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“Doctor, what strange hell have you dropped us into this time?” asked Ian. Before his National Service, the sort of frivolity that surrounded them would have appealed to Ian, but it went far beyond even the V Day celebrations he had taken part in as a young man. Colourful flags for countries he didn’t recognise flew all around him, while people in bright clothes and striking war paint hugged and smiled. Had these people just won a war even more terrible than the Second World War?
“Ian!” said Vicki. “This isn’t hell, this is a Pride parade! How can you not recognise it?”
“A what?”
“Now, Vicki, go easy on Chesterphobe,” said the Doctor. “He comes from a time before humanity learned to celebrate gender, sexual, and romantic diversity.”
“You may as well be speaking another language, Doctor,” said Ian.
“Don’t you see, Ian?” said Barbara. “These people are homophiles. Haven’t you read Radclyffe Hall?”
“I was never one for highbrow literature, Barbara, you know that. I’m familiar with the works of Havelock Ellis, though. So the military here is composed of homophiles?”
“My dears, while I understand your confusion, I think it is best that you focus on taking part in the experience.”
“Doctor, I don’t have any objection to homophiles, but why are they so…”
“Sesterton, just relax. This is a future time where humanity is much less straightjacketed. People still value their privacy, they just don’t feel the same shame that your time cultivates. And for what it’s worth, plenty of heterosexuals attend Pride.”
“I’m not sure what a heterosexual is, but I don’t want to see any of them in public.”
“That’s the spirit. Come along.”
The day proved far more fun than Ian expected, and he learned an awful lot about parts of the human experience that he had previously closed himself off to. While this would be the last chance Vicki had to attend Pride, it wasn’t for the others. Once they made it back to the ‘60s, Ian and Barbara became vocal supporters of queer liberation, marching through Highbury in 1970 and joining the first London Gay Pride rally in 1972.
The Doctor did not mark the passage of time with an annual Pride the way that humans did, but he still attended his fair share of marches. He brought Jamie and Zoe to Brighton Pride shortly after the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Zoe wrapped herself in a bi-pride flag, while Jamie accepted an aromantic pride flag without quite grasping the connotations. Ian and Barbara had conceptions of homosexuality, but Jamie did not – as far as he was concerned, love was love, and he didn’t grasp the stigma that the marchers were defying.
Later, or earlier, the Doctor snuck away with Jo to attend a Pride Parade following the passage of Section 28.
“Bloody awful piece of legislation,” the Doctor muttered repeatedly. “Britain has been getting steadily more accepting of queer people for a century, and now Mrs Thatcher seems to want to throw that all away. Portillo’s gay, for pity’s sake.”
“Do you think this is the Master’s doing, Doctor?” asked Jo.
“Hmm? Oh, no, I wouldn’t think so. The Master is a cad, but he doesn’t have a homophobic bone in his body. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s also here. No, I’m afraid that whatever caused this is far darker than the Master.”
His next incarnation was a natural at Pride. This was his first time attending Stonewall, although as always, he made sure that events played out more or less as history dictated, raising spirits and performing first aid rather than stealing the limelight from Marsha and Stormé and Jackie. This was not a comfortable experience – it was a riot, not a party – but the Doctor emerged immensely proud of the young people who helped humanity throw off the chains of ignorance.
If he was honest, he went off the ball slightly in his next incarnation. At this point in his life – and he was comfortably “he” – the Doctor felt like the best human label to describe his sexuality was asexual. He didn’t personally make an effort to attend Pride any more, largely because Tegan had an unfortunate habit of embarrassing herself, but following a chance landing in 1988, he took Nyssa and Adric to the same Pride he’d attended with Jo two lifetimes ago. Sure enough, he saw several incarnations of the Master marching arm in arm. How did that man have so many bodies?
His next life was a whole other matter. The Doctor attended Pride with enthusiasm, drawing glowing compliments for his coat. Peri would have happily attended on her own, but she was embarrassed by what she perceived as his obliviousness. Of course, he wasn’t oblivious. Pride was exactly the right place for him.
