 Ychyneg y gallu wrth yn amlwg i this bwysig o feithio Llyfrgell. Rhaid i'n Yamosted Stephen Dryden, rhai eich Llwm Llyfrgell yng Nghymru, ac mae'n ddilyn yn ffwy o'r hanffodus i'r ffyrdd gweithio ar y cyfyniad Ryfysai 28, Plais yng nghymru i lawer am erbyn 1988 ac mae'n bysach o'r hynny, fel y byddw i ni'n gweithio ar y Helswyr yn Paul Baker. F exciting ni'n cerddog yng Nghymru a'r llyfrgell yng Nghymru yng Nghymru, mark LGBTQ plus history month. So, please do check out the rest of the programme and we're delighted tonight to be joined by all of you and specifically our partners in national and public libraries, one of which is Norwich Millennium Library, so welcome to you this evening. Before I introduce the speaker to you, Paul Baker, there's a few housekeeping points that I just want to make for you. We are taking questions and we're going to have a Q&A later on. Can I ask that you submit these questions for the panellists using the question box, which is below the video. Use the tabs above the video to provide feedback to the library and also if you are able to donate something to the library's cultural programming. You can also buy copies of Paul's book from our bookshop partner Gaze the Word, which is based just down the road from us in St Pancras in London, the UK's oldest LGBTQ plus bookshop and that's in a tab above the video, so above us right now. The event has speech detect captioning. This can be accessed in a tab below the video for anybody who would like to use it and is also being supported live by a BSL interpreter. Thank you Paul and Debbie for being with us this evening. So our speaker tonight, so Paul's going to do a presentation for us and then we'll go into a Q&A. Paul Baker is Professor of English Language at Lancaster University. His research interests include language and identities and critical discourse analysis and he's written a fabulous book called Polari and if you haven't checked it out, I'll give you the full title. Polari, fantabilosa, the story of Polari, Britain's secret gay language, which is an amazing book, I thoroughly recommend reading. So without further ado, I'd like to pass to Paul. Thank you very much Stephen and thank you very much all of you for coming to this talk. This is a book which had a lot of personal resonance for me to write and I think it could have ended up being quite an angry book but there was a lot of humour around at the time when I was writing the book and the title outrageous reflect how the anger was often perpetuated with a sense of comedy. It's also a book about a lot of other books, books which triggered a kind of moral panic around what children in the 1980s should be taught around sexuality and perhaps the most famous or ornotorious of these is a book called Jenny lives with Eric and Martin, which was published by Danish author Suzanne Bosch in 1981. It was translated into English in 1983 and released in the UK by gay men's press with a run of 3,000 copies. It's a book about Martin, his boyfriend Eric and their five-year-old daughter Jenny and the characters go to a laundrette, they have a birthday party and they encounter homophobia from a woman in the street. Now part of the book which attracted quite a lot of criticism is that there's a couple of pages there that I put up there where Jenny was shown in bed with the two men and in 1986 the Daily Mail reported that the book had been placed in school libraries by the Inner London Education Authority and this was something of a version of the truth. It was in a parental advisory section to my knowledge but this started a panic with people actually burning copies of the book in the streets to protest. Now this wasn't a particularly easy time I think to be gay due to the discovery of the HIV virus which caused AIDS in the early 80s and the media were very quick to stigmatise gay men. These headlines from various newspapers in the 80s show this. Fickers feature quite prominently in some of these articles so the sun there has, I'd shoot my son if you had AIDS says Vickers. It's an article which for me is a pitch perfect exercise in camp horror. You can actually see a staged photo of Reverend Robert Simpson holding a rifle to his 18-year-old son Chris and the sun has quoted in the article saying sometimes I think he would like to shoot me whether I had AIDS or not. And due to the fact that there were no further news stories about this rather extraordinary family we should probably conclude that Reverend Robert Simpson did not end up shooting anybody thankfully. Now in the 1980s the Labour-run Greater London Council had set up a gay rights working party and they'd funded a lesbian and gay centre. The GLC led by Ken Livingstone were one of the biggest thorns in the side of the Conservative government and Livingstone displayed banners from county hall on the south bank of the Thames which showed unemployment figures or declared London to be a nuclear free zone. The government got so fed up with this they employed an act to devolve the GLC's power to London boroughs effectively abolishing it in 1986 but this didn't stop opposition to the government and a number of Labour-run local councils in London started to give funding towards programmes aimed at helping LGBT people. A Haringey council was one of these they had a newly created lesbian and gay unit and the unit launched a campaign called Positive Images which was set up to encourage schools to include LGBT content in their teaching and one of the books that I recommended was Jenny Livesworth, Eric and Martin. The Femio to Tojun's picture here was one of the members of this unit and she's described how they thought some of the pictures in the book were ridiculous. She says you wouldn't expect to see better-chested men in children's books but they were just excited to see anything or something anything that showed lesbians and gay men could raise children and so they were willing willing to forgive it just about anything else so the campaign went ahead they sent the resources guide to head teachers and they offered to help them to implement it. Now this didn't go down well with some Haringey residents there was a backlash and there was a parents group formed to protest. There was a very dramatic council meeting in October 1986 with eggs being thrown from the public gallery, demonstrators clashed outside Haringey Centre, I remember we've all got on the news and crowbars and bayonets featured in the mayhem. Now the debate rambled on through 1987 which also happened to be an election year and the Conservative Party used homophobia as part of their election campaign with posters which warned that Labour would want to make everyone's children gay so the poster to the left there has someone holding a placard that says gay sports day and answers on a postcard if you know what that is and then in June there was the election the Conservatives won the election and by 3.7 million votes giving Margaret Thatcher her third win in a row and later in October at the Tory party conference in Blackpool Mrs Thatcher was at maximum power mode