Dan Snow's History Hit - Section 28 and Britain's Battle for LGBT+ Education

Episode Date: February 20, 2022

Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 was a controversial amendment to the UK's Local Government Act 1986, enacted on 24 May 1988 and repealed on 21 June 2000 in Scotland, and on 18 November 2003 in the rest of the UK by section 122 of the Local Government Act 2003. The amendment stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".Paul Baker, Professor of English Language at Lancaster University, joins Dan on the podcast in celebration of LGBT+ History Month. They discuss the background to the Act, how the press fanned the flames and what politicians said during debates, how protestors fought back to bring about the repeal of the law in the 2000s, and its eventual legacy.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. February here in the UK is LGBT plus history month.

And today we're going to talk about some gay history. We're going to talk to Paul Baker. He is Professor of English Language at Lancaster University. He's written a history book about the British government's attempts in the 80s and 90s to stop people talking about gayness, to discourage homosexuality by banning teachers talking about it. It's pretty bonkers. It was, of course, just the latest of a long line of ways in

which the government came up with ways to discourage people from homosexuality, which is ironic for anyone who knows anything about the people that have wielded power in this country of ours over the last 500 years. Anyway, there was the Buggery Act in 1533. King Henry VIII sort of took the issue of sodomy from the church courts and made it a state issue. That act made sodomy punishable by death. The Victorians obviously didn't miss a trick there. They criminalised gross indecency between males. That was what got Oscar Wilde sent to prison in 1895. It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that Britain started to have a long, hard look at whether it was wise to penalise, persecute and prosecute a section of its own population for the crime of falling in love and having sex with another consenting adult.

Whilst homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967, in the 1980s Section 28 was introduced. It was an amendment to an Act, the UK Local Government Act 1986, and it stated that local authorities shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality or promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. Paul Baker comes on to tell us how that all went down, how it was eventually repealed, and how it didn't quite have the consequences that the lawmakers intended. You'll be hearing all about that. If you wish to listen to other podcasts from Dan Snow's History Hit, you can do so without the ads at History Hit TV. It's our subscription TV channel. We've got

podcasts on there. We've got videos on there. It's like Netflix and Audible all smashed in together. You're going to love it. So you head over there, follow the link in the description of this podcast, and for a very small subscription, you can join the revolution, join History Hit TV. In the meantime, though, folks, here's Paul Baker talking about Section 28. Enjoy. folks here's paul baker talking about section 28 enjoy paul thank you very much for coming on the podcast thank you very much for having me paul why don't people want men to have sex with each other oh goodness me what a good first question what's going on here we're going all the way back in this podcast we're gonna go all the way back to henry days but like what is going on here? We're going all the way back in this podcast. We're going to go all the way back to Henry VIII. But like, what is going on with this? I don't know.

I don't know. Maybe a very long time ago, it was something to do with ensuring that people kept on having children and then there was the kind of continuation of the family line. So maybe that was the reason hundreds of years ago. But I don't think that should apply these days, should it?

If anything, I think people who don't have children are probably better for the environment. So... We should give them a medal. Yeah, exactly. Go on don't have children are probably better for the environment. So, you know. We should give them a medal. Yeah, exactly. Go on, lads. Have at it, lads. Here's a medal.

Fewer bloody meat-eating, tree-cutting-down humans coming in the next generation. Exactly. You talk about the background of making homosexuality illegal, and I thought that was really interesting. Can we just kind of run through some of the acts when government gets involved in trying to restrict male love? Is 1533, is that the Buggery Act? Is that where you think it sort of starts? Yes, I think so. And then you've got sort of the Victorian laws coming up, which don't get repealed until 1967. Although interestingly,

you get this term promoting homosexuality, which eventually finds its way into Section 28. And that occurs during the 1967 debates about criminalising homosexuality, which is quite interesting. So the very minute that they kind of get rid of it, as it being illegal, there's people kind of complaining that it's going to get promoted right from the start. Yeah. So you get this chap...

