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    Unhappy birthday

    30 years ago today, in the tolerant UK, Section 28 was introduced, banning the "promotion" of homosexuality. This legislation was bigoted in conception and execution, a sadistic response to initiatives that were starting to make life easier for some LGB youth*. It gave tacit legal and establishment approval to a poisonous atmosphere of crude anti-gay bigotry in the media and in society in general. It wasn't repealed until 2003. Here are two good articles on the subject.

    The generally wonderful Another Angry Woman writes about her experience of school and adolescence during this regime.

    Bigmouth goes through some of the unremarkable press of the time.

    Both writers make the connection between the media of the time and the mundanely transphobic media of today. All the same shit - dangerous to children, perverted freaks, kids can't know what they're talking about, blah blah - gets slung at us, usually by journalists you'd think might know better, or controversialists who almost certainly DO know better but don't give a fuck cos they're making money.

    Anyway, it was good of Mr. Corbyn to state that the Labour Party unequivocally regards trans women as women earlier this week.

    Just remembered that phrase "pretended family relationships." How disgusting are the people who did this? How many are still in Parliament?

    *Worth pointing out that most schools at this time didn't need legislation to ignore the existence of LGBT pupils


    EDIT - thread title does not refer to my birthday. My birthday was fine.

    #2
    Phew to the last bit.

    And yes, I'm pleased Corbyn was unequivocal.

    I'm on a slow internet connection (not got my broadband set up yet) so can't click on the links.

    Comment


      #3
      i was hoping someone would start a thread on this subject: i'm glad it was you. i completely agree that the trans* panic of today's media is a replay of the 1980s, right down to the hateful stuff that gets thrown out by people you would hope (and might expect) to be allies. i've always thought of section/clause 28 as a uniquely vindictive piece of legislation, even by the standards of the Thatcher government. For a time, in the mid-00s, it did seem it had come to symbolise the spite and the viciousness of that administration, and i briefly allowed myself to hope that it would prevent the Tories from going that far or being that brazen again when they got back into power. i think the disability allowance legislation and the climate of hostility have set me right.

      Personally i was unaffected by C28. Aged 14 when it passed, i was at a convent school which was already disinclined to acknowledge – let alone promote – homosexuality. Unlike the Angry Woman linked in the OP i'm not sure C28 was all that successful: i attribute my confusion above all to the innate confusingness of sexuality, and its repression, and the rubbish tools we were given to conceive of it (or, if you grew up around nuns, not given). i felt not the slightest shame in letting my eyes rest a little longer than they needed to on my roommate's body. But i didn't imagine that she or i could be gay, so nothing would ever come of it. The really dangerous bodies were those of celebrities, because your imagination could run wild. But real lesbians? i imagined they must be in hiding, because of their awfulness.

      Thinking about it, i'm certain that the first openly lesbian lesbians i ever saw were the ones who absailed into parliament or got trapped under Nicholas Witchell's buttocks. So, 30 years ago this week. Up until then they had been mythological figures and symbols of abjection: a word, a label, and you did what you needed to do so that it wouldn't stick to you. Then, these proper adult lesbians on the news. i don't remember how i reacted: probably i found them laughable, and thought they looked a bit scuzzy. (Well, they did. Rat's tails.)

      In truth i had forgotten about the C28 stunts. The first lesbian i remember remembering was in Foyle's bookstore in London, probably a couple of years afterwards. She was browsing the Gay And Lesbian section, quite publicly and unashamedly. i was completely appalled by her audacity and presumptuousness; she made me feel ill. She had thick curls of jet black hair, in a kind of tight perm, shortish. And she was wearing a tweedy sports jacket with big square shoulders – a man's jacket! It made her look squat and broad. i only saw her from the back, but i was repulsed. The lesson i took away was, if that was a lesbian, then i was safely on the side of the righteous. i could never be so vile. i carried on browsing the section opposite (probably classic literature: this was my Henry James / Edith Wharton phase), not even remotely curious as to the contents of the other shelves.

      Within a year or two i was rattling a bucket on the university steps so that we could hire a bus to take us to Edinburgh to protest against Section 28. My sociology tutor saw me and (i feared) the little pink triangle badge i'd semi-hidden under my defiantly flowing locks. As she approached, i went crimson; she dropped a whole purse load of coins in my bucket. We made it to Edinburgh and hollered at some Tory nobody and hung out with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and got to see the Aids quilt, which was making its way around the land. My instinct was to kneel Mary Magdalene style before this incredible, tragic shroud – but we were supposed to be enraged and energised, not sappy. (i blame the Sisters.)

      Those were the darkest days. Slowly i became politicised. i began to take note of the way that lesbians and gays were portrayed in the media and in my family homes. i thought backwards to get a sense of the climate i had grown up in. The debate around S28, which i remembered surprisingly vividly (the few publications that were permitted in the boarding house included the Daily Mail and the Catholic Herald), seemed to symbolise the hopelessness of those times. A discourse of terror against a small, enfeebled, grieving minority. During a canvassing for the 1987 general election i'd had my photo taken wearing a Say Yes to Maggie sticker. (It seems i was confused about more than sexuality.) Now the Right had lost me, forever. (LGBTories of my generation are one of those eternal mysteries.)