making one of her most well-known speeches where she warned that children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have the inalienable right to be gay and for that she received an 11-minute standing ovation. So on 2 December 1987 a Conservative backbencher called David Wilshire put forward an amendments to the Local Government Act 1986 that was aimed to stop councils from doing what the act called promoting the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. Now that wording is a bit muddled, homosexuality is a sexuality it's not a relationship so the main thrust of what that the act says didn't really make any sense there was also quite a lot of confusion around what the phrase promote homosexuality actually meant and they went round and round in circles trying to define this and didn't really succeed. Now that phrase promote homosexuality has actually been floating around for about two decades prior to this we find references to promoting homosexuality right back in 1967 during the debate in Parliament which actually decriminalised homosexuality there was an MP called Cicero Osborne who tried to water down this decriminalisation with a clause that would have stopped people from publishing names and addresses of gay people as that would have been a way of promoting homosexuality. The term kind of hung around for a bit it got used by high court judges it was quoted by Mary White House of the Nationwide Festival of Light and in 1974 the Festival of Light and rebranded itself as a group called CARE which stands for Christian Action Research and Education and then in 1985 the new director of CARE commissioned research which resulted in a booklet called Gay Lessons how public funds are used to promote homosexuality among children and young people and that booklet was sent to every MP and quite a lot of the lords as well and it helped to instigate the Section 28 campaign and in Parliament some of the politicians who debated Section 28 made no secret of their dislike for gay people. So the Earl of Hullsbury said that homosexuals act as reservoirs of venereal disease and the lesbian camp is becoming increasingly aggressive. Lord Swinfarn was slightly nicer and he claimed that schools were promoting sexual disability as homosexuals and lesbians were sexually disabled. My MP at the time Elaine Kellet Bowman during a discussion around an arson attack on the premises of Capsule Gay magazine said it was quite right that there should be intolerance of evil but my favourite homophobia quote is from Nicholas Ferber. He used to flamboyantly swan in to Parliament dressed in tartan with a silver miniature working revolver attached his belt and he called him sexuality a morbid squint and talked about sodomy and buggery as been the result of deep-seated psychopathological perversion. Lovely. Now initially in the Labour Party there was muted support for Section 28 and only a very small number of MPs actually spoke out against it. One of these was Bernie Grant, the MP for Tottenham and he said if the new clause is accepted it will be a signal to every fascist and everyone opposed to homosexuality that the government is really on their side. Now gradually other MPs started to get persuaded by Grant's perspective and Labour and the Lib Dems began to mount an attack although as the Conservatives had a solid majority in Parliament the passage of the law was pretty much guaranteed unfortunately. Now along with Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin one of the books that was cited in these debates is an example of shockingly explicit teaching of our homosexuality was this one here the playbook for kids about sex and the title is rather provocative it's actually a book about relationships and feelings not just sex and I don't know I think it's always not a good idea to half the words kids and sex in the same sentence anyway really and then playbook you know has multiple meanings so not really a good title to this book. During one of the debates on Section 28 Baroness Knight said that the book contained brightly coloured pictures of little stick men and showed all of our homosexuality and how it was done so just kind of have an image of that in your heads and I will show you the actual picture that I think she was referring to here it is it's that bit in the middle of the screen I put in a kind of red box so we can see two gay men there and they're out buying pot plants at the garden centre shamelessly flaunting it by holding hands and then the next picture alongside that shows two women who are engaging in the shocking practice of flying kite together while one has their arm around the other so not really the catalogue of filth that Baroness Knight had built us up to expect and you may ask why nobody bothered to get hold of that book at the time it should have been fairly easy considering it was supposedly freely available to all the libraries of the schools and all the left-wing councils across the country apparently now as I said the Conservatives had a big majority in parliament and they were reflecting popular attitudes of the time which in turn had been influenced by the media by the newspapers there was a British social attitudes survey taken in 1987 and it indicated that 64% of British people thought that homosexuality was always wrong and in another 11% thought it was sometimes wrong that's a lot of people and in 1988 clause 28 became legal turning into section 28 but it didn't happen without the great deal of opposition this photo is taken from a demonstration called never going underground that occurred in Manchester on the 20th of February 1988 attended by about 20,000 people and by the demonstration speeches were made by the actor Ian McKellen that's the chapter in the white coat if you don't recognise he'd come out the month before during a debate about section 28 on radio three to his left there is Michael Cashman some of you may be old enough to remember that he played the first the first gay character in East Enders Colin and he gave a speech at the event too and also did Stephen Parry on the far left he's a a young actor who played a a gay character in the soap opera Brookside on channel four and there are massive protests like this up and down the country in places like Brighton Leeds and London and Birmingham and I think one unintended outcome of section 28 was it brought people together it gave them a common cause to fight against and also it caused a great deal of LGBT plus people to become politicised to come out of the closet to campaign for gay rights and also to meet one each other and to fall in love or to to cop off the Labour MP Chris Smith telling me that he met his partner of 24 years during one of these lobbying meetings that took place at Westminster now there were also some hilarious acts of direct action which took place during this period some of my favourite bits of the story so one of the most famous acts of protest occurred during a House of Lords debate that took place on the 2nd of February 1988 a group of young women some of whom had been