Matthew: Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. This is Pride Month, June in 2026 and it’s a great time to talk about mining and miner strikes. What in the world am I talking about? I am talking about a movie called Pride. Now, if you look for this movie, you’ll probably find a whole bunch of pride and prejudice. You’ll probably find a whole bunch of Netflix or Amazon’s Pride collection.
You might even find Simba’s Pride as my guest found. But there is a movie called Pride from 2011 made by the BBC. Fantastic movie that is about a pretty important event in queer history that very few people talk about. Lesbians and gays support the miners and the BBC made a movie about it and I have Becky Allen returning guest on to talk about it.
We want to talk about it today because this movie is about an important moment in queer history but also in labour organizing history and the way the movie tells the story about coalition building and about how do we see past our differences when we have common enemies and there is a whole bunch of themes that we love to talk about on this podcast. So Becky, welcome.
Becky: Hi, thank you for having me back. For my quick introduction, my name is Becky Allen. I’m an author and a person who does online tech stuff for my day job.
I live in New York. I live in a co-op and so I have been discovering a lot of community and getting much more involved in my own community. I’m queer. I’m very excited to be discussing this movie. Yeah, and I feel like you probably had me on because the last labour movie we discussed as far as I know was Newsies and that is also a fave of mine. I hadn’t seen Pride before so I watched it for this and it is wonderful. I really, really loved it.
Matthew: You’re so right. I’m so glad that we brought up Newsies. Newsies is another great movie about the labour movement as well as singing and dancing which is another part of this movie as well. That movie, I think a number of people hope that there is a gay subtext possible.
This one it is pretty clearly there. I did also further introduce myself. I’m Matthew Fox.
I’ve heard me before. I’m non-binary and queer and so this movie is dear to my heart for those issues but also because there’s someone who’s been a community organizer for most of my life. Some of that is spent as a pastor. Some of that is spent in secular community organizing. My first job was as a union organizer and I’ve always had a real fondness for the labour movement and a real sadness that for a wealth of reasons that a lot of people have written about a lot of the left and a lot of the labour movement have kind of parted ways. And so this story to me is such a beautiful one about queer community and labour community coming together in ways that still resonate today.
And I want to talk about the movie but I’m going to just very quickly tell the story of what actually happened. So in the mid-80s a number of miners, people who work in coal mines, not kids, these are very clear miners, a number of them, I think most of them in Great Britain, the United Kingdom went on strike. Margaret Thatcher was doing a lot of terrible things to bust the unions.
She and Reagan were kind of in the same vein and this was right after Reagan had done terrible things to the air traffic controllers unions and the like. And during that time the miners were really struggling. They were trying to pay the bills. They were trying to pay the rent and gas and put food on the table because they were on strike for almost a year. And led by this guy named Mark Ashton, a number of gays and lesbians in London decided to start raising money to support them. And he had this idea of like, look, Thatcher hates them, Thatcher hates us, we should be supporting them.
He was a very left wing socialist guy and so he had a lot of support for labour unions already. And the movie tells the story about how they come to work together. And there’s a lot of sort of fish out of water on both sides and some tensions but they come to work together. And one of the real points of the movie is that by the end of it not only have the gays and lesbians all supported the miners but that the miners remembered that. And that long after the strike, the summer after that strike at the Pride Parade, a huge number of coal miners came down to the Pride Parade and led the Pride Parade. And a couple of years later when the Labour Party officially made gay rights a part of the platform, it was in large part because the miners, the mining union, the Labour Party at that point, each union was a big, big part of it, pushed very hard for it.
And just to give you an idea that this isn’t something that happened once and then went away, one of the characters in the movie is a guy named Mike, he’s based on a real guy. Not long ago, for this year as part of Pride, Britain like America has had a real kind of right wing turn. They don’t have a Trump but they certainly have a lot of the far right kind of movements, some of which are very anti-queer, including unfortunately some parts of the Labour movement now. And the city council where this guy lived is run by Reform UK, which is a really right wing party, and they voted to not give any city funds to support the Pride Parade that they’d supported for decades and decades. The miners’ union, honoring this thing again from 40 years ago, heard about this, worked with Mike and donated more money to make this parade happen than had ever been donated to them before.
So just a wonderful way of like this moment of coalition building kind of just kept going and kept being true. Alright, I’ve said quite a lot, so Becky, let me kind of let you jump in and talk about what did the movie, what hit you?
Becky: Okay, so there was, so first off, the movie is lovely and I definitely highly recommend it. It is, I think, it is too simplistic to say it’s a feel good movie or a feel good story. There are a lot of elements of it and I do think one thing we should touch on at some point is that it is also situated in the midst of the AIDS crisis. And that is definitely a stated but still somewhat understated, I thought, element of it and I really appreciated how that was acknowledged and handled within it without it becoming what the movie was about. But it is also very funny and it is very uplifting. Like it is a lovely movie, it’s not exactly a comedy, it’s not exactly a drama, but it is a movie that makes you feel good by the end. And I very much appreciated that and it is something that I think is needed sometimes just in terms of having queer stories and particularly one that is based in history, not all of the characters in the movie were real people, but many of them were. But it is something that I think is a really good and necessary thing to have, stories that we can point to and say, even though bad things were happening, look at the community they built, look at the ways we’re still feeling those echoes today. I got choked up reading about the Pride Parade this year.
I got choked up when you were just describing it. And I think it’s very powerful and so first off, absolutely recommend the movie as something that is very powerful and will make you feel many feelings. But I do think that there’s also, there’s a lot to say about community and I also think that at some point in this discussion, we should touch on respectability politics because I think there’s some interesting things happening there.
