Schooling under Section 28

What I do know is that, under Section 28 as a queer – as a gay assumed person, as a queer child, it was quite horrible, horrifying. I was, you know, bullied, as I say, almost constantly. One of the things that I really notice looking back is that the teachers definitely knew, but a lot of them did nothing, for a mixture of, you know, how can they say, don’t bully the queer kids, when they’re not allowed to say what that is. How can they stop that violence?

And then there’s also other teachers who were like, you know, approved of it, and were in their heads sort of thinking, oh, that’ll make a man of me. That failed, obviously. But there were also definitely teachers who were like, you know, beat the faggy, beat the gay kids, and obviously couldn’t say it, but also didn’t do anything to stop that. And that was pretty, you know – that was just, that was how it was for me. Yeah. The lack of, you know, being able to intervene, I think was quite deliberate in that way, yeah.

We also had this lesson called something like personal, social, and moral education, where we’d talk about all sorts of kind of moral and ethical stuff that you – just trying to make us more and more kind of moral and thoughtful human beings, I suppose. But I do remember at one point they had, in one lesson, they had a list of statements that we could, that were kind of prompts for discussion, really. And one of the prompts was something like: is it okay for people of the same sex to sleep together? And the teacher said: oh I don’t think we want to talk about that! Like it was just something completely unmentionable. But to their credit, a couple of my classmates piped up, which – and looking back, was just so brave of them – and they weren’t having it. They said no, we do want to talk about this, and if it’s a way of showing someone you love them, then, that’s a good thing. And I can remember being completely taken aback.

And then there were the teachers that didn’t give a shit, that were going to talk about it anyway. And were very clear that – there was a drama teacher who also took some of these personal, social and moral education lessons, and I think Section 28 came up specifically in one of those lessons, and he was just very clear and blunt and he clearly didn’t care, and he said this is the government’s way of stigmatising gay people. He was completely upfront. And I’m grateful to him for that, because it was the only positive message I heard from a teacher. The only one.  

Like there were some things after I came out as gay where it was just like… So I came out, and I was dating this girl, and then like we had some other friends who were gay as well and we went out with them sometimes. And then like one of them ended up in hospital because like they got herpes. And I realised that they ended up in hospital because we never got any sex education at school to keep us safe. And I was like, oh shit, that’s really, really bad. And then I went oh, well, that means that like all my friends, who are male and gay, didn’t get any information that stops them from dying of HIV/AIDS either. Because if we didn’t get told about herpes, they didn’t get told about that. And I thought, oh, that’s a lot worse, isn’t it.

And I wasn’t really paying attention to sex education when I was actually doing it, cause I couldn’t see how it applied to me, because it seemed to apply to people who were cis. And I just thought it was pointless me being there, because I was just like, what the fuck has this got to do with me? Like, why am I even here? Like – and then they were just talking about, like, straight people having sex. And it was just like, well, I’m not doing that.

So my sex education started in Year 6. Mr Lord, the science teacher, walked in, and we all knew the lesson we were going to have because we all had the letter home like to say ‘we’re going to be talking about sex’. And I remember that letter came home and my parents were like mortified, my mum was bright red, and my dad tried to like say something funny, but just didn’t hit right.

And so I was like, okay well I know I’m going to be talking about it. And Mr Lord came in and went [shouting] ‘right, this is a penis. It is not a willy or a dick or a cock, it is a penis’. And like that the whole room was, I think he was trying to set like a strict tone and all, I remember all the boys just falling off their stools laughing. All the girls are just like ‘what? My god. Like there’s a penis, like on the whiteboard. Like what?’ Or the overhead projector as it would’ve been then. And so that was like, that was the start of it, and then there was like a really old-school woman on her back, a lot of pubic hair, pushing out a baby, like it was filmed in sort of the eighties, grainy footage, and it was like screaming and terrible. So that was Year 6. And then I, as part of that, like I was fascinated with everyone’s reactions. So the mixture of a class of say thirty children, the reactions from people like falling off their chairs laughing, people too embarrassed to look, people disgusted, people nervous.

Like that, the reactions from people, fascinated me as a young person, to be like ‘why is everyone so different? Why are we all kind of laughing or embarrassed?’ This is science essentially, but it’s caused a reaction in all of us, which is different to say learning about photosynthesis. And so I went to the library – because I loved the library – and got a load of books, without my parents knowing, and sat in my bedroom like getting all the sort of relevant pages and taking them into school and going through them with my friends, and like doing sort of like the whole sex education lessons on the side, just to understand more.

I remember, we’d been shown like the reproductive organs inside, so there was, no one had seen a penis, no one had seen a vulva, let alone it be called a vulva. It was always like a vagina, ‘a woman has a vagina’, which is just the like entrance. Actually there was never a conversation about a vulva, which is what it is like in its entirety, the female reproductive like part of the body is the vulva. But all we learn about is the vagina, which is like one hole where babies are made of, and that’s all women are for, is for making babies.