involved in protest at Green and Common had been thinking about taking imaginative non-violent direct action and they discussed various ideas and one which involved using a boat to board Westminster that way but they came up with a plan and one of the women Susanna Bauer who's got her hand up there second on the left she told me that on the day her and a group of her friends arrived at Parliament they tied lengths of clothesline around their waists and their jackets that they bought from Kaepham Market security guards didn't seem to notice when one of those lengths of clothesline fell on the floor and they let the women into the building anyway the women managed to persuade one of the more sympathetic Lords Lord Emma Monkswell to sign them into the pier's guest gallery and so the women sat there they watched the debate take place on the floor below and then when the Lords voted to pass clause 28 they got the clotheslines out and they tied them to the balcony railings and then to the shock of the watching Lords and Ladies the women went over the edge of the railings and later on the press corps was absailing but it wasn't absailing really it was just shilling down these lengths of clothesline and Susanna told me that she got kind of rope burns on her hands as she went down and as they descended to the floor of the House of Lords they shouted lesbians are out and it fell to the gentleman Usher of the Black Rod said John Jingill to try to remove them and impose order and there was a bit of a scuffle one Usher got kicked several others got pinched apparently one Usher apparently almost lost his trousers and the scuffle too and during all this pandemonium a couple of the women just simply walked out of the building got away with it and several others including some of the women who hadn't even been involved in it they got kind of apprehended rounded up and put into a cell next to Big Ben but the arresting officer must have been on their side I think because they were given tea and coffee and they were allowed to watch television before they were released without charge and they were actually showing the cell where some of the suffragettes were held as well many years earlier but the women were just getting started and a few months later on May the 23rd which I remember very well because it's my 16th birthday and I was actually having my birthday cake when I was watching this members from the same group decided to carry out another even more audacious invasion this time of the BBC six o'clock news studio while the news was live on air these women included Sally Francis and Buann Temple who was a carpenter who built a refuge for Asian women and women's centre and the Tarangay and the bill was due to become a law the next day so the women thought this was really their last chance to protest and they were very concerned about the lack of coverage of section 28 on the news so they thought well we'll just be the news so in advance they meant they got hold of a map of the building they managed to get entrance they had a bit of trouble at the door but they got passed the security guards they ran up six flights upstairs to the new studios they found some toilets and they changed their t-shirts and it's the ones that had pink triangles on and then just as the news started they burst into the studio now the director was watching from a control booth and he sort of clumped what was happening he started screaming he says um oh fucking hell we've got nutters in the studio get him out get security quickly meanwhile one of the women has handcuffed herself to a news desk and another one attaches herself to a camera cable now everybody in the studio was completely shocked this has never happened before but it was live television there was no going back and they just have to do what the british are so good at doing in a crisis pretended to not happening and muddled through somehow so amid methyl chouts of stop section 28 one of the news readers Sue Lawley somehow managed to read out the headlines and you can see from that picture there was a bit of an issue with the graphics appearing kind of over the top of her face there um but this was the least of their worries i think at that point as Sue read out the headlines the other news reader Nicholas Wichill was sitting on top of one of the women placing a hand over her mouth and you can actually hear these kind of muffles, shouts and screams on the footage in the background and the protesters said that she thought she was going to suffocate at that point and meanwhile Sue said to the eight million viewers i do apologise if you're hearing quite a lot of noise in the studio at the moment i'm afraid that we have rather been invaded by some people who we hope to be removing very shortly now the newspaper coverage the next day was not very uplifting i've put the headline from the from the page of the mirror there be demand sits on lesbian the daily star was even less lonely lesies attacked tv sue and it went on to call the women a gaggle of screeching lesbian harridans dotty dykes and her suit halfies they like their litteration and the star but it referred to sue lowly as fair and feminine perhaps the best headline for me was the pink paper um who simply wrote dykes penetrate anti so moving on what were the effects of section 28 well it has already shown it sent the bbc into a complete flap bit later on the tableau's got hold of the story that the bbc was going to show a film called two of us it's a love story about two gay teenagers and the tableau's kicked up such a first that the bbc ended up showing it at half past 11 at night i remember i stayed up late to watch it when the parents were asleep in bed upstairs um i thought it was a great film but they the bbc changed it they cut the ending um which was supposed to be a happy ending where the two gay guys got together instead they implied that one of them had kind of gone back to his girlfriend on the other hand channel four responded by trolling government and they created a series called out on Tuesday which aimed to promote homosexuality the production company went by the name of absaith and not the women who went over the balcony but it was art and theater i think which suffered um the most um in 1990 an artist called senal gupta put on an exhibition in salford called ecstatic antibodies which was based around representations of AIDS however the exhibition got cancelled at the last minute and those involved were told do not speak to the press another casualty of section 28 was the theater group gay sweatshop which had its funding pulled so it had to disband but it was in schools i think where the main damage was done and actually i think still continues to be done section 28 created an atmosphere of fear and silence around homosexuality homophobic bullying became rife in the 1980s with lgbt plus children talking about how they were spat on shoved called names had drinks drain on them genuinely had their lives made miserable and i should know i was one of those kids schools had confused on non-existent policies