Matthew: Definitely there is. And I think also I should note, both of us describe ourselves as queer. I think this movie is also a reflection of a particular time and place. So if you’re kind of wondering where’s the B and the T in the description I used, that was just not the language that was used at that time. No one identifies as bisexual in the movie or describes themselves in that way. There are a number of not main characters, but sideline characters who are clearly either drag queens or trans or something like that.
And so that’s definitely a part of the community. But at the time, that was not the language people used. And so that’s kind of one thing that is sort of the historical artifact that definitely threw me a little bit when I went to the research.
Like, no, this is just actually what the name of the group was, Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners. And I like what you said about the uplifting because I think that’s very right because and here I’m going to give some spoilers, but it’s also these are historical facts that happened. The miners’ strike was regarded by many people as a failure. And in many ways, I think that is both a sad, but also hopeful part of the story is that the fact that the miners keep coming back and keep coming to support the queer community for many decades later now.
After something, I think it definitely, like, I mean, the support that was given helped keep people alive, helped keep people moving. But the strike is remembered as a failure. It’s remembered as one of the moments of really crushing the labor unions. And it’s kind of, I think the way that the movie tells the story of naming that problem and reflecting that, and there being a moment of everyone kind of wondering like what was this for? What was the purpose of it? Really, to me, feels like a very important way that they ended on that high note of the parade, but also with this sad note of like, yeah, this thing didn’t work out the way that they wanted.
Becky: Yeah. And I think, I think that goes to show there is no end of history. And that’s something which I think certainly in the United States right now that we also need to keep very much in mind right now is a time of community building and coalition building because of all of the horrible things that are going on that we don’t need to name right now. And it is very easy to feel crushed by that. And there are a lot of things that you would look at and say individually, this is a thing that we lost. This is a thing that bad people won and we lost and that’s devastating. But you look at something like this and you can say, okay, there was a loss in this strike and that is awful.
And obviously, you know, watching it as a narrative in a movie, you want them to win and that’s just not what happened. But you also see that was not the end of these people. They all went on to continue to do other things. Several of them passed away. But generally, the people continued to live and make progress. And the fact that they built this community between miners and queer people is something which continued to help both groups going forward and they continued to have that solidarity and caring about each other. And that is I wouldn’t necessarily say more important than the actual loss.
Like, I don’t think that that can be quantified in that way. But I think it’s important to remember that the work that they did was not in vain and that this alliance between very unlikely groups was not in vain, even though the strike did not have the desired outcome.
Matthew: And I think it’s such a good point. And especially one thing they talk about a lot in the movie is the way that these two very different groups are able to find the things they have in common. And in part, it starts with they have a common enemy, you know, that Thatcher is going after both of them, that the police are going after both of them, that the press is going after both of them.
And that becomes a thing. And one of my favorite lines in the movie is from Cliff, who’s one of the mining community, and someone is showing him, you know, because one of the sort of plots of the movie is will the miners support this, especially in the small town, because there’s still a lot of like, you know, toxic masculinity and ideas about this. And when the miners are supposed to be strong, this makes them look weak and all that. And someone is reading to Cliff from a newspaper about, you know, these terrible things about the gays and lesbians and saying, how can you support them? And Cliff’s response is, I read the terrible lies they tell about us. Why would I believe the terrible lies they tell about them? You know, I just thought that was such a great moment of like, because to me, so much of coalition building, so much of intersectionality, so much of all of that is can I see that my struggle is reflected in someone else’s struggle, not in oppression Olympics, not to say one of us is worse than the other. And sometimes one group needs support more than the other. And that’s a fair conversation. But still be able to say, you’re getting attacked in a way that I see, you’re hurting in a way that I’ve been hurt. And how can that build a bridge between us, even if it’s just I’m not going to listen to the propaganda about you, because they tell propaganda about me too.
Becky: Yeah, I think that’s very important. And I think it is very easy to see ways in which people are different from you, or in this case, again, two very radically different communities that came together.
And it is much harder to see the things that you have in common. And so at the very beginning of the movie and of the movement, you have Mark Ashton saying they are just like us. They’re being beaten up by cops, like we are. Thatcher’s going after them, like she’s going after us.
We have that in common. And it’s actually harder from the other side for the miners to see that. But many of them do eventually. And I think many of the miners are uncomfortable with queer people. And that is just the fact of how those people felt. And we can critique that. But that is the fact of how people felt. It is unfortunately how some people still feel. But I do think that there is power in seeing, even if I am uncomfortable with some of what you have said, or even if I am uncomfortable with some aspects of how you live, we can still see this is an existential threat. And we need to be united against it and find that common ground. And I think that that, again, is very powerful. And I also think it is powerful and important that a lot of the miners ended up seeing, oh, we do have a lot in common. And also, yeah, you are just people and feeling more comfortable with it. And that is certainly part of the narrative of the movie. And that’s a really beautiful thing.
Matthew: And I think they tell it really well, especially in that, while there are two very different groups, as the movie goes on, we find that there are ways they overlap. You know, there is one of the miners who is himself gay. And that’s a part of where he’s coming from. One of the leaders of the gay movement is from a mining town in Wales. And I think it’s never quite said if his parents themselves are miners, but clearly he’s from the community that this is all happening in.
And I really love the efforts that are clearly made and the stumbles. You know, like one of the things that the show, the movie shows is that the two kind of main leaders are Mark, who we’ve talked about, and Dai, who is the union spokesman. So he’s the one who comes down from the town to come and meet with them and stuff like that.
