Why are the cops at Pride?


There is a question I hear again and again in the lead up to Pride every year, one which drives at the rotten core of contemporary ‘gay politics’ in this country. I have heard some variant of it in bars and living rooms alike, at parties and in the street, and always in an exasperated tone. The question is this:

Why are the cops at Pride?

This concern is so inescapable that Midsumma provide a superficial response on the festival website. I confess that reading it leaves me feeling that I’ve slipped into some alternate universe where everything assumes an opposite meaning, as in a child’s story. They write, in part:

Victoria Police play an important role in the safe delivery of Pride … officers are present to monitor and deal with threats of violence [and] have a presence in the Parade itself, as allies [sic] … as part of their work and … of their internal pride for … employees who identify as LGBTQIA+.

I do not understand what these words mean. In whose world do cops foster safety? In which moments do they discourage, as opposed to dispense, violence? And by what arcane, incomprehensible definition of the word could anyone consider them ‘allies’?

When queers are kicked to the street by their tragically heterosexual families, it’s the cops who will tear down their shelters and steal their possessions. It is they who’ll raid, slap with fines and prosecute the queers who make ends meet with sex work.

When we take to the streets to protest detention camps or mining conventions or the wanton destruction of sacred trees or yet another death in custody, it is Victoria Police who’ll greet us with batons, cable ties, horses, shields and tear gas. They’ll set up a tent at Carnival one day and crack skulls the next.

It is here that white people, especially those who wear lanyards and know only the more gardened suburbs and their bourgeois aspirations, will grow uncomfortable. They’ll chime in, with a saccharine smile, that it’s ‘about adding chairs to the table, not taking them away’.

This schoolyard metaphor, of chairs and tables, shifts the ground of the matter. It implies that the great difficulty of the queer experience is exclusion and that therefore, to avoid hypocrisy, we must fraternise with absolutely anyone, no matter their actions, ethics, and politics. I think this is nonsense.

The trouble they want to obscure with this platitude is power – who has it, who uses it and against whom. It is by no means a neutral act to invite the instruments of state violence to our table. The rallying cry of police ‘inclusion’ is meant to drown out the voices of those who are made unsafe by their presence. 

We have gained very little by becoming collaborators, and lost much. Some may point to the liaison officers, but I do not think this is the trump card that bureaucrats and white gays believe it is. Liaison officers are an admission that the Force remains so hostile to us that we cannot safely interact with it without intermediaries. 

Indeed, this is what the evidence suggests. The combination of the words ‘police’ and ‘allies’ brings to mind the coppers who pushed Michael Maynes to suicide. I cannot help but think of the constable who unlawfully leaked photos out of the St Kilda cop shop, to say nothing of the ones that shattered Nik Dimopoulos’s shoulder. 

The raid on Hares and Hyenas’ ignited discontent among queers, evoking as it did the police attacks on gay people from decades past. In fact, the assault was only a few months out from the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1994 Tasty nightclub raid, which saw hundreds of queers detained, strip-searched and brutalised. 

Though, as poet Omar Sakr observed at the time, the cruelty at Hares that night was not intended for a queer but for someone marked by their nationality, religion and skin as the appropriate recipient of state sadism. When the quasi-militarised assault team kicked down that door, they were looking for a person of colour.

I do not mean to say that our rage was misguided. Instead, I think the incident points to the commonality queers share with other minoritised people. Police violence against queers is inherently tied to police violence against others, for it is the same application of brute force.

I also don’t want to be irresponsible and talk about police brutality without acknowledging the settler violence that drives it. The colonial enterprise we call Australia started with dispossession, massacres and apartheid. As Lidia Thorpe recently remarked, genocide continues, only with greater sophistication.

Police are the conduit that feeds the widening jaws of the Victorian private prison system. They are the machine that doubled Aboriginal imprisonment between 2010 to 2020. With a new for-profit ‘supermax’ on the way, it’s no wonder that their rapacious hands seize Blak children and Blak women asleep on trains.