around homophobic bullying team teachers felt that their hands were tied to confront it and they really couldn't give advice to children and paint them um to talk about being gay nothing actually in the wording of section 28 related to classrooms but it was an ambiguous law and nobody wanted to be the test case there was an awful lot of self-censorship from teachers and i think what was more important was the message that section 28 gave off that homosexuality itself was wrong we do not want our children to be gay was the message now despite the fact that there was a clause in section 28 about preventing education about diseases i think many children missed out on relevant sex education information about safer sex and consent were often missing from the school curriculum and to the detriment of the children you know when they left school later on and gay and lesbian teachers also suffered and they were afraid to come out in the classroom or the staff room in case they got them into trouble and even now many lgbt plus teachers who were around in the 80s and 90s still feel unable to come out in the workplace now in the 90s um as a result of the homophobic climates climates which section 28 was part of two organisations with quite different mission statements um were formed so we have Stonewall which was a lobbying group which had the actors Ian McKellen and Michael Cashman as key members now they advocated dialogue talk to MPs and trying to get slow incremental changes to the law which will result in acceptance and equality for lgbt plus people on the other hand outrage he was most well known member um was the fabulous Peter Tatchell was a much more shouty organisation which aims at high profile sometimes hilarious demonstrations that were eye catching and provocative the outrage was an organisation of protest their members distributed leaflets about gay sex education outside schools and they carried out mass kissings in public spaces now is it one of these kissings held in Piccadilly Circus that um one of the actors from gay sweatshop chap called Richard Sandals did something quite remarkable Richard Sandals had been arrested a couple of years earlier when he'd made a speech on the balcony of the house of lords during one of the close 28 debates and during the kissing he climbed up onto the statue of eros and he would he I think he meant to hold the banner but he realised he couldn't hold it with two hands so he dropped it and instead just decided to give eros a great big kiss the police who were watching said bloody hell and eros waved quite a bit actually it's such a powerful and beautiful image that I just had to put it on the cover of the book now Stonewall and outrage had very different ways of going about things and at times there was some kind of disagreement between them at least I think they made opportunities for protest a lot more inclusive because they offered such different strategies and I think it also made it quite more difficult for the other side to counter opposition to section 28 because the opposition came from from different directions okay let's move on to 1997 we've got Tony Blair's new Labour party forming the next government and there was reason to hope that section 28 to today's was numbered at that point but as the years passed activists were getting increasingly frustrated that it was still around now Blair apparently was quite cautious about how repealing section 28 would look what pensioners would think and what the tabloids would say so then there was an attempt in 1999 November a Labour MP called Maria 5 tabled an early day motion that called for section 28 repeal finally and this form part of a local government bill now Labour had 418 seats the Tories had 171 seats so what possibly could go wrong well the answer was the house of lords the lords had already been much more traditional of the two houses a much higher average age and more members whose political views tended to kind of skew towards the right and during the bill's second reading Lord after Lord stood up to defend section 28 the most staunch defector was Baroness Young who won that repealing section 28 would open the floodgates to very unsuitable material appearing in schools for the use of children and she said it would encourage many children to pursue a path most responsible parents do not believe is right so on February 7th 2000 the lords voted essentially to keep section 28 and the government realised that they were heading for defeat and they tried to compromise by suggesting an amendment to a different bill although that got defeated too and a memo written by Blair in April got leaked to the press a couple of months later and then it blared said oh dear Labour are seen as weak on gay issues there's a perception that the government's out of touch with gut British instincts so amid quite a bit of gearing from the opposition they backed down and it was actually Scotland who showed Westminster the way later that year the newly created Scottish Parliament thought that actually there'd be no trouble whatsoever in repealing section 28 or I think it was called section 2A in Scotland but there was an instant backlash it was led by a group in Scotland called Keep the Claws who ran a poster and leafletting campaign and one of the most prominent members of Keep the Claws was a Scottish businessman called Brian Souter who owned the stagecoach bus company and Souter reportedly used about a million pounds of his own money to fund a nationwide vote at Scotland to see if people actually wanted the law overturned. The results when they came in looked rather encouraging for Keep the Claws 80.8% voted to retain it we should remember bear in mind though that only 31.8% of the votes actually got returned many people just burnt their ballots in the streets or they sent the envelopes back with nothing in them to incur unwanted expenditure for the polar organisers but in the end after all of this first and all these campaigning the law was overturned in Scottish Parliament on 21st of June 2000 with barely a whimper even the public gallery was described as being strangely quiet that day so it wasn't until 2003 six years after late year it got in that Westminster was able to get rid of section 28 so what had changed over those last three years since they'd last tried it well first of all Baroness Young had darked in 2002 age 75 and so section 28 we lost its most fierce and scary advocate and a number of the laws had been passed to that point the age of consent had been equalised 16th for gay men and gay men and lesbians had been allowed to serve in the armed forces and it hadn't caused rebellions by pensioners the sky hadn't fallen in the tablets hadn't gone crazy it was a feeling that the time was right i think to get rid of section 28 and this time the bill to overturn it was a a cross-party effort indicating that some conservatives were willing to support it as well there was still some opposition in the lords from people like Baroness Blach but Baroness Richardson noted that actually with the internet children