And he gets asked to go to this gay and lesbian bar to speak about what’s happening. And everyone expects him to completely bomb. And he does great. It is such a lesson in how to speak to a community that assumes you’re going to be hostile in a disarming kind of a way, you know, watch his speech because it is so well done. And then on the flip side, Mark, who I think is just this powerhouse of organizing, he goes into the miners’ hall, the welfare hall, and bombs. He knows they’re uncomfortable and he kind of reverts to, oh, you know, kind of like teasing them about like, well, you know, I’m sure many more of you are gay, which probably there’s some truth to, but like, this is not how you build that bridge. And I just kind of love that because I think it would be easy for this movie to be the smart, sophisticated city folk go and help the, you know, dumb backwards country folk so that they all can be together.
And it’s not that. It really shows the lessons that had to be learned on both sides. Yeah, definitely. Let’s talk more about the HIV/AIDS part of it. And this is something I know is important to you because I don’t know if you still do work with groups working for AIDS education and advocacy, am I correct?
Becky: Yes, I have not in, I ended up leaving that job five or six years ago now, but for more than a decade, I was, it was a community news organization and I worked on the website, so I was not the person going to conferences and doing the interviews necessarily, but I definitely was pretty enmeshed in that community. And it was something that was very important to me. It still is. It’s TheBody.com.
It’s great. People should look at it for HIV news and awareness. But yeah, so that was something that was very much on my mind going into this. And I was curious how the movie was going to address it. I hadn’t, like I knew the basics of what had happened before, but I didn’t know who the players in the story were. And I had been going into it thinking this is a story that is centering around, you know, several gay men in the mid-80s. And that’s definitely something that would be part of their lives. I wasn’t sure which, you know, I say characters, some were characters, some are actual people who are being, you know, turned into characters for a movie.
I wasn’t sure if they were going to get into whether or not any of them had diagnoses. And they did. And as I said before, I was really pleased with the balance that the movie struck with that. You do find out one of the characters is HIV positive. He’s a long term survivor. He’s still alive, even though he was one of the very first people in the UK diagnosed in the very early 80s.
Matthew: Literally number two, Jonathan Blake. And in the movie, which came out in 2014, he was still alive. He was 65 at that point. I kind of wondered like, I mean, he’s just a man in his 70s, late almost 80s now. He’s still alive. He is still alive today.
Becky: That was one of the very first things I checked. I finished the movie and then I checked Wikipedia immediately. Whereas Mark Ashton passed away only a couple of years after the events the movie covers. And the movie doesn’t explicitly tell you that he is living with HIV or that he is being tested for it. But there is a really powerful scene, which is something certainly I had the context for. And I hope most viewers would, although I don’t know if you are not as familiar with the history of HIV, if it would be as clear where he is in a club and he runs into somebody who I think is an ex, but it’s not entirely clear, who says, oh, I’m on my goodbye tour.
And he says, where are you going? And there’s not really an answer to that. And that to me was very, very clear what that discussion was about. And I found that to be a very powerful moment. Again, I keep saying that word, but I do mean it because it made it very clear that after that, Mark has a little bit of a breakdown. And that’s also when the things are going wrong with the group and the strike is not being successful. And he ends up sort of freaking out and leaving for a while. And I think that understanding that moment gives it context that he’s got a lot more going on than just this movement that is very important to him, although that is a huge part of it. But I found not naming it in that moment to also be something that was very powerful and that spoke to this was just a thing that people knew. And it didn’t always have to be said, but it was something that was a huge and terrifying part of these people’s lives.
Matthew: No, I fully agree. And I definitely picked up on it. And I think if you’re of older Gen X or older millennial age or above, you probably pick up on that as well. I think for younger people, it may be something that needs a bit of explaining in part because HIV/AIDS is still an incredibly deadly disease if you’re not getting the treatment and care that you need, and that treatment and care is by no means accessible to everyone. Even with that, it can sometimes still be deadly. But I think among a lot of people today, there’s a perception that HIV/AIDS is now something you can live with if you’re doing all the medical stuff that you need to do, etc. And please correct me if any point is wrong.
Becky: No, what I would add to that is that it is increasingly easy to live with if you have access to medical care. I was in high school, certainly, and probably when you were as well, there was a lot of discussion of the cocktail drugs and you would have to take five drugs at a time, very specific, like every five hours around the clock.
And that’s not the case anymore. Most people are able to have one pill a day and are fine and have the same rough health outcomes as people who are not living with HIV. There are also a lot of different forms of prevention now. Certainly, again, when we were younger, it was basically condoms and abstinence. And you were lucky if in school you got condoms as part of the discussion instead of just abstinence. But now you do have PrEP and there are different forms of PrEP that are being approved. It is a very, very different outcome possible today, which is incredible. Medical science is amazing and should be funded and that should be the end of that sentence.
Matthew: 100%. And you’re right. I think I’m a little older than you, but we’re close. Those things were just getting started, but there was still very much the perception, especially when we were younger, that HIV is a death sentence.
And certainly at the time of the early 80s, when this movie was taking place, I think it was set in 1984, that was very much the case. None of those things were around at the time. And not only that, but there was still so much stigma and so much fear about it. Like at one point a character says she doesn’t want any of these gay visitors to their town sleeping in her basement because she might get AIDS.
That kind of massive ignorance and things like that. And I think you’re right. In some ways, if that character had said to Mark, yeah, I just got my positive test or something like that, it would have felt very inauthentic because there’s absolutely no need to have that conversation. It was so clear in that world, of course, that’s what it would mean. I think they handle it well where Jonathan later is talking to Sian, one of the straight characters from Wales. And so because she doesn’t have that context, he tells her more about what’s happening. And that I thought was a really brilliant way of storytelling.
