BlufBear

Some inherit wealth. Some, silence. I inherited a working-class sensibility and the understanding that pride is often punished. I wasn’t born in County Durham, but I chose to live here, drawn by its spirit, its solidarity, its proud tradition of standing up and standing together. Now, I live under a Reform UK-run council in a place that knows what struggle feels like.

I work in the NHS. I come from working-class roots, people who wore uniforms, not suits. Now I’m a doctor, upwardly mobile on paper, but never far from the instincts of where I started. That mobility comes with its own unease. In a profession still governed by caution, classism and quiet codes about what’s respectable, I know how easily it can all be taken away. The social environment I inhabit is conservative at its core. People like me can rise, but we can fall faster. One misstep, one article, one complaint, and years of work could come undone.

And so I write under a pseudonym, BlufBear, because my queerness, my leather identity and my politics don’t sit comfortably in this system. I wish I could be out fully, without consequence. But I’ve seen how queerness is still sanitised. I’ve felt the discomfort of colleagues when you don’t fit the “right” kind of gay. I’ve watched the General Medical Council dance to the tune of political fashion, and I’ve read the headlines. Drag bans, transphobic bills, and a media machine that still treats kink like pathology.

So I wear the mask when I must. And I write without it, because silence is no longer an option. Safety demands discretion. Rage demands I speak.

That’s why Darren Grimes’ outrage over being excluded from the Durham Miners’ Gala doesn’t land. It isn’t censorship. It’s accountability. I’m writing this with full leather fury, because Darren Grimes does not belong on the platform of the Durham Miners’ Gala. And being gay doesn’t make him a comrade.

Grimes loves to position himself as the misunderstood patriot. Gay. Working-class roots. Grandson of a miner. He clings to this identity as though it grants him automatic entry into spaces built on struggle. But solidarity isn’t inherited. It’s practised.

He wasn’t excluded because he’s gay. He was excluded because he champions a party that kicks downwards. A party that would see the NHS dismantled, unions crushed, and marginalised people blamed for the chaos left behind by decades of austerity. He’s not a victim of homophobia, he’s a beneficiary of privilege, choosing to wield his identity as armour while attacking the very communities that fought to make that identity survivable.

Let’s remember: in 1984, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) didn’t seek permission to stand with striking pit communities. They acted. They fundraised. They marched. They turned up, despite knowing they’d be viewed with suspicion. And in doing so, they built real solidarity, based not on shared identity, but on shared oppression. Their defiance was met with smears in the press. “Pits and Perverts” was a tabloid insult, a lazy attempt to ridicule both miners and queers into submission.

But they didn’t flinch. They reclaimed it. They knew the cost of being too visible, too queer, too poor. And they stood with each other anyway.

This is the legacy that the Gala protects. It’s why the Durham Miners’ Association said no to Reform UK councillors being official guests. The Gala is not a neutral cultural fair, it is a political act of memory, a celebration of working-class resistance. It is for those who stand with the oppressed, not those who manufacture consent to oppress further.

Grimes responded as he always does: with faux shock, thin-skinned indignation, and a tweet that managed to mock queers, Palestinians, and the entire left in under 280 characters:

“The Durham Miners’ Gala, 2025: A sea of Palestinian flags, Arabic slogans… and a bizarre smattering of Pride flags.
Funny, isn’t it? How does the Palestinian Ambassador, invited to speak on stage, who famously refused to condemn Hamas, feel about all that rainbow regalia? Bet that’s not in his script!
These Hard Left Cranks running the show are clearly desperate. They threatened me, Darren Grimes, your straight-talking Deputy Leader of Durham County Council, from the main stage – no less! Talk about rattled.”

Grimes calls himself “straight-talking.” But that’s just code for punching down. For dog-whistle bigotry dressed in banter. For misrepresenting a movement while claiming its heritage.

He dares the organisers to say it to his face. But the truth has already been said, loudly, publicly, on stages and in streets. You can’t represent a community while helping to platform those who’ve spent years tearing it apart. You don’t get to invoke your grandfather’s mine if you praise the woman who shut it down.

I’m also aware that Darren Grimes is frequently mocked online with the nickname “Crafty Wank.” It’s crude, and yes, it’s been graffitied and smirked about. But I don’t use it. Not because I sympathise with his politics, but because ad hominem attacks cheapen the fight. They’re the right’s stock-in-trade, insult over substance, personality over policy. Progressives don’t need that. The case against Grimes, and everything he enables, is stronger when we stick to the politics.

His exclusion has been framed by right-wing trolls as an outrage, an act of reverse snobbery or censorship. The fact that he is gay, born in County Durham and the grandson of a miner has been used as ammunition, a kind of birthright. How could someone with his heritage, his identity, not be welcomed to an event that celebrates precisely that lineage?

But solidarity is not inherited like a surname. It’s not proven by who you sleep with, or whose name is on your birth certificate. It’s measured by what you fight for, and who you throw under the bus along the way.

Grimes has made a career out of being the “respectable gay.” He wears his sexuality like a well-fitted suit: tight enough to mark him out, loose enough not to offend. He flatters himself as proof that the right can be inclusive. That you can be both gay and reactionary, both queer and in the service of a movement that has weaponised culture wars against the very communities he claims to represent.

That politics of respectability is a poison disguised as polish. It tells queer people to behave. To assimilate. To moderate their demands and dress nicely while they make them. But it has never protected us. Not in the clubs raided by police. Not on the wards where queer patients are misgendered. Not in the surgeries where kink is pathologised. It’s a trap, and one that the leather and kink communities know intimately. We are often the ones still called perverts, even by other queers. We are the line that respectability wants to redraw. I’ve seen it in the raised eyebrows at a harness, the assumption that leather is inherently indecent, even dangerous. But visibility is resistance. And resistance is not polite.

The Gala is for anyone who’s been scapegoated, shafted, or sacrificed by the powerful. It’s for those who understand that class and solidarity must stretch to migrants, to queer folk, to trans people, to those who don’t speak the Queen’s English or march in a neat line. It’s not about purity. It’s about principle.

I marched at Durham Pride this year, carrying the Leather Pride flag and planting my Wesco boots in County Durham soil. I stood beside banners that told the truth of a region betrayed, and among people who know what it is to fight. The miners were just behind the kinksters and the Leather Daddies, shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with the oppressed. I wasn’t there to be palatable. I was there to be counted.

Darren Grimes can keep waving his laminated credentials. He can sneer at drag queens and queer flags. But he doesn’t speak for this place. And he doesn’t speak for me.

Because some of us have been called perverts. And instead of hiding, we made it our banner.