By 1988, Margaret Hilda Thatcher had been the leader of the Conservative Party for thirteen years and the British Prime Minister for eight of those years.
She seemed, in many ways, an invincible figure. By the mid eighties though, she had alienated a great many people, including the Queen, partly as a result of her feelings about the British Commonwealth and partly as she increasingly assumed regal poses, (such as taking the salute at the victory parade after the Falklands war) and starting using the royal ‘we’ when talking about herself, which was seen as quite strange by many. Her story was dramatised (although shoehorned) reasonably well, in the popular Netflix TV series ‘The Crown’ in 2020-2023. Watching it, it felt like Thatcher came and went ‘in a flash’ in some respects but for those living through her premiership and opposed to her policies, it felt anything but that. It seemed to drag on and on and there were countless marches I went on, after that day when Gary, Alison and I had been to the Tory Party Conference, back in 1980, where the phrase ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out,Out’ was repeated ad infinitum.
She seemed immune to all the criticism levelled at her (although retrospectively we know now that this was not quite the case in fact) but she was not called an ‘Iron Lady‘ for nothing. In her political lifetime she managed to dodge all the ‘political bullets’ fired at her. She even survived an assassination attempt by the IRA (Irish Republican Army) on the Grand Hotel in Brighton, at another Tory Party conference there in October 1984. We had, by 1988, resigned ourselves to the fact that she was not going to look at changing any laws or policies of the time, in regards to discrimination against lesbians & gay men, whether related to social attitudes, employment, legal issues or sexual matters.
However, what we hadn’t bargained for (and perhaps we should have seen it coming), is that the government would start to create new laws that actively encouraged discrimination against us. But with the advent of discussion, about what became known as Section 28, that is exactly what happened. Certainly, by 1987, there had been a shift in attitudes publically about acceptance or tolerance of homosexuality generally. Much of this had been fostered by papers like the Tory supporting ‘Sun’ which had sought to create negative publicity about gay men in particular with headlines at the time such as ‘I’d shoot my son if he had AIDS’.
In 1987 too, Thatcher went to the nation and managed to get a landslide majority, so securing a third term. Things started well enough for her but slowly, in the year or so afterwards, it is generally accepted that her mistakes multiplied and equally, her enemies in her party and indeed in the country, started to actively conspire against her.
At that year’s Conservative Party conference, she was attempting to gain support from those who wanted a stronger moral line to come from the government. Backbench Conservative MPs and peers had begun a backlash against what had been seen as the “promotion” of homosexuality, especially by councils such as the GLC (Greater London Council). On the whole this was not something she had wanted to become very involved in, up until this point in her premiership but she recognised the need to be seen to be addressing the issue and consequently bit the bullet “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay”. There was loud applause.
In December 1987, what became known as “Section 28” was added as an amendment to a new Local Government Act 1988 that was going through parliament. Books such as Jenny lives with Eric and Martin were highlighted as being examples of this promotion of unwholesome non family values.
Within the lesbian and gay community, there was outrage at the way in which this law was being pushed through and a number of organisations stepped up to the plate to protest against it. Despite these protests the amendment was nevertheless enacted into law on 24 May 1988, and 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”.
Of course I felt very strongly, as did many, many, others at the time, that this was completely the wrong direction to be heading in; indeed, it was exactly what had caused me so much angst, growing up as gay teenager in the early 70’s and having nothing of any sort that was available to help me understand what was ‘happening’ to me and that I wasn’t alone: that there were many others who had successfully built up their lives, whilst acknowledging and accepting their sexuality and forming positive loving relationships, as a part of that. But not just that, also accepting that just wanting to have a sexual relationship with a partner of the same sex was not ‘deviant behaviour’ to be ashamed of or hidden but was also a positive healthy thing. Along with the issue of HIV and AIDS, this felt like an immense step backwards, into the moral conservatism and opprobrium of 1950’s Britain. Suddenly the future stopped looking brighter and it seemed that we might be heading back towards the widescale oppression and bigotry of the sort that existed in the year that I was born, 1957.
In 2018, the Guardian interviewed a number of people who had been most actively involved in the various campaigns against Section 28 then, such as Michael Cashman and, in particular, talked to Lisa Power. At the time (of Section 28) she was very much involved with Lesbian and Gay Switchboard but she was also one of the co-editors of the relatively new ‘Pink Paper’, a weekly free newspaper.
