Pride under attack: reflections on Berlin

On Saturday night, as hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Berlin for Christopher Street Day – one of Europe’s largest and oldest Pride celebrations – a man drove a van into a crowd of pedestrians in the Tiergarten, close to the closing rally at the Brandenburg Gate. A woman was killed. 29 people were injured, several critically. The suspect, a 21-year-old man previously convicted in connection with plotting an attack and reported to have sought to join the so-called Islamic State, fled the scene and was shot dead by police the following day. German authorities are treating it as an Islamist terrorist attack.

People had spent that day dancing. They had marched for hours through the centre of Berlin behind eighty floats, under a festival motto that translates as ‘blessing instead of hate’. It was, by every account, a day of joy: music and glitter and hundreds of thousands of people celebrating the simple, hard-won right to be visible. But someone looked at that celebration and saw a target. 

By the next evening there were flowers near the place where the van came. One mourner, a young British visitor, told reporters that we will never be erased and never be gone.

I write this as a gay man, so I can’t pretend to be coolly detached about it. Attacks like this make us scared. I remember feeling the same way after the Orlando nightclub attack in Florida a few years ago. Scared. After all, it could have been me. It could easily have been someone I knew or cared about.

When newly out people ask me, ahead of the annual LGBT+ Humanists march in the Pride parade in London, whether it is ‘safe’ to march, I’ve always simply said yes without hesitation. Despite the UK’s own history of violence against LGBT spaces – including the nail bomb that tore through Old Compton Street in London some decades ago – I generally do feel safe. But next summer, when a young queer person asks me that same question, what should I tell them? Will the scenes from the Tiergarten come violently to mind – for me, and for them?

This fear, surely, is the result that terrorists want. Across the whole long history of religiously and politically motivated violence against LGBT people, that aim has never changed. They want us to hide, they want us to run scared, they want to take from us our pride in who we are.

Old hatreds

But grief demands honesty too. If the authorities’ assessment is correct, the man who did this was animated by an ideology which holds that people whose love transgresses the rules of a supernatural creator deserve death. That murderous belief deserves our scorn.

And we remember of course that LGBT people are far from the only victims of religiously motivated hatred. The same conviction – that faith confers a licence to kill the infidel, the apostate, the blasphemer – murdered cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo and Jewish shoppers at a kosher supermarket in Paris. It beheaded the schoolteacher Samuel Paty for showing a cartoon in a classroom. It left Salman Rushdie blinded in one eye, more than three decades after a theocrat first ordered his death. It’s the reason why someone killed Asad Shah, an Ahmadi Muslim shopkeeper in Glasgow who wished customers a happy Easter.

And while a disproportionate and very significant proportion of these attacks are clearly linked to Islamic fundamentalism, we should be clear that hatred of this kind is far from the property of just one religion. In the United States, doctors have been shot dead in their own churches and abortion clinics have been bombed by Christian extremists who believed they were doing God’s work. All of these victims are owed the same response: protection. Hand-wringing about offence, or about ‘community tensions’, is a way of withholding it.

A free society must defend those marked for death by men certain of heaven’s approval – and be willing to name the beliefs that put them in danger.

A history of violence

For LGBT people, this violence has a long and painful lineage.

Berlin’s Pride is named for Christopher Street in New York, where in 1969 the patrons of the Stonewall Inn – so used to routine police raids, beatings, and humiliation – one day fought back. Every Pride since has marked the anniversary of a riot. 

In 1999, as alluded to above, a neo-Nazi’s nail bomb killed three people and wounded dozens at the Admiral Duncan pub on Old Compton Street in Soho because it was a gay pub. In 2016, 49 people were murdered at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando by a gunman who had pledged allegiance to ISIS. In 2022, a gunman opened fire outside a gay bar in Oslo on the eve of the city’s Pride parade, killing two, in what Norwegian authorities described as Islamist terrorism. Later that year, five people were killed in an attack at Club Q in Colorado Springs.

And where violence has not silenced Pride, politicians and governments have tried. One recent example is Istanbul, once famed for being a relatively liberal and cosmopolitan city and home to the largest Pride event in the Muslim-majority world. Since 2015, when the water cannons came out to silence marchers, the event has been banned by authorities, with those who attempt to march met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass detentions. In Europe, the Hungarian government legislated just last year to ban Pride outright and empowered police to use facial recognition to identify participants. Meanwhile in Russia, the ‘international LGBT movement’ has been designated an extremist organisation, making the mere display of a rainbow flag a criminal act.

The climate closer to home

Let’s be clear about one thing: there is no equivalence between a terrorist who murders people at Pride and a politician who takes down a flag, or a street preacher with a megaphone. To suggest otherwise would be an insult to the dead and injured in Berlin, and it would be untrue. Murder is murder.

But it would also be dishonest to describe Saturday’s attack in isolation from the climate in which it occurred: one in which, around the world, the visibility of LGBT people is increasingly treated as a provocation – something to be contested, removed, banned, or ‘debated’, rather than an ordinary fact of a free society.

As anyone who has ever marched in a Pride parade knows, LGBT people will generally take the presence of religious protesters brandishing signs telling us we are going to hell with good humour (and without incident). Much more concerning, however, was an incident last year where outright intimidation appeared to be the goal. Last October, a self-styled ‘King’s Army’ – a Christian Nationalist group that describes itself as a ‘spiritual army’ waging war on ‘sin and cultural decay’ – marched in military formation and matching black uniforms down Old Compton Street, the very street where the Admiral Duncan was bombed, chanting at the heart of London’s LGBT community. LGBT+ Humanists and Humanists UK wrote to Prevent to ask what it was doing to combat the growing risk of Christian Nationalist extremism, alongside its existing work on Islamic extremism.

That this country has so far been spared a Berlin or an Orlando owes something to luck – but also a great deal to police and security services who treat these threats with the seriousness they deserve. In 2020, a man was jailed for life for plotting a knife and firearms attack on London Pride, inspired by Islamist ideology. In 2018, another was stopped by police before he could carry out a machete attack against a gay event at a pub in Cumbria. In 2024, a Swansea teenager who assaulted a transgender woman was found to have filled his phone with material glorifying far-right terrorism.

Why Pride matters

I have heard it said, more often in recent years, that Pride has served its purpose – that in countries like ours, with equal marriage and legal protections, it is now just a party, or a branding exercise.

Pride has only ever been necessary because of the people who want to make us as invisible as ghosts. It began as a defiant answer to violence, and this weekend it was answered with violence once again. A woman went to a celebration of love and freedom on Saturday and did not come home. We mourn her, and we hold the injured and the frightened in our thoughts – along with everyone who has ever had to ask whether it is safe to march.

The humanist conviction at the heart of our work is a simple one: that every person has one life, and an equal claim to live it freely, openly, and without fear. Pride is that conviction made visible – flags and floats and music standing in for something deadly serious underneath. And so we keep on marching.

Nick Baldwin is the Coordinator of LGBT+ Humanists, a section of Humanists UK.