🎙️ What’s This Episode About?

Warren Allmark is a founding member and chairperson of Chester Pride, a drag artist known as Wanda Why, and the driving force behind the Rainbow Tea Rooms, Chester Pride’s own LGBTQ+ community café in the heart of the city. He has tried to leave Chester Pride twice. He has not succeeded. Recorded at the Rainbow Tea Rooms, where a memorial to The Vivienne adds to the atmosphere and a homophobic squatter interrupts briefly.

Warren joins John to tell the story of how Chester Pride came to be, from a simple ask by the late landlord of the Liverpool Arms to help book some acts, to 15 years as the last surviving founding member of an organisation he has shepherded through financial difficulty, a cancelled year, and a political landscape that has only grown more hostile. He talks frankly about what it actually costs to put on a Pride event in 2026, why the idea that Pride should always be free has become increasingly disconnected from reality, and what rising artist fees are doing to smaller Prides across the country.

The conversation covers a lot of ground: the Gender Blender nightclub nights he ran and eventually walked away from without a second thought, the Rainbow Tea Rooms and why a community café outside the nighttime economy matters more now than when they opened it, and Chester Pride’s decision to ban national political parties from marching while keeping the door of the Tea Rooms open for surgeries and accountability. Warren is also candid about the community’s internal fractures, the LGB without the T argument, and why he thinks solidarity is not optional right now.

There is also a genuinely moving thread about what it means to be part of something for 15 years, to have built something that belongs to a whole community, and to not quite be ready to hand it over yet. Funny, opinionated, completely direct, and very good company.

It’s an hour that goes past quickly, a conversation about community, pride in all senses, and what it actually takes to keep the lights on.

Find out more at https://chesterpride.co.uk

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