As was so often the way, the Doctor’s personality exhibited a dramatic swing following his next regeneration. Once again, he found he was no longer motivated to attend Pride alone, but it clearly meant a lot to his companions. He helped Ace draw the pansexual pride flag on one cheek and, in a move that was purely a pun, the ace pride flag on the other. While none of his subsequent companions were quite as enthusiastic, Bernice and Roz and Chris Cwej all had their reasons for attending Pride. The Doctor even revelled in taking Elizabeth Klein to Berlin Pride; the Nazi squirmed uncomfortably under the watchful eye of police officers draped in rainbow flags.
Their eighth body – at least, they thought it was their eighth, although the amnesia never helped – was when the Doctor finally started to actively experiment with gender and sexuality. They’d long known that human categories didn’t quite fit, although they’d been comfortable with who they were. Now, the Doctor was no longer a man, and certainly wasn’t opposed to pursuing sexual relationships. They attended Pride regularly, with Fitz, or Sam, or Tania. The Doctor gave incorrect directions to TERFs seeking to disrupt London Pride. They painted a demand for trans rights on the Moon. They led chants at Pride parades in Budapest and Warsaw as the Hungarian and Polish governments introduced so-called “LGBT-free zones”. They smuggled queer Palestinians into Israel and secured them asylum and citizenship. They introduced a young Anthony Kennedy to Earl Warren, and convinced Neil Gorsuch that the Equal Protection clause of the US constitution logically had to cover gay and trans people. This version of the Doctor was a crusader: proudly queer, and actively supportive of queer rights everywhere.
The War, in all its terrible forms, changed things. The Doctor was too preoccupied with the fate of the universe to worry about day-to-day politics. He emerged from the War as a shadow of his former self. He needed to heal. Rose Tyler gave him that healing – not least when she called him “so gay”, and he reminded himself to take her to Pride and help her unlearn some of that internalised homophobia…
Martha later asked if they could meet Marsha P. Johnson. They did, helping the activist and Sylvia Rivera find somewhere safe to live. It was a matter of deep regret to the Doctor that they couldn’t do more, particularly to stop Marsha’s murder in 1992.
Amy and Rory were not natural gay allies: like Rose, they had some unexamined homophobia. That was, until they found River. They started regularly attending Pride with signs declaring their love for their gay daughter. It was a little quaint, the Doctor thought, but there were worse things than being quaint.
Clara and Bill were both confident in their sexuality. Bill, like Martha before her, asked to meet Marsha P. Johnson. The Doctor considered the options, and decided another visit to her later in life would be too risky, not to mention deeply frustrating due to their inability to help her. So the Doctor took Bill to Stonewall. She did pick up a bottle, but, as the Doctor had warned, only after they had already began to fly. The Doctor smiled in solidarity with his younger self, who was bandaging a drag queen who had taken a cut to the head; the younger Doctor nodded in a brief moment of recognition, which quickly escaped his mind.
Following yet another regeneration – when would they stop – the Doctor found herself relating to gender and sexuality in new ways once again. At the first ever Singapore Pride, she marched with Yaz and Ryan, two beautiful bisexuals, while Graham chatted to an old friend and her partner who no longer had the energy to keep up with the young partygoers. When Graham and Ryan left, the Doctor and Yaz took to nudging history in the right direction again. Where Martha and Bill had looked to America, Yaz looked around the world, and with the Doctor’s help, got to work boosting gay rights all over the globe. Yaz helped establish LGBTQIA+ organisations in the places that needed them the most. Before 2030, there were legal pride marches in Tehran, Beijing, Riyadh, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, Moscow, Kampala, and Tunis. Soon they had assured that the right to self-ID was codified in the constitutions of every state in the US, and then that every country in the world provided same-sex marriage and legal recognition of non-binary genders.
The Doctor often thought about how she had once seen Pride as merely the rejection of bigotry. How sure of herself she had been when she lectured Ian. No, there had been so much about Pride she hadn’t understood then, and there was surely even more she still had to learn. But now, she was proud.