You have recently published two excellent and thought- provoking letters about Pride, both of which should give the Pride committee food for thought.

Peter Lilley (Letters, August 11) has hit the nail on the head. Pride has become a carnival and ought to be re-named such. Let it be Brighton and Hove’s annual carnival and no longer make any pretence that it has anything at all to do with the LGBT community.

This action would then force the Pride committee to think again what it was aiming to achieve with Pride. The answer given to Peter at the AGM last year – that Pride is whatever you want it to be – is an abdication of the committee’s responsibility. The steering committee’s task is to steer.

Peter uses the somewhat unkind expression “gay for a day crowd” to describe the thousands of straight folk who come to the park but I do take his point. There is no way of discovering if these heterosexuals actually attend Pride events in support of us or because it is a carnival, complete with those distorted exaggerations of humanity one normally only encounters in pantomimes.

James Bull (Letters, August 7) is right to say it has become an excuse for extremism – excessive alcohol and drug abuse in some – and un-called-for public exhibition of our sexuality in others.

James is also right to say it sends out the message that we can get away with anything, at least on Pride day. But it also confirms in the minds of many straight people that, given a chance, we are all drag queens or fetishists of some kind or other.

I wonder how many of the 150,000 in Preston Park were actually perfectly ordinary gay men or lesbians who on that day passed as straight because they did not make an exhibition of themselves?

Michael Johnson Kevin Gardens, Brighton