can very now very easily access sexually explicit material and what's more important is the need to teach them how to respond to that to you and so on the 18th of november section 2003 section 28 became history now fairly enough you'd think that after all of the newspaper coverage that it received in the past the change to the law would also receive a lot of press attention but in fact it didn't i think the Guardian had an article about it on page six and but generally the national newspapers kept very quiet about that change and so in the end a largely symbolic law that had ended up causing a great deal of damage vanished without most people even noticing that it went so what happened after section 28 was repealed what did the people who'd supported it say while some of them died without apologising people like Baroness Young and Nicholas Fairburn Baroness Blach and Elaine Kellett Bowman and Margaret Thatcher others have apologised for supporting it so David Cameron made a speech apologising for section 28 editorial fundraising events for gay pride in 2009 something which would have been unthinkable 10 years previously other politicians have sort of apologised for it so Jill Knight who was one of the original and people responsible for the legislation was interviewed in 2018 and she said the intention was the well-being of children and if I got that wrong well I'm sorry I'd have welcomed a letter from someone who knew what the legislation was actually feeling like and some people have criticised that apology saying you know it doesn't really fully acknowledge the hurt and the damage that occurred other apologies and by people like Theresa May mean a lot more carefully worded it. Piers Morgan has apologised on Twitter and for his journalism about a gay kiss and he stenders and when he refers to Yuppie Puffs and Michael Cashman who's won half of that back the gay kiss and he stenders telling me that he's forgiven Morgan but he can't forget it because to forget allows such actions to be repeated when a different political environment deems itself but generally the political environment has changed Westminster now has an LGBT plus history tour of parliament I went on it in 2019 and they they show you the balconies where the women sailed over to protest against section 28 we can still see the echoes though of section 28 in other contexts there have been controversy in the last couple of years over LGBT plus inclusivity teaching in various schools in Birmingham for example a teacher called Andrew Moffat developed a programme called no outsiders which promoted tolerance and inclusivity at Parkfield community school and in 2019 parents withdrew about 600 children from the school for a day and there were crowds of protesters outside shouting get Mr Moffat out and the protest spread to other schools in the area now since then Parkfield has held a consultation with parents which has resulted in a somewhat altered version of no outsiders called no outsiders for a faith community and since then the protests haven't returned last year a new act called the Children and Social Work Act was passed it made sex education compulsory in schools although parents can withdraw their children except for the final year it states that all pupils have to be taught LGBT consent at a timely point but also the teaching needs to take into account the religious background of people and that may call for a differentiated curriculum whatever that is so while there's reason to maybe cautiously welcome the new act it remains to be seen I think whether all children across the UK will still receive an inclusive and positive message about LGBT plus people and elsewhere in the world the situation can be can be pretty bleak or grim at times homosexuality continues to be legal in seven states in Oceania nine in the Americas 23 in Asia and Middle East and 33 in Africa and while the UK got rid of section 28 more recently some countries have created their kind of copycat versions of it in 2013 Russia passed the law for the purpose of protecting children from information advocating for a denial of traditional family values like section 28 it has quite a vague wording with the result that it becomes difficult to hold a gay pride march or even wave a rainbow flag in case a child might see it there have been mass arrests and violence inflicted on LGBT plus people in demonstrations and marches in Russia 2017 saw reports of arrests torture and killings of gay men in the Republic of Chechnya opposition is growing in Poland as well with most of the southeast of Poland declaring itself an LGBT free zone I'm on the newspaper actually gives out stickers that say that and in November 2018 the president of Poland said he would support a homosexual propaganda ban Hungary's parliament passed the law last year in June that banned gay people from appearing in school educational materials or any tv aimed at people under 18 so while we got rid of section 28 its ideology is still out there and Britain invented it even though we got rid of it first it hasn't gone away but I want to end on a more positive note focusing on what some of the people I interviewed for the book told me about their experiences of some of the activists they went back and they went on to great things some of them though went back on to their lives including the women who invaded the house of lords and the BBC news and susanna bowyer telling me that she's still in touch with many of the women and that within that group people have different takes some are clear that for them the action stands for itself and they don't want to take part in interviews the fact that they did disappear was part of it and there's something very cool about that disappearing chrysmyth noted a benefit of section 28 he told me because it was so egregious and so extreme it helped in one really important way it helped to change social attitudes it actually meant that lots of decent ordinary non-lgbt people up and down the country thought these people don't deserve that kind of a program and michael cashman became a member of the european parliament where he continued to campaign for lgbt plus rights and he told me between us we lost the battle of the section 28 but we won the war for equality and if you didn't stand up for what you believed in you couldn't believe in yourself there was that moment that led me to where i am now and then mckellon said the revolution happened without a single brick being thrown without anyone being hurt there were no riots in the streets there were occasional disturbances but we won the argument and politics is all about that so there we go and for me section 28 is a story of heroism and humor in the face of adversity the activists in the 80s and 90s fought back against an unfair law and it's because of them that we have many of the rights and protections that we have now now the uk is by no means a safe place for lgbt plus people but it is a lot better than it was in 1988 and i can attest to that haven't been around in 88 so it's a story i think that the lgbt plus