as is with most things she does, and as with her very person, resistance sat at its core. Phyll recalls the tense atmosphere caused by the machinations of English nationalists and white supremacists.
“[It was a heightened period in [2004/2005], with the far-right; the misogyny, the sexism, the homophobia, the Islamophobia, the nastiness that was being spouted by [them].”
In a world that penalises, criminalises and otherwise marginalises black and brown queer bodies, such bold visibility was, and continues to be, an undeniably radical act. “There was no better time. [No time for waiting],” she states emphatically. “It [was] about action, [so we] went down and we had two bus loads of beautiful queer [women of colour]. We got out at Southend, and we ended up on Shrewsbury Ness. We had this turntable of DJ’s playing music, this marquee that cost us £400 – which was a lot of money for us — and people just standing, enjoying, being in this space.”
Now an event welcoming around 8,000, UKBP
is more than just a one-day flash in the pan. It’s a movement looking to extend its reach beyond the limitations of one proud day. Beyond the Pride festival itself, the work that UKBP finds itself doing now is much broader than its initial now remit, which in her own words, “[aimed] to put on an annual festival to create that safe space for people who are African, Asian, Latin American and [other ethnic minorities].” Having grown considerably in size and resources, Lady Phyll wants the organisation to expand its focus to advocacy. “More reaching out. More signposting,” she enthuses.
“We don’t just want to parachute in [on our one Pride day] and [have] everyone climbing that hill to excitement, and then after the 8 July, where do we leave them? [Moving forward], there’s going to be a lot more working [in partnership with organisations like Stonewall], to get deeper to into our communities. Those people who may feel isolated up in Newcastle, or Bristol, or Scotland, or Wales — we’ve got to reach them. We’ve got to find a way of not just reaching them, but asking [them how we can support them]. What services are there for them? What do they need? How do we provide that? How do we create an environment for them to feel safe and free, even if they don’t want to come out, but just so that they feel they can be? When you’re isolated and feel like you’re the only queer person in your [community], you can quite easily fall into a self-destroying dark place, which leads to [poor mental health.] We already know that [people of colour] are certainly overrepresented in our mental health institutions, so our reach has to be big. We’re not just about that one day event, but a lot more partnering with organisations who have been doing some of this work so well, but also may need some assistance or guidance on how they reach [POC] who are LGBTQ. “
UKBP is uniquely placed to represent and cater to the interests of those within the margins, being further marginalised — queer people of colour who might in some sense feel doubly dislocated from a sense of community. Far from being universally lauded, UKBP has faced a barrage of criticisms. Beyond cardboard cut-out racists and their ‘Fear of a Black [Planet/Pride]’, some detractors believe that much like Daniel Quasar’s newly, redesigned Pride flag (which includes among other things black and brown stripes to make a visible commitment to to QPOC), UKBP’s very creation and continued existence divides the LGBTQ community — emphasising the differences between us, rather than what brings us together.
To those people, Lady Phyll has this to say: “Until we all have the same rights, until we all do not face any form of injustice, until we all have proper access to housing, to health, to school, to education, then they’ll always be a need for Black Pride.”
This is clearly a line of argument that she’s had to face with all too great frequency, leveled by people who have fundamentally misunderstood the function of UKBP. “I reiterate this all the time,” she continues. “In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need [any Prides] would we? We wouldn’t have to deal with championing or fighting for rights, for LGBTQ people, but we don’t live in an ideal world because there’s homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, but there’s also racism. Black Pride was set up [not only to celebrate POC], and have pride of place, but to also combat systemic racism.”
“Why don’t you just join the normal Pride?” is another question she and her fellow organisers are routinely faced with. “Therein lies the problem.” You know, what is normal to non-POC [LGBTQ] people is not [necessarily] our norm. We’re trying to usualise (a word she explains, that she prefers to ‘normalise’) the fact that black people should be seen and heard, and visible 365 days of the year, 24/7. But we should be seen and represented in a positive light [all the time].”
In a world in which the average life expectancy of a trans woman of color in the US is only 35 years, it’s easy to see logic of her impassioned rebuttal.