Like that to me was a setting where him kind of giving a little bit of exposition about what AIDS is like at that time made a lot of sense in a way that if it was Mark talking to someone in that scene it would not have made sense at all.
Becky: Exactly, yeah. And I think that’s the importance of naming that. And I think there was a time when if you were making a gay movie, there had to be a character who suffered a gay bashing and there had to be a character who died of AIDS. And there was a real push to sort of move past that. In kind of the same way of like, yes, we should tell movies about racism, but not every Black character has to be a victim of racism as part of every movie.
I think there’s been a big movement more recently to say queer joy is important. You don’t have to have those moments. Trigger warning: both of those things happen in this movie. There was a gay bashing incident. HIV is obviously a big thing, but it being a part of the history of this movie, I think, as you said, makes it a necessary thing.
Becky: And they are both things that I think are handled with care. And a lot of thought is put into how they are portrayed and how you see them affect people. And we find out that Jonathan is HIV positive when his partner is the one who has been hospitalized after a gay bashing and Jonathan is trying to tell people, oh, no, you have to take care of him. Make sure he’s eating his vegetables. He has HIV. It’s really important that he stay healthy.
And is clearly struggling with what has happened to him and is doing what he can to try and protect someone else. And that’s also a very moving moment that is very well done.
Matthew: Very much. Yeah. Because Sian at first is down there kind of mothering Jonathan and being like, no, no, we’re worried about you. And that’s when he has to say, no, it’s this. And then Jonathan tells that incredible story of him being literally the second person diagnosed and still alive, which it did happen. But I would bet he is one of the first thousand still alive. There are very, very few who are still alive today.
And he’s having that conversation with another one of my favorite characters in this movie, who I think also has an incredible journey. Sian James. Talk a bit about what you thought of her journey.
Becky: I loved her journey. And she was somebody else who I looked up. And there’s a postscript about her over the closing credits. She starts out as a wife and mother who is helping make sandwiches for the miners’ support effort. Her husband is a miner and she is not really in a leadership role or anything.
She kind of wants to be, but she seems really intimidated by it. And then in the first meeting that we see, she is making sandwiches and listening to the people who are the leadership committee discuss whether or not they should invite the gay and lesbian group who have been donating money to come visit their town, which all of the other groups that have donated, they have invited. And she finally just says, well, if you’ve invited everybody else, just invite them. And she makes herself more of a presence. And her husband is a little bit uncomfortable with that because he’s very uncomfortable with the idea of gay people, which he works through the course of the movie. He gets to know people, he moves past that, he becomes very defensive of them. When other people are threatening and rude, he grabs like two young idiots who are being very disrespectful and bodily shoves them out of the room.
Like I thought that was great. But she very much comes into herself. She becomes a leader. She becomes a caretaker, as was mentioned, for the point-of-view character of the movie, who is a fictional character, as well as for Jonathan in the hospital and his partner. And she is somebody who becomes very involved with this group. They clearly mean a lot to her. She’s very accepting.
And at the end, I think it’s Jonathan who encourages her, why don’t you go to college? You have such a great mind and you’re such a good leader. And what’s wonderful is that she actually did in real life. And she eventually became a member of parliament. And that is so cool.
That’s amazing.
Matthew: It’s such a wonderful story. And she was the first woman elected in her district. I think she’s retired now, but she did serve for quite a while. And it is such a wonderful part of the story. And first, not to go back a bit, but it’s one of the ways in which the HIV story helps to set context for everything else. Because part of what Jonathan is saying to her is that he’s talking about how many wonderful people of his generation and the younger generations had these incredible minds and are no longer here.
And he basically says, like, you have this great mind, don’t waste it. Because so many people are not getting their chance and they need people like you to advocate and fight for them. And I know she did. She did quite a lot in parliament on a number of issues, especially miners’ rights and union rights.
But also, I know she did quite a lot of fighting for HIV care and AIDS care as well. And I have to imagine that’s very connected to that part of the story. And yeah, it’s a kind of moment where you need this to be based on a true story.
Because if this was completely fictional, like if one of the kids at the end of Newsies grows up and goes to run for Congress because he got so inspired, you’re like, come on, Disney, that’s so silly. And so when it really happened, I was like, me and my partner were both like, wait, really?
We had to Google it because it just felt so incredible. But yeah. But it’s wonderful.
Becky: This really is a story that lends itself to being a movie. The things that actually happened work so well narratively. And I’m sure that they did not all happen exactly as we saw in the movie. But this coalition was real. The Pits and Perverts fundraiser club night was real. And it was their biggest fundraiser. And that name came after a newspaper had dismissively referred to them as that.
And they embraced it and used it for fundraising. Mark Ashton was a real person. Jonathan was a real person.
Sian was a real person. And then she went on to be a politician. It really is just like, wow, history told the story here. And it’s good that it was remembered and turned into this movie.
Matthew: And in my mind, it’s also such a brilliant moment of community organizing because that’s a very sort of, you know, maligned profession these days. But one of the biggest things about community organizing, like when I was being taught how to do it and in that work and when I taught others, a phrase we often use is organize yourself out of a job. Like if you are someone who is helping a community from the outside, part of your job is to help find the people who should be leaders in that community and lift them up and give them the skills and the training and the encouragement so they can then do it themselves and you’re not needed anymore. And so the fact that that’s what happened with her, that this community coming in to help from the outside and giving them motivation to fight and to speak gives her this opportunity, and she uses it. One of the things that happens is because the London group had been dealing with the police a lot longer, they know the rules about when you can arrest people at a protest and when you can’t. And so, but they know that two gay men walking into a police station in South Wales is not going to be helpful. So they teach Sian how to speak up and she uses her voice to go and speak for people.