      C28 didn't affect me directly but it marked me profoundly. It made me an activist, and unavoidably one of the big-tent, alliance-building, reaching-outwards kind. It helped me cut the final ties with my church and my faith. It transformed my political thinking. It drew me to people i never would have met otherwise. And today it has made me feel a strange sort of nostalgia, for the awfulness of a time that has passed, that is coming again, completely avoidably; for an age when my own ignorance was almost endearing; for the straightforwardness, the blinding obviousness of the evil intent behind that legislation.

      Fuck off, Maggie.
      Last edited by laverte; 24-05-2018, 21:09.

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        #4
        Great piece laverte, thanks. In those 30 years one of my closest friends has made a similar journey from repressed Catholic Tory to married gay socialist.

        For him and for you here's the invasion of the BBC in protest

        https://twitter.com/JBPersonalBrand/status/999594324034834434

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          #5
          This is a great thread. The transphobic stuff retweeted by the likes of the Wings Over Scotland human debris is really depressing. And as said above similar to the homophobic shit thrown around in the 80s/90s. It’s interesting that the US soft Dem left still seems mostly unaffected by Transphobia, definitely not the case in Labour/SNP fringes etc.
          Last edited by Lang Spoon; 24-05-2018, 23:33.

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            #6
            Thanks for that, Laverte.

            There's a fair bit of revisionism around Thatcher. People on the free market/slash/libertarian right, who nowadays vote for gay marriage and generally keep their distance from caveman conservatives, still hold up Thatcher as a shining light. In fact, more than ever, as many weren't even born when she was in power. Their definition of "freedom" requires some challenging gymnastics, and/or a woeful ignorance of UK history.

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              #7
              Great posts from laverte and dm.

              I'm inclined to believe that hate filled and spiteful people don't so much transfer their loathing from one group to another as focus their expression of it on particular targets at different times. Any advances have to be defended and the famous Niemöller quote is just as true when paraphrased with 'came back for'.

              Comment


                #8
                Ah yeah, laverte with a great post.

                Tossers having a go at Owen Jones for having the temerity to say that opposition to Section 28 was largely the province of the 'loony left'. Apparently the mainstream Labour Party, and the Liberals, and nice people in general, were all dead against it and it was widely recognised as appalling bigotry. Yeah, that's why New Labour took six years and two general elections to get around to doing anything about it once in power. Of course these tossers aren't LGBT, which means of course they're going to have an accurate recollection of society's homophobia at the time. Jones has stood up loud and proud in defence of trans people, and copped tons of abuse for it. He's alright.

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                  #9
                  Fucking took long enough, didn't it?

                  There are so comparatively few trans people, it's really annoying to see some Labour people going on now as though we're suddenly going to have a stampede of trans candidates pushing CIS women out. Back in the day, homophobes acted as though everybody was going to turn ravenously sex-crazed queer if they learnt that some people lived happily and gay in every sense, in or out of relationships. Again, if we get equality, all that happens is that people will just be able to live a life, take part in society, without constant harassment and discrimination.

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                    #10
                    I don't even know if it's homophobes any more. It's just fucking morons. Morons believe that safe injection sites 'encourage' people to shoot up when we should be discouraging it. Morons think that if you talk frankly with kids about their bodies and healthy sex, they'll start fucking like minks. And if you talk openly about gay, lesbian, trans, etc they'll all 'turn' or make the conscious decision to be gay, bi, trans, whatever. It's just stupidity and faulty thinking on a whole other plane.

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                      #11
                      Apparently the mainstream Labour Party, and the Liberals, and nice people in general, were all dead against it and it was widely recognised as appalling bigotry. Yeah, that's why New Labour took six years and two general elections to get around to doing anything about it once in power.

                      To be fair to Lab and the LDs, section 28* vanished from the statute books in Scotland a year after the first parliament convened up there (and it was a Lab/LD coalition in charge back then). It was during this repeal process that Brian Souter and Ann Gloag showed themselves to be the knuggle-dragging homophobes they are by funding a campaign to keep it.

                      No excuse for the delay at Westminster tho.

                      *actually Section 2A in Scotland, but created by the same act as section 28 in 1988
                      Last edited by blameless; 25-05-2018, 15:46.

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                        #12
                        Oh, the dig was more at the people pretending the entire centre and left stood/stand firmly behind LGBT people in order to attack a gay man whose politics they dislike than the actual parties. I realise they take time to grind into action.

                        MsD, left transphobia is a parochial thing. Irish feminists supported self declaration and told arsehole British feminists to fuck off when the latter tried to tell them that the Repeal the 8th campaign shouldn't be trans-inclusive. Ireland has had self dec for two years with none of the phantom problems the anti-trans lot scaremonger about. I do actually have reservations about self declaration but that's because I think it would create a new criminal offence, which is rarely a good thing, especially when minorities are involved.

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                          #13
                          Glad it was too hot to go to Pride today.

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                            #14
                            What a fiasco.

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                              #15
                              It's so dull. What bugs me is that they'll get loads of attention for their nonsense due to a dull stunt. Pride In London was already shit, they let UKIP in in 2015 ffs, they have representatives of a government that terrorises and deports LGBT asylum seekers etc. I really don't expect anything good from them.

                              There's UK Black Pride in south London tomorrow, looks far more pleasant. Crowds and heat, though.

                              Comment


                                #16
                                Not so long ago.

                                https://twitter.com/labour_history/status/1333317302067077120

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