“Hello, can I leave you some flyers for Suburban Pride?” Sarah Aissaoui, 24, does not hesitate when she speaks to this restaurateur in Pantin, Monday May 23. The answer is cordial: “Yes of course no problem”. In shops or in the street, this resident of Saint-Denis always has a smile to talk about this Pride March which will parade in her city on Saturday June 4, three weeks before that of Paris. The first edition brought together, according to its organizers, 3 000 people.
For a month and a half, the young consultant has been traveling the Seine-Saint-Denis to “show that the LGBTQIA+ community [lesbienne, gay, bisexuel, transgenre, queer, intersexe, asexuel et autres] exists here too”. “We did Montreuil, we did La Courneuve, we went as far as Epinay, we did Saint-Ouen, we did Aubervilliers, she lists. We try to cast a wide net and really favor 93, which is the heart of our suburban Pride. Honestly, we had good towing sessions with fairly open people, no hostility. It really encourages reaching out to everyone.”
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This is one of the messages from this collective born in Saint-Denis: the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods are no more hostile to the queer community than the rest of France. Yanis Khames, 23, spokesperson for Pride and co-creator of the first edition in 2019, is proud to have participated in the emergence in the media of a “counter-discourse”: “At the base, there was a discourse on LGBTQIA+ people from the suburbs who would be victims of particular violence because suburban men and women would be particularly obscurantist. This is a discourse that has been very widespread. took the opposite view because we, as suburbanites, the stigmatization of working-class neighborhoods does us a disservice (…).
“You can live in the suburbs without necessarily being attacked every day by Islamist delinquents, as certain media can sometimes show. Moreover, LGBTQ+phobias are real, they are present and can take specific forms”.
Yanis Khames, Spokesperson for Suburban Prideat franceinfo
After two years of Covid, two years without a parade, the LGBTQIA+ community in the suburbs wants to make its own demands heard again. A political platform which was not necessarily carried by the Paris Pride March, even if the last edition had taken Pantin as a starting point. “The first thing that comes to me as a fag, it’s sexual health, bluntly loose Erwan Passey, 29, president of the Queer Pantin association.We still have very, very little PrEP coverage, the pre-exposure treatment against HIV. Clearly, I am followed in a Parisian hospital. It would be good for general practitioners to be trained, for hospitals to be trained. Access to healthcare in general is complex in Seine-Saint-Denis. In fact, it superimposes the purely LGBTQ + themes and the precariousness and the abandonment of the territory of Seine-Saint-Denis.
Île-de-France and Seine-Saint-Denis are the territories with the highest risk of HIV contamination. LGBTQI+ people in working-class neighborhoods are therefore particularly concerned.
However, prevention and screening offers remain insufficient. pic.twitter.com/kOCClaTI6J
— Suburban Pride (@pride_banlieues) May 20, 2022
The main demand of this second edition is the creation of 10,000 emergency accommodation places in the department where the 115 services are regularly saturated. The collective recalls that queers from working-class neighborhoods, because they are often victims of violence and rejection, are overrepresented among the homeless. It is this reality that Perrine Malnoy, 24, wants to speak out for. Also a resident of Pantin, she joined the movement a few weeks ago, after civic service in an association helping people in great exclusion. “LGBTQIA+ people are people who are more at risk of finding themselves in a precarious situation, she explains, more risk of finding themselves in a situation of exclusion on the part of their loved ones, on the part of their family and therefore in a situation of poor housing, poor accommodation and absolutely precarious living conditions.
“The big question is often that of accommodation, where to go to live when you get kicked out of your parents’ house.”
Perrine Malnoy, member of the suburban Pride collectiveat franceinfo
The preparation of the Pride of the suburbs: the report of Valentine Joubin
to listen
In the suburbs, the fight against discrimination linked to sexual orientation and gender is also inseparable from the fight against racism, points out Gillian Coudray, 23, teaching assistant in a college in Saint-Denis and active member of Pride suburbs: “We have messages that are at the intersectionality of many issues. I am a racialized person. We experience racism, we experience LGBTQA+phobias, but also all institutional violence. When you are precarious, when you come from working-class neighborhoods, what does it mean to have an address in Saint-Denis when you’re looking for work… All that, I think it’s important that we make it visible. that there are political answers behind it. We are not here just to make noise and then stop on June 5.”
The Pride of the suburbs can today count on forty activists on a daily basis and up to 150 for the organization of the June 4 march. “Three years ago… We were four”points out with a smile Yanis Khames.
Ranks are widening and institutional support is strengthening. In addition to the political and institutional support of the town hall of Saint-Denis, the association can count this year on the department, now an official partner of the event. The spokesperson and other members of the collective carried out actions to raise awareness among agents of the departmental council on the reception of LGBTQIA+ people.
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But to sustain the movement, we will have to find more money, explains, fatalistic, Yanis Kahmes. The educator receives us in his room, in Saint-Denis: “We are only volunteers, because we can’t afford to have employees. We don’t have a place to meet, to organize ourselves. If this room is very nice, I can tell you that on a daily basis, it’s not easy to work at home with your parents who do stuff. There, there’s the plumber next door, it’s not necessarily easy. If we had the means to be able to focus on that commitment, well we could put in place solutions and in any case provide qualitative advice to the public authorities.”