The Arts Under Section 28

I think gay people were still pretty central to pop culture, and I think that whilst there was, for a time, a nervousness amongst creative people to do things with gay themes, I think that had changed by 1993, at the latest, because I do remember going to see plays where there was either a gay theme or a kind of subtheme, you know? Perhaps it wasn’t the main story, but it was a secondary story in a play.

And I don’t think, you know, art, if we talk about art in the sense of art being artefacts created by artists, I don’t think art was really that affected in this country. I think TV definitely was. In fact after, in the mid-eighties Channel 4 had broadcast a series of late night films and shows aimed at LGBT people, and you knew that it was on because it was really late in the evening, and there would be a little red, no, I think there might’ve been a little red triangle, or pink triangle, in the corner of the screen, well some kind of warning symbol anyway, in case you turned over to it by accident and you were offended by it. And so I think TV was definitely affected. I can remember, because there was some controversy about a one-off TV show. And you did feel, with all the press coverage of loony left councils, and of them supposedly putting books in libraries aimed at small children, teaching them normality of, you know, being raised by two dads or two mums, that you weren’t liked by society.

But you had to learn to ignore that. You know, you had to get on dancing to Soul 2 Soul and Beverley Knight and whatever you could find, and have a good time. Because I was never somebody who would kind of fret about the fact that Baroness Young had a real problem with gay people. You know, she was an old person. And I did literally think to myself, that generation is dying out, you know? And I know that seems horrible, but I did think that.

I was thinking about something that happened when I was quite young, and this was in my second boarding school, and in art we had to draw, no it was paint a picture of someone we loved and admired. I can’t remember if it was 1984 or 1985, I was like eight or nine, and I chose Boy George, because I love, I just remember loving Culture Club as a child. My sister’s older than me, she’s four years older, so I kind of have always had access to pop culture because of her, and I’ve always kind of, I mean I loved Morten Harket from a-ha at a young age, Madonna.

So yeah, Boy George, sorry. So I painted a picture of Boy George and it was literally, it’s been destroyed a long time ago, but it was just a big colourful face with makeup and big hair, and my art teacher told me to come to the staffroom and he pinned my picture up. And I remember people laughing, like teachers laughing at it, and it felt, I felt shamed. I just remember this feeling of feeling shamed, and I remember walking past the staffroom a lot and the door open and seeing this picture for a couple of weeks.

It wasn’t really until, I’m going to say the early 1990s, so probably about ’94, ‘5, yeah, about ’94, that I really noticed Section 28.

So I went to, my partner at the time had sort of teenage  children, thirteen or so, and they would go to school trips, you know, to places. And we lived just north of London, so it was quite regular for them to go to London. You could go to London on the train in like fifteen minutes, you know, from where we lived. So they used to go on sort of day trips and stuff, and occasionally parents had to chaperone, you know, we’d volunteer.

And one of these trips was to The Tate in London. So Paul, my partner at the time, so Paul’s daughter was very artistic and wanted to be a painter, and so we were going to The Tate, and we two went together. So what was interesting was there was no problem with that. No one at school said ‘you can’t come’, you know? ‘You’re sort of their dad and his partner’, there was no moment where anyone said ‘mmm, what do we think about this? Are you allowed to go?’ You know, ‘are you safe to be around children?’ and all that sort of stuff, that was some of the sort of homophobic arguments about LGBT people that had been said in the past.

So we went to London, and we went to The Tate, and they had a guided tour, because it was from the sort of art department I guess, from school, and it was only a small group. And they were going through different pictures and talking about them, and explaining the context of the art and the life of the artist and all that sort of thing. And we got to a painting by David Hockney, which is quite a famous painting, and it’s, I think, I’ve forgotten the name of it, but there’s, it’s a painting of a guy who’s looking out of a window and his wife who’s sat on the chair with a cat looking straight at the artist.

And she just sort of showed it and said ‘this is a painting by David Hockney, and it shows a man looking out of the window and a woman sat in a chair’, and then we moved on. And I said to her, as we were walking, I said ‘oh, aren’t you going to explain about the painting?’ And she said ‘no, I’m not allowed to’. So I said ‘okay well, you’ve you know, explained everything else, you know, you’ve done all the other stuff, but you can’t explain about that?’

And she went, she sort of held back with me and she said ‘no, it’s because in the painting David Hockney was having an affair with the guy and the wife has just found out. And so she’s staring at him because she knows, and, you know, the man’s embarrassed and looking out the window’. And I was like ‘why can’t you say that?’ And she went ‘because of Section 28. I’m not allowed to explain it to the children’. And I was like ‘that’s crazy. It’s the truth about the painting’.

And she went ‘I know, but we’re just not allowed to’. So that kind of really sort of woke me up a bit to the reality of Section 28, and by that time, you know, ’93, ’94, I’d been going to Pride marches and seeing the stuff about Section 28. And it really, you know, it really sort of started that what Section 28 truly was for, which wasn’t just about sex education at school or anything like that. It was an attempt to sort of eradicate homosexuality generally.