Lady Phyll: ‘Pride can’t just be a party when we’re still fighting to survive’

For Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, better known as Lady Phyll, advocacy feels less like a choice and more like something woven into who she is: “Activism really found me, when I didn’t have the language for it, growing up as a Black queer woman.”

She traces the connection back to being 12 years old, when she remembers a British National Party march taking place nearby, and an elderly woman urged her to go into a shop before they arrived as they “didn’t like your sorts”. The comment was directed only at Lady Phyll, not the blonde-haired, blue-eyed friend she was standing beside.

“It made me think there is something very different about me that people don’t like,” she recalled. The moment stayed with her and helped ignite what would become a lifelong commitment to campaigning.

“At my core, activism has always been about dignity and people wanting to feel safe, visible, and worthy of joy.” Joy is a word Lady Phyll returns to constantly throughout the conversation. For her, it’s key to have joyful moments, and it’s an essential part of her work.

That attitude to activism eventually led to the creation of UK Black Pride in 2005, which celebrated its milestone 20th anniversary last August. Lady Phyll now marks her third year as CEO after previously holding the role of executive director, and she has been included in The Independent’s Pride List 2026 for the fourth consecutive year for her decades-long work on race, gender and LGBTQ+ rights.

“UK Black Pride came from a need, frustration and desire to see ourselves in spaces where we could be fully ourselves,” she said. “Without having to fragment parts of our identity of being Black and being queer.”

At the time, she said many Black LGBTQ+ people felt pressured to choose between their Blackness and their queerness. Lady Phyll was then running Black Lesbians UK (BLUK), and organised a coach trip to Southend-on-Sea, which became something much bigger. “It felt joyful, liberating. We understood that shared commonality we had with each other,” she explained.

As they walked back to the coach, Lady Phyll floated the idea of creating a UK Black Pride similar to events in Chicago and Washington DC. A few people laughed it off, thinking it was just a “wacky idea”. The idea, of course, turned out to be anything but wacky.

Building UK Black Pride was far from easy, though. Lady Phyll said she struggled to find support and advice, faced resistance, and even received death threats in the organisation’s early days. Two decades later, she is still frequently asked why a Black Pride is needed at all. “It’s not something I feel the need to justify,” she said.

Part of the problem, she explained, was that Black queer communities often felt invisible within wider Pride spaces, or “tokenised with one Black speaker who’s supposed to speak on behalf of everybody… We’re not a monolith,” she said.

For Lady Phyll, intersectionality remains central to the organisation’s mission, and she’s encouraging people to look further than just the need for ‘diversity’, which she said is important, but doesn’t cover the full picture. “We should not have to separate our identities,” she added, explaining the lived experiences of race, gender, class, disability, age and more all matter.

Now 20 years on, the anniversary event was attended by 25,000 people at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford. Beyond London, events also took place elsewhere in the UK, including Cymru Glitter in Wales, recognising that not everyone can travel to the capital. Queer Britain (the UK’s first LGBTQ+ dedicated museum) also hosted an exhibition showcasing items from UK Black Pride’s archive. “When I walked in, I almost felt like breaking down and crying,” Lady Phyll said.

The anniversary wasn’t just about celebrating the past, but the momentous milestone meant the team began to look at how to sustain this event for the future, and as a result, UK Black Pride will be taking a break this year and will return in 2027. “It’s not because of a lack of sponsors or funding,” she explained. “It’s more about how we sustain UK Black Pride in an increasingly hostile environment, and make sure we can maintain it as a free event for the future.”

Over its two decades, UK Black Pride has grown into the world’s largest celebration for LGBTQ+ people of African, Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, Middle Eastern and Indigenous descent. Though she knew the event would be big, as there was already “the traction and the need for it”, she didn’t envisage it would grow to the size it has done. “What it’s become today, I just think, ‘wow’,” she said, while stressing the importance of the work, efforts and dedication of the wider team behind the event. “I may be the face behind it, but it’s the people that make it happen.”

What moves her most about UK Black Pride’s success is not the scale of the event, but what it represents. “When parents come with their queer children, or seeing generations of global majority people [Black, Asian, brown, dual-heritage or indigenous people] dance together and when trans people feel safe enough to just exhale.”

Lady Phyll also believes Pride must remain political at its core, particularly at a time when some feel events have become overly corporate or sanitised. “Pride can’t just be a party when we’re still fighting to survive… it was born out of disruption from people who had been criminalised and marginalised,” she said. “You can’t take the politics out of Pride.”

Despite growing hostility toward LGBTQ+ communities globally, Lady Phyll, who seems to be endlessly full of positivity and joy, feels hopeful about the future. “I come from communities that have always found ways to survive,” she concluded. Adding that she “finds hope in young people and definitely our trans activists who refuse to disappear.”