community can be rightly proud of and it's one that's definitely worth telling and it's one that i was very proud to tell so thank you very much for listening thank you very much paul it's interesting isn't it doing these events where we haven't got an audience because you can't really gauge how people are reacting but i would encourage you all the way that we know that you're there that you're out there is to submit a question so please do that on the question box which i think is above us let me just double check no it's below us there you go you can double check as well and paul while we're waiting for some questions to come through um i have a question for you if that's all right yeah um so i was wondering what it was that inspired you to write the book um conscious that palari was very much 50s 60s ish um what what what what forced you or went took you to the 1980s in education well i've also had you know a strong interest in gay social history and you know as you mentioned i'd written this book earlier of the same publisher um fabulosa on palari which had looked at 50s and 60s um and then and then you know i got us thinking it would be lovely to do something you know think about what came afterwards in the uk um and i was talking with my publisher about it and sort of he suggested you know would you like to do something on section 28 there hasn't really been a full book written on it there have been books written on parts of the story but not a kind of kind of overview um and i thought back to you know my 16th birthday um you know how i was there watching watching it happen live on on the six o'clock news and how how strange that was i remember the time um and i thought about lots of things that happened in my life going through at various points in my life and how you know sort of section 28 it intersected with my life at various points um to an extent made me the person i am in a way i think i might have been maybe a different person if it hadn't happened um so yeah i thought i thought it would be a great opportunity i think to to to write that book to to try and to tell the story i said i called it the story um section 28 but it's really lots of stories and obviously any book is only ever going to be a partial story because there are so many different people who are involved in and you know kind of getting section 28 over turns or getting it started in the first place um but it was it was a great privilege to be able to to speak to you know some of those people to interview them and i think i think i kind of made them a bit a bit embarrassed because i kind of was so so grateful um during some of the interviews and they were all incredibly modest um and kind of told me to shut up a bit um i think one of the really powerful things about the book is actually the um the personal tone of it the fact that you do relate quite a lot of your own encounters or the the the walls that stone that that the claws had put up um how did you how did you approach the research was it archival mostly or was it was it did it come from the interviews that you were doing with participants in in actions against it it was i just you know threw everything i had at it so um i i wrote it unfortunately during during the kind of the lockdown in in covid which which didn't make it harder to get hold of some of the material um although in some ways it made it easier to to talk to people because i did lots of interviews on zoom and people were just getting used to that so i was looking you know i think maybe people like Ian McKellen wouldn't have talked to me had it not been able to to do it to do it via the internet so it wasn't as difficult to get to him um yeah archives were they're useful as well um and you know kind of looking through through the media as well look i had access um to um a huge archive of gay and lesbian um newspapers and magazines that my university and i got them to subscribe for the pro quest um archive and then also i had archived to one of the um you know the national press and then i got another archive which was um local newspapers too which was incredibly useful because that told me about lots of local stories um things that happened in you know places that weren't london and and i thought you know i wanted to include as many perspectives and as a lot of voices that i could in the story um so that was very helpful and then the interviews on top of that as well yeah great it actually links in with one of the questions that's actually just come through from um our friends of Norwich who who are joining us today at the millennium library um which they've they've also be they're interested in the archiving library resources that you've asked whether there were any hidden gems that you encountered that you um you hadn't inspected does anything spring to mind oh good question i'm not i'm not i'm not sure from the archives themselves um one thing i did find incredibly useful when um was a i think it was a radio four um kind of sort of documentary um that that had been put out um about 10 years or so ago and that was like a kind of i think like that gave me a way in to a lot of the background that i didn't know about at the time so a lot of what was happening in Haringay um and and Femio to Toju was interviewed on that show um with some amazing insights um and and also um a vicar called um i think Reverend David Rushworth Smith who actually went on a hunger strike over section 28 which i had no idea that people were going on hunger strikes not not over section 28 but he wanted section 28 to happen so he kind of went on this hunger strike to protest about what Haringay council were doing at the time um and you know kind of listening to it the interviewer kind of didn't believe that he actually had gone on a hunger strike and he kind of said that he went in a wheelchair to attend meetings even though he didn't actually need to be in a wheelchair but he felt that he should go in a wheelchair um so things like that i found quite shocking i just hadn't realised that all of this was going on you know when i was sort of 14 15 16 um at the time um in Haringay so that was absolutely fascinating but no that that was kind of them backgrounds um to it which kind of kicked it all off really yeah i think one of the things that i really enjoyed about the book was how um you talk about these different different groups who were coming together and forming actions i actually um today ordered out one of the newspapers that you reference in the book which i don't know if you can see that there sorry dykes go on the march which is a outright it's a woman's woman's newspaper and it's it's actually incredible all of the different places where um you know clause 28 was actually discussed and kind of campaigned about um we've got a question that's come in from um Simon who talks about you know his activism within and against section 28 and about the age of consent and the age of consent wasn't equal during this period as well um he asked do you agree that we still have quite a long way to go in terms of um making