Listen, you can do it, but you're not allowed to talk about it, right? Yeah. You get this chap called Cyril Osborne, who was an MP, trying to put in this extra clause to stop people from promoting homosexuality, as he called it. It wasn't successful, but it was kind of a phrase that then got picked up by Mary Whitehouse, who was that morals campaigner from the 60s and 70s. And she fronted this group called the Nationwide Festival of Light. And then that group eventually kind of morphs into this new organisation

called Christian Action Research and Education, stands for CARE. And then in the 80s, they used research to fund a book called Gay Lessons, How Public Funds Are Used to Promote Homosexuality Among Children and Young People, and they sent that booklet to every MP, and then Feminine Ethics finds its way into the wording of section 28. So you have this kind of long story of this phrase going all the way back to 1967 it's kind of been hanging around various areas and discourses um for a while before it gets into the legislation let's dwell on the mid-century for a second because that's a period when we start to see as you say the legal changes but then we also start to see that the genesis of the movement that would end up in

section 28 a sort of different frontiers opened up in the battle. So 1957 is the Walthamton Report, and it was after several high-profile men had basically been convicted. Yes, yes, there was the Lord Montague case of Peter Wildblood. Montague was a very kind of member of the establishment, you know, and he was kind of caught with young men who were above the age of consent but

still there was a big kind of publicity and news kind of scandal about that and I think that started to bring it to public attention and then there were also the cases of the men who were insinuated in the kind of spying for Russia and people like Guy Burgess so there was this kind of worry that gay people were going to be open to blackmail by kind of Russian agents, and that would compromise the country in a way. I think there was a sense also that it was a very unfair law, and people were being blackmailed, they were not being protected. If they went to the police after being beaten up, so they would be the ones who would go to prison.

There was also the awful case of Alan Turing as well. He kind of helped to crack the German codes in World War II. And then he goes to the police because he's being burgled, happens to mention that he's gay, and then they convict him. They take away all of his rights and things, and they make him take hormones which make him grow breasts. And then eventually he dies under circumstances which look very much like suicide. There are horrible, horrible treatments of gay people

in the 50s after World War II especially. Something has to be done, really. So when's decriminalisation? 1967, which is 10 years after the Wilfridon Report was published. So, you know, the government were dragging their heels quite a bit on implementing the measures of the Wilfridon Report, which is a shame. But they did get round to it.

And so in 67, you have this decriminalisation of homosexuality. It doesn't mean it's legal, but it means you can do it as long as there's just two of you and you're in a house where nobody else is present, preferably in a locked room somewhere, and you're not in the Merchant Navy or the Armed Forces, and you're not in one of the islands. So there's all these kind of restrictions to it. You're not allowed to go to an island?

Well, no, not island, but I think it's the... Was it Jersey or Guernsey? I think some of the islands, you couldn't do it there. Oh, okay. They took quite a long time. So the Isle of Wight's okay. I'd have to check that. I'm not sure.

It is now. Asking for a friend. Okay, yeah. That's interesting. That wasn't the end of it. That produced a backlash, didn't it? It did. I mean, after that period, prosecutions of gay men actually went up

because there was kind of more publicity about it and gay men were seen as easy targets and they weren't going to complain. They weren't real criminals anyway, but, you know, they could help getting police quotas for arrests and things. It didn't make things magically wonderful overnight for gay men and lesbians that do criminalisation, but it did mean at least that they could go to bars and clubs and they could organise and they could meet in rooms and they could, you know, so things that they couldn't do before without fear of getting raided and arrested, that died off a bit. And it

did start the beginning of this movement, this gay liberation movement of the late 60s and early 70s, which was a very young movement associated with university students and a movement which, unlike the earlier movements movements was not really about we want you to tolerate us it was more about we want equality on your terms we are as good as you and we're actually proud of being gay and we're going to come out and shout it from the rooftops so it was a very kind of new way of thinking about being gay and these people in their own way I think they were quite confrontational. So I mentioned Mary Whitehouse earlier. She helped to organise these nationwide Festival of Light events where lots of religious

