This Saturday, Helsinki Pride Week reaches its traditional high point: the parade through the city and the Park Festival in Kaivopuisto. RBSK is therefore briefly climbing out of its summer hiding place, dusting the pollen off the equipment, and putting a properly long Pride playlist on the air.
For almost 20 hours, we will be playing new and old music shaped by queer artists, Pride anthems, dance-floor survivors, and songs that somehow became part of the shared soundtrack of rainbow life. Some were written with that purpose in mind. Others simply arrived, stayed, and eventually became family.
Pride is not a musical genre, of course. It is a history, a gathering, a parade, a quiet recognition, a loud chorus, a nightclub at 02:00, and occasionally a very good pop song played at exactly the right moment.
June became Pride Month because of the Stonewall uprising in New York in June 1969. After a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, people who had spent too long being pushed aside resisted; the events became a decisive turning point for modern LGBTQ+ activism. A year later, the first Pride march marked its anniversary. That is why the calendar keeps returning here, each June: not merely to remember a confrontation, but to recognise how far a community has travelled, and that its culture, friendships, music and ordinary lives are worth being visible.
Today, Pride means different things to different people. For some it is a public demonstration; for others, a first safe room, a reunion, a party, a family day, or simply proof that they are not alone. Helsinki Pride itself has grown from the Liberation Days of earlier decades into an annual Pride Week held since 2006, with the familiar mixture of culture, conversation, celebration and a very large crowd that somehow still manages to find the nearest coffee queue.
On Saturday 27 June, Helsinki’s parade and the free Park Festival in Kaivopuisto bring the week to its culmination.
Radio Blacksmith Knoll remains, as ever, a station for anyone willing to listen: whatever you are, whoever you love, and whether you arrive in sensible shoes or as a pink unicorn with unexpectedly strong opinions about synth-pop.
Tune in to 6120 kHz, the 49-metre band, for a long, colourful, occasionally dramatic, and hopefully very listenable Pride Weekend transmission.
Radio Blacksmith Knoll — for those who still listen with both ears.