Becky: Oh, it’s so good. Yeah.
Matthew: One part of the movie that’s not as accurate as it could be, I’m curious what you think about it because I think one of the things that makes the movie very comedic is it plays on kind of a cliche, but I think one that can be very easily used, which is kind of the friendship between younger gay men and older women. And there’s a lot of kind of funny fish out of water stuff. And some women of all ages and, you know, there are little girls who are just so fascinated with this guy Jeff’s incredible hair, and all the women want to dance, but the straight guys won’t dance.
So the gay men dance with them. There’s one great moment where a woman who’s a housewife and kind of clearly is unsatisfied with that role in life says to one couple, like, I need to ask you a question. And they are so convinced she’s about to ask them about sex. And she says, which one of you does the housekeeping? And I just thought that was such an interesting moment of how we see gender and gender roles, of her assuming like, well, she’s never known anything except those gender roles. So two men, one of them still must be like, you know, the housekeeper and the other is the breadwinner. But that part of the movie isn’t the most accurate. Those moments I’m sure happened. But in the movie, it is mostly gay men. There’s one lesbian who is kind of portrayed very well, Steph.
And then a couple of others who are there a little bit more for comic relief, because they are vegans and they’re always sort of wanting to do their own committees and stuff like that. And they’re not really as much of a part of things. And my understanding is that there was a little bit of tension in that regard, but that the group itself was actually much more gender balanced.
And there were a lot more lesbians who were much more involved. As I kind of look at that, I’m like, on the one hand, it feels like I wish it was a little more accurate because these things matter. I also, though, can understand that for the uplifting comedic beats they were going for, I understand why they did that. I’m curious what’s your take on that, like I feel like it does come across a little bit more like, hey, it’s the gay men who did this, and I really would have liked to see a little more balance. Curious your thoughts.
Becky: I think a little bit more balance would have been nice. I also think so there was apparently a lesbian sort of breakaway group that was specific for women’s issues. And I do think that the movie plays that very much for laughs. And I don’t know enough about the real history to know what led to that breaking away and what specific concerns they were addressing. And it’s something which the movie kind of plays as like, they don’t need a women’s specific group. And genuinely, maybe they did.
And I don’t know enough to know. And that did irk me a little bit, the feeling of like, the specific lesbian characters who then break away were very much played as like, kind of everybody rolls their eyes at them. And that the overwhelming majority of the rest of the queer characters are men felt a little bit unbalanced. In terms of things like the dancing, I thought that was probably not accurate, but I did think it was lovely.
Because as you mentioned earlier, Mark goes to give his speech and he bombs, and then what actually starts to get through to people is dancing and celebrating and having moments of freedom of expression. And then that does pull in the women. And then there are a couple of men who had been very hesitant, but who are literally like, if I try to dance, girls might like me.
And so they ask one of the gay men to teach them to dance. And it’s very silly and very cliche. But it is heartwarming. It’s fun.
It feels good. And it gives you what the narrative needs you to understand, which is that these two groups do eventually start to mesh and open up to each other and have each other’s backs. And so I am sure that is not how it actually happened. But I feel like narratively that worked well.
But I do wish they had more balance. And I did love Steph, I thought she was like the coolest person in the world watching that. I was like, oh, she’s amazing. And I love her.
Matthew: Steph is fantastic. And as you mentioned, the kind of main POV character is this young man who’s just coming out at the start of the movie and kind of goes through his growth. His name is Joe, he’s from a town called Bromley. He’s a fictionalized character.
But I think it really works for the movie. But he has this really wonderful friendship with Steph. And at one point, when he comes out and leaves his family, he goes to move in with her. And they have this really beautiful heart to heart while they’re lying together in bed because they’re poor and they have one mattress to share. And she looks at him and goes, you know, if we were normal, we would kiss right now. And then they both laugh it off. And it was just this really beautiful moment of, I think, again, a really important one. Not to keep going back to the AIDS part of it, but one of the things that happened during the AIDS crisis is that a lot of unity between gay men and lesbians came in part because gay male groups that often hadn’t been very interested in working with lesbian groups started realizing that when they were dying of AIDS, it was lesbians who were often the only ones willing to come and help and take care of them.
And that fueled a lot of the coalition building. And so this moment of they’re not sexually interested in each other, they’re not romantically interested in each other. But it’s such a clear found family moment of these two people who’ve been rejected by their families, finding a family with each other. It was just such a beautiful moment to me.
Becky: Absolutely. I was actually thinking that too. It’s very much another form of solidarity between gay men and gay women. And the movie didn’t show that very often, because again, there were not that many queer women represented in the movie. But it did have that moment, which I think again, is very powerful. And it is very lovely.
Matthew: And I’m glad you mentioned the two miners who figure out that the way the gay men dance attracts women’s attention. It’s kind of a proto queer eye for the straight guy starting in this Welsh mining town. And you can kind of roll your eyes at it a little bit.
But I kind of loved it in part because it also is a reminder that coalition building doesn’t always have to be for the purest, most wonderful ideals. Because clearly it is a moment of them seeing, oh, I can get more social opportunities if I do this. But also it is the moment that lets them sort of break down and become more friendly and get to know people more. And one of them was like, I’ll buy a guy a pint, but then I’m going to stay on the other side of the room. And he’s not that guy by the end of the movie.
Becky: I think bringing up Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is really sort of fun in this context, because that first version came out about 20 years after the events of this film.