Lazy notions of ‘inclusion’ aside, the reason why cops are at Pride is because Midsumma is afraid to lose government funding. Victoria’s law-and-order administration provides cash and, quid pro quo, they rake in social capital and camouflage for the bullies in blue.

In doing so, Midsumma excises the least well off by colluding with their oppressors, and exploits everyone else as a means to an end. Community is worn as a cloak by agents who would, if ordered, turn on them with a moment’s notice. For this service, we get a fete day and a pre-approved parade.

I do not wonder whether the Midsumma executive and board sleep soundly, as I’m sure that they do, content in the knowledge that their decisions do not harm anyone to whom they must answer. Accountability is a corporate structure in their world. Instead, I ask myself, of what do they dream? 

It cannot be hands restraining their limbs, commands squealed in superiority, and final hours spent in the fluorescent light of a cell. In other words, it can’t be the violence they visit upon others by sharing our table with those who inflict it. 

I can’t fathom what spirit guides their eyes when they look to the horizon. My imagination fails me, for I cannot intuit the view nor improvise the thoughts of those who say to people less free: ‘Now is not your time. You must wait while we bargain with those who stand on your neck.’

 

 

This piece was originally performed at Let Me Get Something off My Chest, produced by Sam Elkin for Midsumma Festival 2021.

Image: Julian Meehan

Hiero Badge

Hiero Badge is a proud non-binary fag living on stolen Wurundjeri land who writes things, mostly essays and a few poems. They haven’t written anything in a bit because the world is kind of fucked (free Palestine). Send love/hate mail on the one owned by the apartheid billionaire or on the one owned by the ivy league billionaire.

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  1. Typical bleeding heart bleeting quoting all the bad parts of our society without any of the good parts. The police are a part of our society to ensure the antisocial elements are not allowed to run raqmpant over the law abiding citizens. Go to a country with anarchy (more of them are popping up every day) and compare it to ours Joshua.

    1. “The police are a part of our society to ensure the antisocial elements are not allowed to run rampant over the law abiding citizens” Bold claim, where’s the citation.

      Half the points of the article are in the form of questions. You didn’t even try to answer any of them. The first is “Why are the cops at Pride?”

    2. So you’re saying LGBT is the ‘bad parts’ of society? Wake up. We live in a nanny state with an overbearing police presence

  2. Misfiring attempt to link all struggles of ‘oppressed’ together…

    In Australia in 2021 there is very little homophobia compared to 1994 or other countries around the world right now.

  3. There may be /less/ homophobia but there is also a giant pervasive miasma of transphobia. *Our* fight is far from over, and if yours is, I will ask you: who was it that supported and fought with you, if you would turn your back on us?

  4. This is a really important conversation that we need to have here in Naarm. Reminds me of two excellent books “Gay, Inc.
    The Non-profitization of Queer Politics” by Myrl Beam and “The End of Policing” by Alex Vitale

  5. When I was a victim of a gay bashing, the police were a godsend. I received utmost sympathy, and support, including when going to court for the prosecution of the offenders –– whom they ultimately succeeded in arresting.

    This author manifests all the peurile inanity of anti-police theology. Who the hell does he think he will turn to should he be the victim of a crime?

  6. I am reading these comments, and I am honestly surprised. As a straight, white, affluent, cis’ male, I have never had an issue with the police, so this article intrigued me.
    Police are MY friendly neighbourhood protection… but if you do even a little research into police brutality towards LGBTQ+ – yes even in Australia – it’s obvious that they are not everyone’s friend. Police ignoring, downplaying or outright promoting the discrimination and abuse of queer citizens. And if the people police are trying to “protect” me from are black, queer or minority, then that’s not a protection I want.

  7. I came out in Adelaide 1980. Moved to Sydney 1981. Travelled a lot.But spent about 20 years there in total, my interactions with police are numerous, professionally and personally and mostly negative. I almost died after a ‘gay’ stabbing in Hobart ’97, Rodney Pratley a serial offender, caught because I put up a fight was arrested at casualty as I underwent surgery, but the cops were useless. I have employed them as security, was in business with one, I say They have no place in community events.

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