And then sort of that progressed then to Year 9. So aged thirteen, fourteen, and you had your sort of STI, condom lesson. And we didn’t even have like proper condom demonstrations. We didn’t even have a cucumber or a banana. We literally had a test-tube, which is too skinny for a condom, so like it just didn’t fit, it was like sort of this baggy thing on. And it just didn’t make any sense. We sort of had a brief period lesson and were like given like a magazine with a period pad and a tampon in. All the boys laughed at it, and it was just, it was so, so uncomfortable, all of, the whole process. Like we were shown pictures in a textbook of a vulva with like blue, like gross discharge. And it’s what, I remember people used to say ‘oh that’s like a blue waffle’, and it’s all these different nicknames for it back in the day. But that’s what an STI was.

And so there was this massive stigma. Like you, basically you’re going to get, sex, either that makes a baby or it’s going to give you an STI, and your vulva’s going to go blue or your penis is going to fall off, and everything’s going to be itchy and gross. And so sex was like a really risky business and that kind of thing. And I get what they were doing I think. Back then education, in all kinds of thing, was like you tell them the dangers to stop them from doing it.

So the GCSE project, it was the first year of GCSEs and for English you had to hold a talk, or give a talk – I can’t remember how long it had to be, it wasn’t that, obviously not that long, probably about five minutes – and then you had to be able to discuss your point of view. So you were supposed to be making an argument for or against something. It wasn’t just saying ‘oh, you know, I had milk for breakfast’ or whatever.

It was actually, it was a bit like a debating society. You had to be able to make your point, so it was kind of a rhetorical exercise. But because our school was quite political a lot of the girls did topics that were quite political and quite current at the time. So I remember another girl did about vegetarianism and anti-fox hunting and so on, because it wasn’t banned yet then. So this is 1988 we’re talking about. And, as I say, myself and at least one other girl did about Clause 28, saying it was wrong and why we thought it was wrong.

Yeah, I felt it was really personal to me. So I, at the time I was really, I can’t really remember what words we used, I think I used to think of myself as gay, but I knew at any rate that it applied to me quite sort of explicitly. But I didn’t want to say that in the meeting, so it was really funny. So the topic itself was discussed quite widely in the school, but nobody actually would come out and say they were gay, because you just couldn’t at that time. So it was kind of a way of coming out if you like, but kind of indirectly.

And I certainly didn’t assume that the other girl giving, who also did her talk on that in my group, I didn’t assume she was gay. I just thought, oh that’s interesting, she’s interested in it as well. So that was really funny. Like now I’d be quite, think about it quite differently probably. But at the time I just thought, oh that’s good that, you know, other people are getting involved and saying they think it’s wrong and so on.

Yeah, it was good. I did well in the exam, the discussion was quite lively. I remember it was one of the livelier discussions. It wasn’t really a discussion as in people saying ‘oh we think Clause 28 is really good’. It was more a discussion in the sense of everybody agreeing that it was stopping free speech, and that was the kind of approach that people were taking to it. So it was about free speech, rather than saying people have a right to be gay. It was about saying people have the right to say what they want and to teach what they want basically. So thinking about it it was quite interesting, because obviously a couple of our teachers were there because they had to mark the exam, and they also got quite involved, saying they thought it was wrong.

You know, there’s this thing about Section 28 and taking books out of libraries. The fact is the books were not in the libraries. Yes, you would get books by Christopher Isherwood, by Angus Wilson, perhaps John Layman, perhaps Vita Sackville-West, obviously Virginia Woolf, because by the sixties she was established as a writer whom you studied in the academy, so she could not be ignored despite her affair with Vita Sackville-West.

Yes, there would be poetry by W H Auden, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and others. But those were generally in anthologies, and it was only because they were studied. I can’t remember going into a library as a young person and finding the books that I found in the Lavendar Menace catalogue in that little town in Lincolnshire where I lived in the mid-eighties. So in that drama, that TV drama series that he did, Russel T Davies absolutely made a joke about the removal of books from libraries. But in places like Lincolnshire and Norfolk and Suffolk I don’t think they were there in the first place. I don’t think the young adults’ novels aimed at potentially same sex attracted young people, like The Milkman’s on His Way by David Rhys, or Who Lies Inside? by Martin somebody-or-other, I don’t think they were there in those parts of the country. So it wasn’t that they were going to be taken away. They were never given to children in the first place. Children were not taught about these things.

And the first positive thing, or non-negative thing, I heard in school was in 1981, and we were studying Wilfred Owen, because there was a standard text for the precursor to GCSEs, O-levels, it was an anthology of various poets, and Wilfred Owen was one of them. And the teacher said ‘actually several of the writers in this anthology’, and it was nine poets, and they were almost all male, were gay or bisexual, or homosexual or bisexual. I can’t remember exactly what she said.

And it was clear that Wilfred Owen was one of them because of the nature of the poems. And I think, because of the association with the Armed Forces and the sacrifice that he and millions of others made in the First World War, there was no way that he could not be taught, you know? I mean and so that was the only slightly positive reference during my entire school career, which was pre Section 28.