Pride and partnership

TRANSCRIPT

SIMON: So about, you know, not long before – maybe a few weeks before we had our civil partnership – I think we saw a flyer or a poster, and we were like, ‘oh my god.’ It was the first ever Leeds Pride, taking place from outside the Civic Hall, at the same time as our civil partnership! And at first we were like, ‘Oh no, this is terrible!’ I don’t know why, we just thought, oh, you know, it’s just going to be too much, and it’s just like – we didn’t…

CRAIG: I don’t think we expected – we, we probably over-expected the, the number of people that were gonna attend. Now obviously we know it’s – we’re, we’re in the 66,000 bracket. Before, I think it was, it was a few hundred people. But I think we, we kind of pictured as being a bit like a, a London Pride, so there were thousands of people gonna be converging on Millennium Square and, and we wouldn’t have been able to get out, and, and they were doing warm-up aerobics, all kind of things.

SIMON: But, yeah, so, you know, when we went in to the Civic Hall, there wasn’t really much happening in Millennium Square at 12 o’ clock. But, by the time we came out, an hour later at 1 o’clock, the entire kind of march was, like, literally just waiting to start. And there was people with flags, there was, like, male go-go dancers in, you know, skimpy little sequinned, you know, briefs. There was a – you know, double-decker, open-top bus with all people dancing, there was cars, it was this huge kind of crazy-as-you-can-imagine thing for Pride. And it just – A) it was just amazing because like, people sort of saw us, coming out of the Civic Hall, like, as a gay couple, and started to cheer and clap and they sort of – cos it was obviously a total coincidence, but I think people maybe thought we’d arrange…

CRAIG: Planned it…

SIMON: …to have our civil partnership to coincide, which we didn’t. And then the most funny thing was Craig’s nana who was like, sort of, late 80s at the time – sort of just turned around and said ‘[Gasp] Is all this just for you two?!’ and she thought it was absolutely fabulous and she was…

CRAIG: Amazing… ‘Do you know all these people?!’

SIMON: She was loving it, but everyone thought – a lot of people thought that it, that, the whole shebang was in celebration of just the two of us, and that was quite a – it was actually a really memorable…

CRAIG: It was.

SIMON: …special kind of moment, wasn’t it.

CRAIG: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Sounds fabulous!

[Laughter.]