education around gender and sexuality um or well improving it i guess is what is what Simon's asking there's still there's still quite a way to go what an enormous way to go yeah when when i when i was initially researching about and you know you kind of look around at what's going on in your own life and yeah i remember my nephew um kind of somebody said something herbofobic to him when he was at school i think he was about 12 at the time and he kind of responded by saying well my uncle's a gay so what and it kind of shut them up and i thought oh you know that's really nice but i feel in a way that's quite an representative kind of anecdote um and when you look at kind of surveys um there's um the charity just like us um i think last year commissioned them i studied by Sibyl i think and an organization that looked into bullying in schools and you know the numbers are horrific um you know even though section 28's been gone for nearly 20 years you know the amount of homophobic bullying that's taken place in schools is still enormous and it kind of shows that you know the messages you know more than ever i think need to get through you know we've only scratched the surface section 28 didn't stop bullying overnight by any means um and i think there's so much work to be done i think um to to change children's views at a young age um and engage with them i think there is there is improvements in in some quarters but um it's not it's nowhere near enough we think sadly thank you very much Paul um we've got another um question here sorry that's actually pretty much the same um from Lydia Lydia did you find any changes have been made to teacher training since the repeal of section 28 oh that's a really good question it's not it's not one that that i was able to to to kind of include or look at to be honest in the book um so i'm just not sure um you know if there has been yeah there was quite an interesting survey by pink news recently where they surveyed 3000 teachers and 23% of them said that they felt very uncomfortable talking to students about sex and sexuality and that's just in general not just not not not about lgbtq plus sex education yeah i had some some figures i think in the last chapter of the book looking at sort of the situation of the teachers and you know it's quite again quite depressing how how few of them felt you know that that they could come out particularly the ones who have been around in the 80s and 90s um as teachers um you know and even though it has been repealed like a lot of those older teachers you know are not out um you know in a classroom or even in the school they don't bring their partners to you know school events things like that um you know there's there's still kind of a no a kind of legacy i think for that for that generation which is really tragic yeah um i mean i i have a copy of paul's book here right next to me it's a gorgeous cover it has that amazing photograph which paul showed in in the presentation um if i if i can paul the last bit of the chapter that i've just read actually talks about um i think kind of what you talked about in in your talk where there's this storm if you like of early instances of hiv um becoming a parent within national media and you also have these arguments and debates around books targeted children and libraries and and you talk about i was terrified of growing up in a world where i would have to be where i'd have to try probably unsuccessfully to hide my sexuality i had no one to talk to i was scared of becoming hib positive i was sure i was gay but was terrified of my parents finding out um i mean that really resonated with me um i think there's probably about a decade between us i was born in i was born in 1980 um do you what what what what do you make of um the fact that the repeal of section 28 just went so under the radar do you think that was in in any way tied in with a lot of the stuff that was going on in the early 80s around hiv and and uh there's huge government backlash around education i think i think in a sense i mean a lot a lot of the newspapers supported it and i think you know they they weren't that happy that it was repealed and i think but i think they also knew that they you know if they said if they wrote that that it wouldn't go down well um you know they were on the wrong side of history there so they just chose to ignore it i think um you know rob rather than than reporting that the change was happening um it was you know it was it was a great moment and you know in the book you know that there was there was a great party and you know um Stonewall held a big a big event and lots of people came along to it and there was celebrated it's going um at night but you know i add i do i know i talked about you know the next day people just got up on my school as usual and i i get the impression that it wasn't this massive overnight change where you know homophobia magically vanished from from the shores of the UK um you know it wasn't very symbolic floor in itself in a sense section 28 was kind of the symptom of the homophobia it wasn't the cause of the homophobia if that makes sense um but you know it the even section 28 hadn't happened there was still an incredibly homophobic atmosphere around in the 80s um which you know was going to take a lot of reversing i think um to go away yeah absolutely absolutely um we've had um i'll ask i'll ask ask this question uh you you've described um section 28 and education as a bumpy balmy british story um what what do you think is so british about it apart from the fact that it was a british law obviously lots of things i think um you know susanna bowyer one of the women who went over there you know the railings um you know because she told me it was like it was like something out of carry on film you know incredibly british and you know i think you know carry on section 28 is a film that needs to be made i think definitely um it's a shame that kennith williams isn't around because i can imagine him playing an outraged house member of the house of lords absolutely and they're pontificating them um at the same time um so you know you've got you've got that kind of like this kind of force like scenes of the invasions i think which were you know hilarious and slightly bungled as well if you know that the ropes dropping off on the floor and i'm getting through anyway because the police were so incompetent they couldn't spot it um so you got that and then i think there's also something about the kind of the plightness of it all um you know the the debate that ian mkelin did when he came out on on radio three um he debated the um i think the editor of the sunday telegraph you know it's it's they're both incredibly polite to each other even though they're really disagreeing with one another they're so well-mannered and the and the women who invaded the bbc um when they were being cut free from their handcuffs one of them says thank you very much very brightly and i think you know i think only in britain would somebody say that and then afterwards they they told about how shocked