TPS Photos: Gay Pride London 2009

On Saturday 4th July, I attended a breakfast hosted by the London Fire Brigade for this year's London Gay Pride.

I was accompanied by Hugh Hill and Marta Demartini and we shot our images as we marched amongst the others celebrating and commemorating and remembering and thinking. I love the fact that in the UK we have the right for consenting adults to love one another without breaking any rules. This is not the case everywhere in our world of course, nor is my above statement an attempt to get away from the fact that hate crimes resulting in murder or serious injury still occur. Why one human would kill or mame another becsuse of their sexual orientation, skin colour, gender, religious belief, disability, age - is beyond me.

That ism list that so many people talk about but so few actually deal with properly proves again and again that nothing political is correct. Well if I'm going to be so late posting my blog items I guess I might as well make them lively....

Right up the front representing the Greater London Authority was the Deputy Mayor Richard Barnes, pictured below with Rhona Cameron. There are 200 images uploaded to our main site at https://www.theimagefile.com/?skin=7635&Action=_VC&id=32968450&ppwd=nc3835pr

During the entire time I worked in the Royal Naval Submarine Service, where I was trained as a photographer by the Fleet Air Arm Phot Section, if anyone had come out as gay, it would have immediately terminated his employment. The perverse rationale argument from the MOD(N) on applying an absolute ban on gay men in the navy was that the person would be a potential blackmail victim, being forced to sell state secrets to the enemy in fear of being exposed! So the argument is that if it aint banned, it aint concealed. It must have taken military intelligence years to fathom that one out, but at least in the 21st century people like this two badge submariner below, no longer have to live two secret lives.