But it actually was almost exactly that conversation. I remember when it came out me being in college and very progressive and I was like, this is all stereotypes. And then I had friends who pointed out to me like, yes, but also it’s straight men being told here is value in the things that queer men do and can do for you, and ways that you should be more like them.
And that’s not really something that had been seen or discussed before. And so I do think that that moment is very Queer Eye in that specific way. But that’s, you know, what those characters needed and what the narrative needed to convey in that time.
Matthew: Right. Yeah, very much so. What are other elements that really kind of hit you or that you wanted to bring up?
Becky: So I mentioned in the intro, respectability politics. And I think that there are sort of two pieces of that that I wanted to touch on because one is sort of trying to have some empathy for some of the people in this mining town who do not learn the error of their ways, who do not become comfortable with queer people at any point, but did feel what I took to be genuinely that having so much publicity around, you know, gays and lesbians supporting the miners would make their movement look bad and not be taken as seriously.
And I do think that’s worth discussing. But the other one was one that I ran into as a criticism of the movie, which is that Mark Ashton was actually a communist. He was a member of the Communist Party. He was a leader of the Young Communist League. That was something that he cared deeply about.
And that was part of his motivation for seeking the solidarity. And that is not something the movie engages with at all. At some point, somebody yells “commie” at him. And that’s the closest that they get to ever acknowledging that. And I did wonder if the movie was also engaging in respectability politics there by not bringing that up.
Matthew: I think that’s probably true. I will say there’s one other moment that points to it, but that I missed the first time I saw the movie, which is that early in the movie, when Mark is clearly waking up after a hookup, someone who stayed over the night before, he’s watching news about the miners’ strike. And the guy is like, I left my number just in case. And Mark kind of barely acknowledges him. But you’re seeing part of Mark’s kitchen. And there is a big communist flag, the flag of the Soviet Union. But I don’t think I noticed it the first time I saw it.
Becky: Yeah, so it’s like a pointed reference. And I think you’re right, the respectability politics there is definitely a thing. And with respect to it, I think one other element that I would add is that one of the conflicts that Jonathan has, and he’s one of the older gay men in the movie compared to Mark and some of the others, is he talks a lot about how he likes being flamboyant and he likes being openly, proudly queer.
I don’t know if he would use that word, but I think we would look at it in that kind of language today. And at one point, there’s discussion among some of the others, including some who clearly want the white picket fence and 2.3 kids and a dog, they just want it with two men instead of a man and a woman. And they kind of say like, do we need to be so flamboyant? Because again, they’re trying to be very, we want the miners to like us, we don’t want to scare them off.
And Jonathan calls it out and he says, I’m sorry, I haven’t spoken 1950s in a while. And I thought that was just such an interesting thing of like, with both of these groups, there’s that sense of how do we work with others? And how much do we hold back? I’m going to get really into queer theory here, but have you heard much about Judith Butler?
Becky: I have not. I am mildly familiar with some of it, but I have not done the reading myself.
Matthew: So that’s probably the best way to do it, because she is one of the best theorists and one of the worst writers that I’ve ever read. There are sentences that go on for pages, she does not understand periods and commas. But one of her ideas is that we’re all in drag all the time, that all of gender is drag, that we’re always performing. You go to a bank and you want to get a loan, you want them to see you in a certain way and you perform a certain kind of appearance, and you go to a party and you want to be seen a certain way, you perform.
And often that is a different kind of masculinity or femininity or something else. And to me, that’s very much a part of this movie, of the like, yeah, on the one hand, it does make sense that if you’re going to a group event where there are a lot of kids, maybe you don’t have a whole bunch of curse words on your signs, but also how far does that go, you know, and I appreciate that the movie does show the cost of respectability politics. The miners who are concerned have reason to be: once this story comes out, a lot of people lose respect for them and they’re getting teased about it constantly. And I think there’s a message of like, you shouldn’t let that get to you, but these are people who have been on strike for 10 months and they’re fighting the cops every day. And so I appreciate that the movie comes down on the side of respectability politics is not the way to go, but also doesn’t make it just a joke, doesn’t show that there was no real cost, because there was a real cost paid on all sides in terms of how diplomatic to be and how diplomatic not to be.
Becky: Exactly, which I thought was really interesting and I was glad they included that because again, Maureen, the very homophobic character, is not portrayed as somebody who is a good person at all.
And nor should she particularly be. But I do think that that question of how much is just homophobia, which a lot of it is, and how much of it is also understanding that being seen in that way will make them be taken less seriously and will hurt their movement. And ultimately, like you said, I think the movie, I think correctly, comes down very much on the side of the coalition is more important, building alliances is more important, and also don’t be homophobic, it’s okay to be friends with gay people.
But I think that it is important that was acknowledged because that was a real thing. It wasn’t just, oh, these people are homophobic, but the rest of the world is fine. These people were homophobic within a homophobic society that was not going to take them seriously if they were seen being supported by gay people. And sure enough, there was an actual tabloid article that was written, that actually happened, that was hugely damaging to the way they were perceived.
Matthew: And one thing that also came to me in that is an important lesson: when you are a group that is being oppressed, the message of this movie is the best thing you can do is to find common ground with others who are oppressed. But also there is a natural pressure to turn very insular and to not want to get involved with others. And I think anti-miner bias and kind of city bias towards working class people and stuff like that, I don’t think it’s the same level as homophobia as portrayed in this movie, nor do I think it should be. But there are a couple of times when the guys are out canvassing for support for the miners and other gay people get really mad at them and say like, look, we’re dying of AIDS. Why are you supporting them? You know, or folks who say like, these are the people who beat me up.
