The trend is undeniable: audiences love watching British workers fight deindustrialization. As reviewers have been quick to note, Pride’s box office reception follows the unlikely success of Brassed Off, Billy Elliot, and The Full Monty.

These comparisons are apt enough, but they miss the important way that Pride flips the genre’s usual sympathies. Although the southern Wales mining community of Onllwyn is central to the story, Pride is told not through the eyes of the miner men or their wives, but from the perspective of gay and lesbian Londoners who collected thousands of pounds to support the yearlong mining strike of 1984–85.

Even though the London LGBT community was under attack from police violence and the rapid spread of AIDS, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) dared to look for political possibility beyond the gay community.