She talked about how the Section 28 Campaign had been positive in that it ‘had brought the scene queens together with the political activists’ for perhaps the first time. But she went on to make a very salient point, I think:
‘I still find it interesting when people talk about section 28 as if we won, because they remember the abseiling and protests. Those didn’t make a blind bit of difference to the passage through parliament: we lost the battle on section 28′
…which, of course, is absolutely correct. Despite all the hard work put in by so many different people, it still went through parliament and passed into legislation.
Knowing Lisa from Switchboard, I knew she could be relied upon ‘to tell it like it is/was’ and she does not disappoint here. She went on:
‘But this did make people think much more strategically about how we should go about getting lesbian and gay rights to win the war. What we had at the time was a gay movement that was very good at fighting among itself and very good at debating political points – but with no history of making allies with the wider world and no effective lobbying mechanism.
After section 28 happened, some of us quietly went away and began working on what would become Stonewall… I think it’s the strongest example in the world of a successful LGBT lobbying group, changing a country’s mind about some of its citizens‘.
I’m not necessarily sure about the quietly bit but ‘Stonewall’ went on to became a hugely important and influential lobbying group, by using its contacts to work with people in many different areas but especially within external political and social groups at the highest level. With people who had the power to make things happen and change. And this is a difficult issue to wrestle with, to accept that sometimes it’s easier to create change from the inside out, rather than the outside in.
It gave me much pause for thought too, at around that time in 1988, frustrated as I was that we had endured long years of the repressive Thatcher government, put up with years of negative press coverage, especially in relation to the issue of HIV and AIDS, seen no great movement in our civil rights and development of the policies suggested in ‘Changing the World‘, that document coming from the GLC that Lisa had again been involved in developing some years before. I began to strongly feel that if I really wanted to influence policy I had to be ‘on the inside‘ looking out too. I had been involved in working in community action projects for so long that it seemed now a natural part of my very identity. Life was self help, community development and protest against perceived injustice. All my heroes, role models if you like, had been doing something like that all the time. How did I feel about changing that? What would those I had been working with think about me becoming involved in such change. Becoming a part of those on the inside?
And yet for some in the gay community in particular (less so the lesbian communities) I think this experience isolated them further from the idea of collaboration, and trying to develop work that was inclusive from ‘within the mainstream’. Others started to feel that progressing things through a more– rather than less -radical agenda was the way forward. This agenda was to develop further in the nineties, fuelled to some extent by the situation in the USA, where it became clear to some gay men that to stay silent would equal ‘death’.
Having come from this position in the last decade myself, I could well understand the anger, frustration and energy behind just such a position. And yet.. and yet .. was it the most useful way forward? I write this, in the third decade of the twentieth first century, when lesbians and gay men have never been more integrated into society as a whole in western Europe (though by no means everywhere of course). We have rights, equality and frequent ‘mixed’ venues. Many of my (lesbian and gay) friends live in small villages up and down the UK and elsewhere and are accepted as important and valued members of their local communities. The radical movements that sprang up in the late eighties and early nineties are for most purposes a thing of the past.
History has been written now about these organisations and how they interacted with the statutory sectors at the time; yet there is more to the story I think in retrospect than reading such history tells us. I think it’s at least worth looking at things from a different perspective. The next part of my own story does just this; after three decades I think I can now more objectively look back: understand the anger, pain and anguish, forget the hurt, the backbiting and demonising that went on.
But in 1988 all this was to come. I had made a mental, theoretical decision to throw my lot into change ‘from the inside’. Would I need to change how I thought, how I acted, how I responded to challenges? How much of the person I had become in the eighties could I bring to the future? Could I even do it ? At that time I wasn’t sure if I could or indeed, just as importantly, if I wanted too.
But for a while these were just thoughts that I pondered over in my diaries, to myself, late at night. There was plenty to keep me occupied anyway, with commissions to make various films and videos coming in for ‘Cleancut’ , and so for the time being I stored the idea away and got on with the business of making and directing films, going to gay venues, and living and loving as a gay man. Which really was something that was never boring..
Being Boring , originally recorded by the Pet Shop Boys
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