people got together and there was lots of singing and prayer and things like that. And a few times the Gay Liberation Front invaded these events and they let pornographic pamphlets drop from the balconies and they dressed as nuns and they kind of can-canned all the way down the stage and they let mice into the audience. They had a great time. They were very disruptive. I don't think Mary Whitehouse ever forgave them for that. So I think gay people

were kind of in her crosshairs right from the start. I love it. That's brilliant. Then of course the 80s you get AIDS. Yes. And did that give the conservative big and small c forces The kind of ammunition they needed to fight this culture war Almost on a different front They certainly did

It was such a tragic thing to happen And you'd think under the circumstances People would have rallied round And actually be nice to people who were dying. But the opposite happened. There was a lot of ignorance and a lot of fear. It was still during the time, I think, when sexuality and sex was still very taboo to talk about. So there was still a lot of kind of, I suppose, judgment and ignorance. A lot of people didn't even know what homosexuality was or what they did. I know my mother didn't. I kind of found out at the same time as her of my dad, who told us both at the same time. So I hope you did him in section 28. I hope you

reported him. Exactly. And you get particularly tabloid newspapers using stories about HIV AIDS as kind of leverage, kind of shock value. So you get headlines like gay plague seals off death prison. My favourite one is I'd shoot my son if he had AIDS, says vicar. And they had this sort of staged photo of this vicar holding a rifle, you know, kind of towards his son's head. And then opposite on the next page is like kind of an advert for funeral expenses or something like that. So it's very strange articles. I assume he didn't shoot his son. Otherwise, there'd have been more stories. It was a pretty awful time, I think.

And public attitudes towards homosexuality just got worse and worse over the 80s. By 1987, which was the year Section 28 actually was proposed, 64% of British people thought that homosexuality was always wrong, and another 11% thought it was sometimes wrong. So that's three quarters of society thinking that you shouldn't be gay, which is an awful lot. I mean, yeah.

Well, it's also a big turnaround, right? It is today, yeah. And also there's a kind of cultural aspect too, which is they went, it's gays, but that's also kind of the loony left. You know, like in America today in particular, you're sort of, it's you're mask wearing socialists. Yes. So the 80s are quite similar in some ways to our present day situation

in that there's a lot of parallelisation in politics. Not many attempts to compromise or find common ground, sadly. Margaret Thatcher, who won the 1979 election, was a very driven, uncompromising leader, and she wasn't afraid to make enemies. And so you've got Ken Livingstone, who's kind of running the Greater London Council, and he's got his offices in County Hall, which is opposite Westminster on the other side of the Thames. And he's kind of trolling the government. He's putting up these kind of big banners, declaring London to be a nuclear-free zone, or announcing the unemployment figures to kind of shame the government. And he's also funding lesbian and gay groups, which is seen as a

complete waste of money by Tories. So the government got rid of the GLC in 1986, but there were still lots of these Labour-run local councils all over the country, a lot of them in London. And they were having these programmes to increase awareness and tolerance towards gay people. And then you get this massive backlash as a result of that. towards gay people. And then you get this massive backlash as a result of that. And a lot of this is focused on Haringey Local Council, which, you know, has all sorts of different, very diverse place, Haringey. And they've got this gay and lesbian kind of section, and this kind of unit in the council, who put together this positive images campaign, where they produce this kind of list of resources, books and short films and things. And they send it to all the teachers in the region.

