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.
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