“Until we live in an ideal world,” she repeats, “there will be a need for Black Pride.” We’ve got young queer black and brown bodies who are living on streets, who have no place to go, who don’t know where their next meal is gonna come from, who have been [cast] out by their families, and need a place to feel like they’re loved, need a place to shed a tear and to know that there are people out there with a shared commonality... of course if people want to put black and brown [stripes in the flag] because that’s how they identify with it a lot stronger, then why should anyone question that?
“[And] those arguing that we’re arguing that
we’re ruining the flag, I would say that they’re ruining society by not letting people be.”
Sitting across from Lady Phyll, it’s impossible to mistake the effusiveness with which she talks about the event – its trajectory and the necessity of such an event as braing. It’s pride in its purest, most generous form; warmth and gratitude flow from her every word and gesture. It’s no coincidence that Phyll and her fellow QWOC are so central in UKBP’s origin story. Her willingness to credit her community and her fellow activists is rendered all the more bitterly ironic, by societal failure to reckon with the legacies of women of colour, and more specifically queer and trans women of colour. One only has to think of the treatment of Sylvia Rivera, of Patrisse Cullors (co-founder of BLM), and of Marsha P. Johnson, who nearly 50 years after being a central agitator in the Stonewall riots, is only just receiving her moment in the public consciousness. It’s a truth (for desperate want of universal acknowledgement), that women of colour, and black women in particular, are our cultural labours and by far our most unappreciated ones. They are rarely given pride of place in our histories, nor are their interests centred in the conversations we have now. “This is the conversation that I have with so many black women. Our history of how we’re underrepresented in particular circles, but overrepresented in others, is so well documented,” she starts, visibly upset at this injustice.
“When [I as a black woman am] called aressive or angry, it’s because I have every right to be aressive and angry. I have every right to assert myself in a particular way because my body has been used. It’s been raped, it’s been disrespected, it’s been fetishised, pulled to pieces, and it’s also fed other people who don’t deserve [nor] have the [right to it].”
So how can we honour these mothers of the movement, who are disproportionately represented on the front lines in all of these strules for justice of freedom, and how can we resist erasing them from our collective histories?
“Creating those spaces,” she begins. “Safe spaces. Secure spaces. Making sure that our stories are not just heard by us alone, but are [usualised] and amplified whether [that’s in the media or in a physical setting]. There’s so much to change... [These women] have made it easier for me to be, so it means that I have to make it easier for the next black woman who is queer, who is lesbian, who is bi, who’s trans, to claim their space, occupy it and be present and visible, but also shape their own narrative and not let their stories be told in the way others want to perceive it.”
Similarly, she demands we resist the erasure of trans people in our community, and that we centre and amplify their voices: “I think it’s about asking them, ‘What is it that you need us to do?” she asks. “As an ally for my trans siblings, I ask questions, but I also listen. I listen very carefully about what they want, how do they want me to ensure that they are represented at UKBP and [all round], not just talking about what happens on [Trans Day of Remembrance and Trans Day of Visibility]. How else can we make sure they’re represented in the most positive way and that we create a tsunami and absolute ripple effect that allows people to see and feel seen?”
To white allies, looking to support UKBP and QPOC more generally, she has these words of advice: “Listen. The greatest thing [you] can do is listen. Come to UKBP and celebrate with us, about us, and for us.”
Before our time is up, I make of her one last request: to impress upon me, her shining visions of utopia. “I want it to feel and look safe, beautiful, shades of the diaspora — where our beings of being black and queer. I want us to be ‘busy being black’ but in such a beautiful way that we’re not tired. I want to be able to look down from Heaven, or wherever the afterlife is — if there is one — to know that young people especially don’t have to strule. I want to know that our [black] queer selves can walk into the boardroom and not be mistaken for the tea lady. I want for us to be walking down the street without a hijab on without feeling that someone from behind is going to drag it off. I want for acceptance, not tolerance. I want for understanding, love, peace and harmony. I want for all forms of discrimination and racism to be eliminated.
“We will get there,” she nods with conviction.”It may not be in my lifetime, but while we’re on the route to getting there, I think I want every step of the way, for our history, our herstory, our their story, to be documented and archived and utilised because when the next generation come about, they feel they’ve got to do this all by themselves... [We] stand on the shoulders of our ancestral giants that continue to guide us and lead the way.”
“I want for acceptance, not tolerance. I want for understanding, love, peace and harmony. I want for all forms of discrimination and racism to be eliminated. ”