And they say, you know, we'd like you to implement this. And we're happy to help and come along if you'd like it. And then there's this massive backlash. And you get this council meeting where people are throwing eggs at each other and chasing each other down the road with bayonets and things like that. It gets on the news. People are marching up and down, protesting. There's different kind of protest groups forming every couple of weeks or so and then counter-process groups. Lots of allegations

going around at the time. It's madness. And that's really the kind of hotbed of it all, where it starts to kick off and then politicians are looking at that and saying, we could use that. We could do something with that. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. we're talking about gay history more coming up how can you tell if your neighbor is a witch if you're obsessed by witches then maybe there's something wrong how would you go about painting henry the eighth i think henry's a monster and so i see a sort of puffed up, balloon-faced, impotent guy. Would you invite Oliver Cromwell to dinner?

There's no point in having Cromwell to dinner other than to be entertained with his heavily skewed version of events. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything from ballads to banqueting, sex to spying, ghosts to gunpowder plots. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny. You'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. whether it's Defund the Police or whatever, you take a very small local movement with all its kind of idiosyncrasies and just blast it out on your big news networks or whatever and create a kind of national schism. Perfect. Let's come to Section 28 itself.

So tell me about that. What is it? How did it come to be? Okay, so it was this very controversial law. It got passed on May 24th, 1988. It said that local authorities couldn't intentionally promote homosexuality or teach in a school that homosexuality was acceptable as a pretended family relationship. Now, the wording is awful. They debated this for hours and hours and hours, and that's the best

they could come up with. You know, so if you say you can't promote homosexuality as a pretended family relationship, homosexuality is a sexuality. It's not a relationship anyway. So it kind of doesn't even make sense to begin with. And then this term promoting homosexuality, what does it actually mean? And they spent ages, you know, politicians were kind of getting their dictionaries out during the debates and trying to kind of say what it meant.

And some of them even got their theosauruses out, but nobody really understood what it meant. I don't think they actually cared. It was vague enough to cover so many different things. So now imagine you're a teacher at school, a kid comes up to you and says, I'm being bullied for being gay. I feel like ending it all. What do you say to the kid? Do you say, actually, it's OK to be gay? Is that promoting homosexuality? Who knows? There's no rule. And I think teachers were terrified of getting on the wrong side of this law.

So they were very, very cautious about what they were allowed to say, most of them. And as a result of that, a lot of homophobic bullying went unchecked in classrooms and playgrounds, and also in some staff rooms as well. And there were all sorts of knock-on effects. It was kind of the government giving a message to the whole populace of the country saying, we don't want your kids not only to be gay, but even to know about what being gay is. It's that bad. So it created this horrible climate where gay people felt under attack. They felt like second-class citizens for a very long time. Did anyone ever get prosecuted? Not that I know of, no. No, I think people self-censored. They were so scared of it

that they didn't do anything that would get them into trouble. And it wasn't just schools. It was local theatre groups, things like that, who relied on funding. So there were particularly queer theatre groups who were getting funding from councils. The councils were afraid to give them money in case that came under Section 28. So, you know, various theatre groups had to disband. So there was a whole thing around that. And then, you know, lesbian parents in particular, you know, say two women, and they had children and were raising them together. And maybe there was a divorce and a court case about custody. There were all sorts of inappropriate and weird questions that the judges were asking them about their relationship,

about the way they dress their children, about their sex lives. You know, did they use toys or devices and things like that? It was just awful growing up in that context. How interesting. It's a very, even if no one's ever prosecuted it, it's obviously a kind of messaging lord, a political gesture. It has such a huge impact on the ground. It's fascinating. How do we go about getting rid of Section 28?