Why would I support them? And it’s not the same. But to me, Maureen feels like someone who’s been kicked and oppressed and so just wants to fight off anything except fighting for her own group. And I saw a connection between that and what those guys were feeling who said, look, we are suffering, why would we get involved with this group hundreds of miles away? Yeah, which I think is a very real feeling.
Becky: Like I grew up in a very rural town and I have very complicated feelings about rural areas. And the ways in which they are not utopias. There are certainly some rural areas that are still quite homophobic or still quite racist. But it’s also incorrect to portray all rural areas or all rural people that way. And it always has been. And I do think that in the city, there can often be a sort of knee-jerk assumption of ignorance about rural people.
And that is still very much a thing. I also think that when you are in a rural town and that is where you grew up, there are a lot of knee-jerk assumptions made about people who live in cities. And those things are also not very kind.
And none of these are accurate. But I do very much, being me, find it much easier to empathize with the gay man who says those are the people who beat me up, as opposed to the homophobic woman who says, I can’t deal with this, I need us to be taken seriously. But again, that’s me, I’m a queer person. Of course that’s going to be my bias. And I do think that’s why, you know, it’s important that the movie frames it from the very beginning with Mark saying, they get beat up just like we do, the cops are after them just like they’re after us, Thatcher’s after them just like they’re after us, and starts with him literally listing everything that they have in common. And I think that’s very important for framing it for the viewers, so that the viewer understands that even though some of those other lenses may be real for that person, they are not the most important way to view this.
Matthew: And I think part of what the movie shows is that with a lot of the characters, especially the ones that come around, it really feels like it’s not coming from a place of hate, it’s coming from a place of ignorance. Because again, it is hard to develop an affinity for a group when everyone around you is constantly telling you only the worst propaganda about that group.
And that goes both ways. I most definitely had a lot of pretty terrible attitudes towards people in so-called flyover states, towards people who lived in the outer boroughs, you know, I used to think people who lived in Brooklyn were behind the times because I lived in Manhattan. That’s common territory, living in New York in the 80s. I still have complicated feelings about Northern New Jersey. But yeah, I think so much of this is about: you can have your idea of what a gay person is like, a lesbian is like, and then you meet that person. And one of my favorite characters in the movie is Hefina, I think that’s her name. She’s not a leader, but she’s one of the older women, and she clearly comes in with some very, you know, unfair stereotypes. But she wants to ask about the group and everyone’s like, no, shut up, please, please don’t embarrass us. And but it’s so clear that she’s asking from a place of genuine curiosity. Like that Ted Lasso line, it’s a Walt Whitman quote: be curious, not judgmental. She says to the lesbians, are you all vegetarians? And I could see a lot of people being pretty offended by that, and I could get it.
But like, it’s so clear that she’s just like, oh, what a fascinating new community. I want to know more. And to me at the end of the day, I was having a dinner at a friend’s house with their parents. And we got talking about Trump and the father who was very blue collar made a comment just out of the blue about like, yeah, he can’t stand Trump because among other things, he hates what Trump is doing to the transvestites.
And the use of that word to refer to the transgender community, I think is often seen as very outdated and kind of almost a slur. That was the word he knew, because that’s what he’d been told. But he clearly meant it in such a heartfelt way, like I hate this community being attacked, I want to support this community. And I think that’s what I think of a lot when I see the people in the mining community being ignorant and almost problematic towards the London group, but coming from a place of ignorance, not of severe dislike.
Becky: Well, and I do think that’s also very relevant to present day politics, part of why a lot of very conservative Republicans hate higher education and are trying to destroy it.
And they keep talking about liberal college bias, etc. But what it actually is, is that people who go to college meet people who are unlike them. Straight people meet queer people, white people meet people of color. And if you’ve grown up in an insular community, you may never have had that experience. I again grew up in a very rural town. I knew like one Black person growing up until I went to college. Honestly, I went to a pretty white college too, so really until I moved to New York. It exposes you to people who you would not necessarily meet in your home community. And that makes those people real.
And it makes it much easier to empathize with them and to understand they’re not a scary threat. They’re just my friend. Or not even necessarily my friend. They’re just the person who lives at the end of my dorm hall. And it becomes that much harder to demonize groups. If you’re like, well, yeah, but my friend John is Black, and he’s not all the horrible stereotypes you’re listing. So I kind of know that you’re wrong. Sorry, I think I’m not supposed to swear.
Matthew: Which way down the podcast. It’s fine. Okay.
Becky: And that’s, you know, I think very much also the experience of both communities, but I would say particularly the rural community in here, but definitely both, is oh, now I know some gay people. And I can see that they’re not whatever the propaganda has been telling me they are, they’re kind of just people, and they’re trying to help with this thing that I care about. So that’s actually great. And we should be friends. Yeah.
Matthew: And just so people don’t think this is like some crazy new liberal idea, George Washington in his farewell address talked about the need for a national university in part because at that point we were 13 colonies that all had a lot of regional prejudices against each other. And he wanted the youth of the country to come together and meet and move past those prejudices.
So that’s always been a thing. I want to wrap up. So I wanted to close with there are two moments in this movie that always make me cry. One is the ending. But the other is when the London group has just made a really powerful statement about how they have to do more.
And they’re in the welfare hall. And a couple of the women, starting with the wife of Dai, the community leader on the miners’ side, start singing a song called Bread and Roses. And the women all join in and then the guys join in. Yeah.
Becky: And if you watch them, you can see both of us cry, and everybody watching cries.
Matthew: It’s incredible. And I just, do you know the history of that song and the relevance of that particular song?
