Arsenal and Chelsea fans set to come together to protest and celebrate at Pride in London

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Both Arsenal with the Gay Gooners and Chelsea with Chelsea Pride have large LGBT+ fan groups, and both will be heavily represented at Saturday’s Pride in London parade

Chelsea Pride will be among the participants at this year’s London Pride parade

Saturday marks the 51st anniversary of the first LGBT+ Pride march in London, with more than 30,000 people expected to parade through the capital’s streets.

Fans from Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham and many other Premier League and EFL teams will be among that huge crowd. Given the rise in homophobic chanting aimed at Blues fans this season, it will be a particularly poignant parade for their LGBT+ fans group, Chelsea Pride.

The group’s chair, Tracy Brown, is also celebrating a personal milestone with this year’s Pride celebrations. And she has insisted that Pride marches are as important as ever given the rise in homophobia.

Speaking exclusively to Mirror Football, Brown said: “This year marks 30 years since I came out which is a personal milestone. So, for me it represents a vast amount of change and now more than ever, Pride is really important because of what our trans community is going through.

“It feels like we’ve taken a step backwards, in some cases even within our own community where there’s even some who want to get rid of the T. This is a time when we should all be coming together as a whole.

“It feels like we’re at a really poignant point in our own history, where we all need to be working together. There’s too much hatred around as it is and as a community we need to be one.

“Last season we saw a vast amount of homophobia. I think everyone in football realised that as soon as the World Cup finished, definitely from a Chelsea point of view. Now more than ever, I think we have to make the messaging very clear that hate has absolutely no place.”

Arsenal fan group the Gay Gooners will also be celebrating Pride (

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Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Pride in London)

It is not just Chelsea who are the victims of rising levels of homophobia and transphobia. The whole LGBT+ community is coming under attack, which signals how important pride has become to Gay Gooners co-chair Carl Fearn.

Speaking exclusively to Mirror Football, he said: “There are some in the UK who will jump on the bandwagon. They’ll say ‘why isn’t there a straight group’ – well you don’t get picked on, you don’t get bullied, you don’t get harrased, you don’t get verbally abused.

“It’s just hidden homophobia when people say things like that. One thing the Gay Gooners have always done is respect everybody, regardless of their ethnicity, their religion, their gender identity, their sexuality. We see people as people.

“It’s not for us to criticise people’s beliefs, but we should defend ourselves if people criticise us, because being LGBT is not a belief, it’s who we are, simple as. It’s not a belief, it’s not a religion, it’s not a cult.

“The nonsense that’s still out there, you’d think we’re still living in the 1980s honestly. I’ve had a death threat, someone wishing me dead. To me it’s almost like a badge of honour, somebody is so offended by this that they feel they have to make a threat, that’s just pathetic.”

While Pride has become even more important that ever, Fearn insists Saturday’s parade should also be a celebration of LGBT+ life.

“Pride means many things to somebody of my age. It’s only recently I’ve been actively out there, celebrating and embracing pride. It was always something that I felt I had to keep in the closet for a long time,” he said.

This is the 51st edition of the London Pride parade and remains more important than ever (

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Matthew Chattle/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

“For a lot of people it means protest, certainly for a lot of the early Pride parades following the Stonewall Riots in America. For me, these days it’s more of a celebration of acceptance of who people like me are and what we contribute to society in general.

“Pride Month is the chance to amplify that people in the LGBT+ family still have to stand up, wave the flags and say ‘we’re here, we have every right to be who we are, we didn’t choose to be this way’.

“It is that chance for people who aren’t LGBT to see that we are around. For me personally working so closely with Arsenal it’s like Pride every day. I’m proud of the club for flying the flag during Pride month. But they fly it all year round.

“We’ve got members in countries where it is illegal to be LGBT. For those people who have to live almost in the bunker, we offer that hope in a way. And it’s good for them to see that Arsenal support them, even if their own country won’t support them. Why should anybody have to fear for their life just because of who they love?”

Both Fearn and Brown have attended past London Pride parades and will once again take their place at the head of their groups for Saturday’s march. And the duo have both been left overwhelmed by the outpouring of support for LGBT+ people from the crowds.

“My first time I actually drove the float that the Gay Gooners had. That was in 2019, at my grand old age, that was actually the first time I went on a Pride parade march,” Fearn said.

The Gay Gooners were waved off by Mikel Arteta and members of the first-team squad ahead of last year’s parade (

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Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

“But I couldn’t help but be sucked in to the love, the emotion and the happiness that we felt. Just to see the joy on the faces of the people in our group who were marching and the reaction we got from the crowd. So for me, just immense joy.

“And then last year Arsenal pulled out all the stops. We had the most magnificent float, we had members of the women’s team on the float. There were three of them there. We had Arsenal media covering the event.

“We were so colourful, flags everywhere, people dancing, great music. The reaction again from the crowd was sensational. To see three international players from the women’s team playing keepy-uppy with a beachball outside the Ritz is a sight I’ll remember for a long time.”

While there is a celebratory feel at modern parades, at the heart of Pride is protest, something that Brown does not forget.

“This will be our fifth year. We started quite small, we did it with Pride in Football, then we had the gap because of Covid. And then last year the club sponsored everything we did, so we had the big bus and they’re sponsoring us again this year,” she said.

“So we’ve got bigger and bigger support for the club. We’re lucky, we’re very lucky that the club back us wholeheartedly and will be backing us again this year. For me it’s literally about Pride.

“I’m one of those people for whom the more attacks I may have for being myself, the more energy that gives me to stand up for not just me but for the community as well.

“So actually, it’s about representing myself and the people around me. For that I am 100 per cent proud and I always will be. It isn’t just about me, it’s about representing the whole community. And they are far more important than the haters who may be out there.”