they were that nicolas witchell had sworn and you know you swear words at them and they said oh i couldn't believe his language you know not someone from the bbc and again it's this kind of i know i don't think british people are the plightest people in the world but we're certain that i think that the country where we're the most obsessed with bightness and we talk about it the most in the world maybe um so you know there's that kind of that running through through kind of all of this the chapters of section 28 i think that kind of british sensibility the kind of the madcap humour and the sort of the plightness of it all i think which i really like as a yeah yeah absolutely i agree with that um an element of camp even in protest um we've got a really good question here from justin hello justin um did you find evidence of teachers or students disregarding or subverting section 28 in their schools were these stories of resistance or agency in addition to those of danger and persecution there were odd bits and pieces i think people maybe didn't want to admit at the time but there were i think particularly in subjects like english literature i think some some like more progressive teachers were able to kind of smuggle um kind of more positive messages um you know by by choosing certain books maybe or plays um you know into the classroom um and kind of getting through it that way there's an amazing woman um called sue sanders um who kept coming up again and again in the store in various points of the story um she's a teacher um i remember you know her kind of attitudes was it was it was my one of my favourite ones and it's sort of she talks about how somebody had written sous miss sands as a lesbian on the blackboard and she came into the classroom and she kind of saw it and she kind of says you know so what you know it's not news everybody knows that why do you feel a need to to kind of write it and then she kind of told them all that you know if they finish their maths then at the end of the lesson um you know she they could have a discussion about about it all um and and they all finished very very quickly that day since they had their discussion one of the children did tell their parents and the parents complained about it and she wasn't allowed to teach that that child again and so you know there were consequences to this um but you know I think you know things things like that do indicate that you know there were pockets of rebellion I think um it wasn't it wasn't every single teacher but that they couldn't say something some some certainly did try yeah um we've had lots of messages come through saying thank you for the talk very informative congratulations including from Jim and Uli who are against the word and just to remind you that you can purchase the book um from our sponsors gave the words through the links on the screen there um before we um before we wrap up we've got one more question which I think might be an interesting way of of of wrapping up which is from Alan what do you think members of groups with other protected characteristics have to learn from the story of section 28 of anything that's a really good question yes um I think I think I'm not not to lose hope not to lose sight of the end goal not maybe to develop fractures amongst yourselves or with other people who maybe have the same goal as you but want to go about it in a different way um and I think that was something which when I talked to some of the activists now and they talked about at the time how they were they were kind of more disagreeable with each other and this is sometimes a bit disapproving of the ways that other people went about it and now they say in hindsight they wish they hadn't that you know it actually it was a good thing that there were all these different ways um of responding to section 28 and you know that just allows more people to get involved in it and okay maybe you don't disagree with them the means and the method but you know the kind of the end goal is broadly the same you know equality and saving children from from bullying and things like that and who doesn't want that so you know I think I think kind of maybe maybe a kind of acceptance of fractures rather than trying to kind of fix them or kind of you know kind of say no my way of doing it's the right way um you know kind of maybe allowing there to be lots of different ways going on as well and I think it's maybe one thing to learn from it and and also not to give up I think that's you know that's so important um and even even if it feels like it's a failure because you know the protest didn't stop section 28 from happening but the protest didn't you know the protest called more people to get involved and you know and it's a long term thing so I think often you have to kind of do be prepared to be in it for the long game as these people were not and not to kind of think well okay it hasn't happened we're just going to give up you know you've got to be in it maybe for yours and also not to just do it on social media I think all of this happened without social media without internet um you know people use their fax machines things like that to get to get marches organised and their philo faxes um and you know and considering you know there wasn't all of that you know ease of the internet you know it was amazing how how much organisational work went into things and I think you know today it is very easy to kind of like something on Twitter and feel like you've done your bit and no and it's not enough I think often I think you have to show up in person campaign you know write letters lobby do more than just you know kind of a social media campaign I think definitely I imagine that's something we can learn from those people because they did it old school and they won yeah I mean and like you mentioned in your talk there's sort of the serendipity of meeting people forming alliances forming relationships etc we're going to wrap up I want to finish with just a quick message that's come through from Steve and Steve says not really a question but as an out-secondary school teacher who runs on LGBTQ plus society at school where the students are really fascinated by section 28 I wanted to say thank you for writing this book there's someone whose entire school life was during the section 28 years it is a fantastic informative and powerful read and I'd really like to second that as well even halfway through you you know it resonates so much with me as a person who was was you know in education during during this legislation so thank you very much for writing it Paul and thank you for for joining us this evening and thank you to all of you for for joining us as well and please keep an eye on our what's on pages on the British Library website for what's going on and there are other events happening during LGBTQ plus history month which you might be interested in and you can also watch past events on the British Library player and you can find link to that on our website as well thank you very much for joining us this evening and take care