Becky: I don’t know the history of it. I’ve certainly picked up the relevance from context.
Matthew: Yeah. So the concept of it, the idea of fighting for bread and roses, because the song is all about how we fight for bread, but we also fight for roses, that life should not just be about survival, but about dignity and beauty and that we should all have the right to have these things in life. And it started with a woman named Helen Todd, who was a suffragette and was also connected to the 1912 Lawrence textile strike in Massachusetts, which was a strike of women workers. And the song quickly became a real favorite of the labor movement, especially ones in which women were involved.
It became very popular during the Spanish Civil War among the Republicans and the pro-labor movements, the communists and the socialists. And it’s just this, you know, it kind of makes me want to have learned more about what were those women’s issues specifically because the movie barely talks about it since the miners are the ones on strike. And those are, I’m sure that somewhere in the United Kingdom there was a woman or two who was a miner and on strike, but it is overwhelmingly men’s work. But clearly you see that the women are suffering just as much. They’re trying to hold these households together with less and less money coming in. And a lot of them are dealing with, you know, one of them has a husband who’s always kind of treating her badly.
And she has this idea that certain things in life she’s just supposed to put up with. And to me, the song, and it is sung by the women, is a very important statement of how the men are the ones who are supposed to be working and are not because they’re on strike, but this is affecting the entire community. It’s affecting all of them. And that they’re not just fighting for more money, they’re fighting for that same thing the title of the movie is about. The song is about wanting to be treated with dignity, with pride, and with respect.
Becky: It’s a very, very powerful moment. It definitely made me cry. It is beautiful and it certainly also, I think, drives home the solidarity, again, between gay women and gay men, as we mentioned earlier, but also between these women in the community who as you said, they’re not likely to be the actual miners, but they are still deeply affected by this. It’s their household, their husbands, their sons.
One of the characters has a brother who died in a mine, and it turns out that that brother was the husband of Maureen, the homophobic character. But you see the way that the women are standing together and are very much the backbone of the community, at least as much as the men who are actually striking. And it is extremely important and it’s just extremely beautiful. It really is.
Matthew: There’s a wonderful version of it by Judy Collins that was recorded in 1976 that you can find easily on Spotify. But also if you just search on YouTube, Bread and Roses Pride 2014, you’ll find a clip of that song from the movie and it is just incredible the way they instrumentalize it and produce it.
Becky: Something I want to add: it’s 2014, not 2011.
Matthew: Oh, I know, I keep saying 2011. Right, 2014. But one thing I just learned, googling the song now, one of the more recent performances of it that drew a lot of attention was it was performed at the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City.
Becky: I had forgotten that, but I was absolutely watching that. Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew: So, well, Becky, I’m so glad you were part of this conversation. Is there any other last things you wanted to touch on or moments in the movie you want to comment on?
Becky: I think we covered it. It’s definitely a movie that I would be happy to watch again and I’m sure I would pick up on much more, like the communist flag in Mark’s apartment, which I did not notice the first time because I wasn’t familiar with his history yet.
Yeah. It’s definitely worth a watch, especially in June for Pride, but probably at any point it’s definitely worth a watch. If you are feeling overwhelmed by some of the news, as a reminder that history doesn’t stop.
You can still build coalitions. And even if you lose a fight, that doesn’t mean that you’ve lost. You can still build and you can still love people and help people.
Matthew: 100%. And that sometimes reaching out across difference is the most powerful thing you can do. Let me actually bring up one last thing I wanted to touch on before we close. When you were talking about how even when some of the people in the mining town are not the most welcoming to the London group, Mark and the others are still like, they still need our help.
That to me is an argument that continues to ring true. The two times I think of it most recently are when queer people have come together to support Palestine and Gaza, and also when there was that horrible flood that killed so many people in an admittedly very conservative Christian community and school, there were people who were saying, why would you support them? They hate you. And I think there’s a lot of pinkwashing in the idea that Israel is some kind of queer paradise, and the idea that all Palestinians in Gaza are homophobic is inaccurate. But I think also the concept of I don’t care how they vote, I don’t want them to die because of government failure. I’m going to support someone else’s rights. And I hope that what happens in this movie happens, that my supporting their rights makes them think I’m not the terrible person that the propaganda has told them.
But even if it doesn’t, if the government’s oppressing them, I don’t want that to happen anymore than I want it to happen to me. And I just love that part of the movie.
That’s relevant. So all right, well, Becky, thank you so much. For people who want to find you, you are a published author, you’re always doing awesome stuff. Where can people find your work?
Becky: Best place to find me is my website, specifically my newsletter. So that would be beckyallenbooks.com/newsletter, which I send out once a month just to give folks updates on what’s going on with my writing. If you are on Bluesky or Instagram, I am @allreb, a-l-l-r-e-b, on both of those.
Matthew: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Definitely check all that out. Check out Becky’s writings, especially really great books, really great work. Of course, you can find this podcast and my other podcasts all at theethicalpanda.com. I do this, I do the Star Wars podcast. We are also doing an episode about Pride in a Galaxy Far Far Away. There have been a number of queer characters in that universe, not just the two people who kiss at the end of Rise of Skywalker, but especially in the books and the video games and also in the TV shows, some beautiful queer relationships and wonderful queer characters, a lot of great exploration of individual characters who are ace or intergender or non-binary because their whole species is, or because they are individually. A lot of fantastic stuff. I’m excited.
We’re going to record that episode in a couple of days and hopefully it should be out pretty soon after this one. So on behalf of myself and Becky, thank you all so much for being a part of this. May the force be with you.