Oh, it took a long time. So Labour got in in 1997 with Tony Blair, and there was a sense of optimism and hope, and gay people thought, this is great, Labour are going to overturn Section 28. And then the years passed and they didn't. And then people are getting quite frustrated with Blair and Labour saying, you know, what's going on? And I think the issue was, I think Blair was still, you know, quite scared of, would there be a backlash? And he was quite worried about the pensioner vote, apparently. And so they dragged their heels a bit. And then they did try to get it overturned in the year 2000. But then they got this massive amount of opposition in the House of Lords. And it was led by Baroness Young, Janet Young, who was, from what I've heard, quite an intimidating and scary character. So votes in the Lords to actually overturn it. And so they were scared, they backed down, they got jeered and mocked by the opposition in Parliament, and they kind of just let things lie for a bit. But then they were kind of humiliated even further by Scotland, because there was this newly formed Scottish Parliament. They decided

they were going to show England, you know, how it was done. So they decided that they were going to repeal it. And they did in 2000. It was one of the first things that the Scottish Parliament did. Though that didn't go smoothly either. There was this campaign in Scotland called Keep the Clause. And there was a Scottish businessman, Brian Souter, who was very much on the side of Keep the Clause. And he actually funded a ballot of the entire population of Scotland. I think it was about a million pounds worth of his own money he used to send out ballot papers to all of Scotland saying, do you want to keep the clause or not? Most people didn't return their votes.

I think 31% or so, or 32% got returned, and of which 86.8% said they wanted to keep the clause, although actually 86% of 31% is only really about a quarter. So it's not a majority who voted for it. And the Scottish Parliament ignored it anyway, and they went ahead and repealed it. And in the end, there wasn't very much fuss. It went through without a whimper, really.

And they showed that it could be done. And the sky didn't fall in or anything like that. So I think it did maybe put a fire under Labour again. And they tried again in 2003. This time the circumstances were a bit different. Some other laws had already been overturned or passed, so gay people could serve in the armed forces at that point. And the age of consent had been lowered to 16, it had been equalised for gay men. And again, the sky hadn't fallen in and the pensions hadn't all had heart attacks and written

letters of complaint. So I think they felt, you know, the time was maybe right for another go. So I think they felt, you know, the time was maybe right for another go. And also Baroness Young had died, so that Section 28 had lost its kind of biggest defender. And there's always somebody else who steps in. There was Baroness Blatch who had a good go at defending it at that point. But I think they knew that the game was up by that point. Even in the Lords, people were voting to get rid of it. And in the Commons, it was a kind of cross-parliamentary act to get rid of it as well,

with support from Labour, Liberal and Conservatives. So eventually it did pass. Paul, when it did pass in November 2003, as a prominent data-led social scientist historian, obviously, has there been a massive outbreak in gayness among kids of school age since then? I don't think there has. I'm not sure. I don't think that there are maybe surveys to suggest that there's been this massive outbreak of gayness. I think maybe more people who probably would have kept in the closet are now not in the closet as much.

But I don't think it's kind of created this nation of gay kids by any means. Absolute tidal wave of games all over the place. We suggest in Section 28, its legacy was only one of toxicity. I mean, there was no good faith argument for it. There was no good faith argument for it, although I think there were unintended consequences, which actually brought some good among it. So it did result in a lot of people getting very upset about it and scared, and then they decided they were going to try and do something about it. So it kind of formed the basis, I think,

of the modern-day lesbian and gay rights movement with people coming together, organising, people who actually weren't very political, sort of realising this bill is so egregious, so awful, we've got to do something about it. And when you think about the time, there was no internet, there were no smartphones, you couldn't show support just by liking something on Twitter, you had to actually show up on the day and be present and go on a march or do something. And these people did. So there were massive protests. There was one in

Manchester that had 20,000 people showing up to it. You've got very high profile people coming out of the closet, like Ian McKellen, who was one of the most well-known detractors of Section 28. He actually came out on the radio, on Radio 3. And then he went on Vogue and watched by millions of people and gave this very, very long argument against Section 28, which was watched by millions of ordinary people. And I think it just got people together. It got people meeting each other. People ended up in relationships because they met each other on marches about Section 28. I think that's great that people had more gay sex because of Section 28. That makes me feel very happy. They did. I think they probably did in the long term, which is probably the last thing that people who invented

