Pride: "Mining Communities Are Being Bullied, Just Like We Are"

Last night a film critic friend invited me to see a new movie being released Friday, Pride. It's a dramatization of a true story set in Thatcherite England (1984), during an historic year long coal mining strike. The movie is spectacular and is a celebration of a bond between humans in the face of cold, ugly corporate power being enforced by right-wing government. The film is set as a piece the brings together politically conscious London gays and Welsh miners. There is plenty of prejudice and hatred woven throughout the plot but when a miner goes to a London gay dance club to thank the community for raising funds to feed their families-- which the Thatcherites are trying to starve into submission-- he says, "When you're in a battle with an enemy so much bigger, so much stronger than you, to find out you have a friend you never knew existed… well, that's the best feeling in the world." What do they have in common, these rough-hewn Welsh miners-- think Appalachia-- and a gay community just coming to grips with the AIDS epidemic? Both recognize a bond built from fighting oppression by the neo-fascists, their police, their media and their manufactured public opinion.

I called Roland when I left the theater to tell him about it. I couldn't. I choked up every time I trued explaining when I spent much of the movie crying. He looked it up online. "It's a comedic drama," he said. "It looks funny." He's right, there was some humor in it-- thank God-- but, at least for me, there was the pride of unity that always chokes me up when I see communal efforts to resist the power of the Establishment, the power of the cannibals. And for me, the whole film got tied up in my mind with a miners benefit I had helped organize a few years before this one. It was in the summer of 1978 and the scraggly punk rock community around San Francisco's Mabuhay Gardens came together to do a benefit concert for Kentucky miners striking because of shit working conditions and black lung disease. We made that our battle in a similar way that the London gays made the miners' struggle in one small Welsh village their own. We managed to raise over $3,000 and almost a dozen bands played-- the Nuns, the Dils, the Avengers, the Sleepers, Negative Trend, UXA, the Mutants, the Liars, Seizure, SST, Tuxedomoon… I may have left some bands out.

The battle will never end, not so long as there are still selfish, greedy sociopathic conservatives trying to enslave everyone else so they can get a bigger share of the pie. Above is a trailer from the film; here's a clip from the Avengers playing "The American In Me" at the Mabuhay miners benefit. Do yourself a favor; go see the movie.