it would have wanted to happen. So I'm on the Office of National Statistics website here, Paul. The percentage of 16 to 24 year olds who identify as LGB is six and a half percent. So not massive, really. This is not a tidal wave. It's not. It's not. Maybe there are a few people in there who are yet to decide, but still, it's not going to change society that much, I think, is it? And as you point out, maybe it'd be good if it did. You know, not having lots of kids might actually be the environmentally sensible thing to do. Looking back, is it a bit like when we see gay marriage in the States or some of these issues on which society has turned

really quite quickly a vault fast. And so those figures you gave in the 80s were extraordinary. Hostilities towards homosexuality. Have people come out and sort of apologised almost? Have we seen people like William Hague, who tried to keep Section 28 as leader of the Tory party, they admit that that was wrong now? It took a while. They did start to eventually, quite a lot of them had died, so they didn't have to apologise.

And quite a lot of them didn't actually see it repealed, which maybe is just as well for them. But gradually, sort of in the last few years in particular, you start to see sort of different kinds of apologies from Conservative politicians. Theresa May apologised, for example, for Section 28. David Cameron was the first Conservative MP who apologised, and he put forward gay marriage, you know, which would have been unthinkable under Margaret Thatcher. It's the kind of opposite of what Section 28 is. Although there was an argument that things like gay marriage are actually kind of letting gay people kind of join the status quo in a way

and join the majority and it doesn't include everybody, only the kind of nice gay people who shop at Ikea, that sort of thing. Maybe it doesn't include everybody within that. But yes, people have apologised. Baroness Knight was interviewed for Newsnight by the editor of Attitude magazine a few years ago. And she kind of gave a bit of a half-hearted apology. I mean, she was one of the main proponents of Section 28

and she said something like, I'm sorry if I did anything to upset you. So it's that kind of like, you know, that word if, you know, kind of, well, sorry, not sorry kind of thing. Piers Morgan apologised on Twitter a year or so ago for an article he wrote about EastEnders and there was a gay character played by Michael Cashman. It was a very homophobic article and people kind of shared it on Twitter again. And he did apologise for writing it and said, you know, times were different then and he's very sorry about it. So, yeah, I think people are apologising. It's harder to know the extent to which they mean it or whether they're saying it because they know they should. And maybe we shouldn't look into

that too much anyway. Maybe the fact they have apologised is enough and maybe we need to forgive and forget, but not forget, but certainly move on. And it certainly wasn't the intention of my book to kind of, I suppose, stoke a banger or make people cancel people or do anything like that. It's not written in those terms at all. It reminds me, I just recorded a podcast about Charles I, whose last words to his kids was, forgive our enemies, but never trust them. Love that! Well, exactly. And the reason for the book is, you know, to remember it, to remember what happened. Because if you remember it, it's harder for it to happen again, I think.

That's certainly something I wanted to do. And also to kind of make people aware that similar things are going on elsewhere. So, you know, Russia has a strangely worded law, which has similar consequences to Section 28. Hungary recently passed a similar law as well. And I want people in those countries to kind of look at what happened in the UK and think, well, we were the first to do this. We were the innovators. We got rid of it. And then other countries have picked up on it. Isn't that wonderful for us? But we got rid of it

at least. And now the people who kind of were the instigators of it are not remembered kindly or well. They've had to apologise. And so just maybe for the leaders of those other countries to think, you know, what's going to happen in maybe 30 50 100 years time will that law still exist how will the history books remember these people are they on the right side of history and i don't think they are there's a place to end it what's the book called it's called outrageous exclamation mark brilliant and then it has a long subtitle Britain's Battle for LGBT Education something like that Outrageous is good you had them outrageous

Thank you very much Paul for coming on Thanks ever so much Dan for having me been great to talk to you Thanks folks for listening to this episode of Dan's Science History as I say all the time This part of the history of our country, all work out and finish. possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors. That's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and

check those out wherever you get your pods. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.