As we end LGBT+ History Month in the UK, I have been thinking the last couple weeks about Section 28, the law that banned local government, including school districts, from the “promotion of homosexuality” in England and Wales between 1988 and 2003 (Scotland repealed it slightly earlier, in 2000).
There’s a discourse currently popular among British queer people my age that goes something along the lines of “Section 28 is why we don’t know our history.” This claim was featured in the episode of the Log Books podcast on Section 28, it has informed responses to It’s A Sin, and it is cited as a reason why we need the now-thoroughly-institutionalized LGBT+ History Month. While it’s true that Section 28 did have plenty of real-world effects—two that come most readily to mind are how it forced gay teachers to stay in the closet, and how it limited the ability for local health authorities to engage in safer-sex education during the AIDS crisis—the implications that LGBT history should necessarily be taught in school, that it would have been were it not for Section 28, and that all it would take to “know our history” would be to have some kind of school assembly about queers, all seem to me to be absurd.
Queer history is messy, complicated, contested, political; it resists “knowing” as a simple set of facts. Of course, it can be explored, engaged with, studied, but there is a part of me that wants this to happen in queer-led non-institutional spaces, not in state education (or at least, in queer-led non-institutional spaces as well). Indeed, it has been happening in queer-led non-institutional spaces for literal centuries: to give a clause of the Local Government Act that was in existence for fifteen years this huge weight to explain knowledge of and engagement with the queer past seems to be a huge misunderstanding of how queer identity, community, and political consciousness work! (It also, obviously, cannot explain the extent of knowledge of queer histories in people who went to school before 1988 and after 2003.) And there is also just a part of me that, having grown up in conservative homophobic southern California in the 1990s and 2000s, rolls my eyes at the idea that something as comparatively mild-mannered as Section 28 bears primary responsibility for homophobia.
The idea that “Section 28 is why we don’t know our history,” and that this legacy is being corrected through artistic representations of the past like It’s A Sin and through initiatives like LGBT+ History Month, also posits Section 28 as firmly over. Yes, of course, the law has been repealed, but we cannot absolve ourselves of the responsibility to attend to its continued legacies and parallels in the present. Most especially, I’ve started to see the framing of the culture war over trans issues in the UK as a restaging of efforts to suppress the “promotion” of trans identities, histories, and politics, especially in educational settings. Numerous commentators have shown how today’s transphobia adopts exactly the same tropes as the homophobia of the late twentieth century: casting trans people as sexual predators, as out to “convert” your children; trans identities as a fad or a lifestyle choice; trans histories as made up. It’s essential to be aware of this so that we can combat it appropriately, pointing up the government’s newfound commitment to “free speech” as an Orwellian recasting of its real intention to suppress forms of academic inquiry that it finds distasteful.
Listening
Spotify happened to push into my feed a playlist of gay pop/dance music from June last year, and I have been listening to it on my regular late-afternoon walk to the neighboring village of Toot Baldon and back. (I may have caused alarm in a well-dressed middle-aged woman who saw me promenading down the middle of the single road in Toot Baldon lip-syncing to “Call Me Maybe” when I thought no one else was around.) I am learning a bit from it—I think I’m finally starting to get Nicki Minaj, who had previously been as inscrutable to me as Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which was on Radio 3 all last week and which I think I am also starting to get?—and it’s also rooting me in a specific place and time, very regional British gay bar in the early 2010s.
Reading
Relatedly, I procrastinated all week on reading two reviews of Jeremy Atherton Lin’s new book Gay Bar: Colm Tóibín in the Guardian; Sam Huneke in the Boston Review—too full, I suppose, of melancholy nostalgia to face them. Tóibín’s and Huneke’s responses contrast generationally and stylistically. In particular, I was struck that Huneke seems keen to determine whether gay bars are A Good Thing, and whether their decline is inevitable or a crisis to be averted. As I was reading, though, I found myself thinking about one of the best gay parties I ever went to, many years ago, not in a bar but in an institutional basement in Princeton. After these reviews I’m very eager to read Atherton Lin’s book, but I’d also be interested in an account of gay/queer spaces outside major world cities. I suspect we’ll still need and want them, even as the bar and club scene transmutates.
On this theme, I’ll just highlight that it’s never a bad time to revisit either Tyler Baldor’s research on the relationship between gay hookup apps and in-person nightlife; or that lovely lyrical piece, “In praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club,” that Justin Torres wrote after the Pulse shooting.
The vaccine news continues to be incredibly good. Angela Rasmussen explained in the NYT what it means for vaccines to prevent transmission, and how we can interpret the data about it.
I increasingly suspect that Substack and Medium authors really would benefit from the editorial oversight and strict word count limits they would get at a traditional publication (guilty as charged); I have had several long Substack essays sitting in my tabs for WEEKS and I finally went through them:
I enjoyed Gabriel Rosenberg’s account of the alliance between an early-20th-century US “Rich Fool” and a eugenicist. The lessons for our present are not mentioned, but implicit.
Huw Lemmey wrote about representations of homosexuality in Private Eye and in mainstream humour in 1960s Britain more broadly. I hope he makes a journal article out of this; there’s some rich material (especially some really astute observations about upper-middle-class homophobia: mockery, not disgust) that relates closely to my intellectual-history-of-homosexuality project.
A rich account of an exhibition of photographs at a local museum in Hackney, with much to say about the history of Black communities in London and about parallels between the 1980s and now.
I appreciated Claire Potter’s appreciation of Carol Smith-Rosenberg’s classic essay “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” and of how she found herself in it. Though part of the story is surely also how the article was later criticized for telling too asexual a story about female homoeroticism. As the TikTok teens using the phrase “they were just good friends” to mock their history instructors tell us, this remains a fraught topic of debate. (I am aware that, ever one to take up a bourgeois establishment position, I am absolutely the classic history lecturer urging caution about projecting present-day sexual identities onto the past.)
Semi-relatedly, I leapt at and savored Terry Castle on Patricia Highsmith. Here’s a taste:
There was the sexy, suicidal drinking, of course. Highsmith’s alcoholism blighted her life and eventually transformed her – not entirely figuratively – into a Dorian Gray-style lesbian fright-bag. Heartbreakingly attractive in her youth (see the exquisite nude portraits made by her gay photographer friend Rolf Tietgens in the early 1940s), she looked like a sullen gargoyle by the time she died: rubbery, bloodshot, wrinkled to the point of cave-in, a calamitous experiment in DIY self-pickling. Compared with Highsmith in her seventies, her fellow drunk-dyke genius Elizabeth Bishop looked like a fresh-blooming flower in her later years – a regular Goop-enhanced Gwyneth.
Oddly (or perhaps not), the perfect companion piece to Castle is Susan Pedersen in the same LRB issue, trashing a biography of Sylvia Pankhurst. Hilariously, both Castle and Susan reserve their greatest ire for the copy-editing operation at Bloomsbury.
Was charmed by this piece (via my father) on nostalgia for the VHS tape.
Wise words from UK undergrads on the government’s stupid, misguided, culture-war-stoking “free speech” crusade.
Lorna Finlayson’s account of dropping out of mainstream schooling reminded me of how I was very seriously tempted to do the same as a teenager, of my rage at the constant set of indignities visited upon me at school at the expense of petty tyrants bent on exercising power.
The woman who created the “Your Fave Is Problematic” Tumblr speaks.
Cottagecore Corner
An unprecedented display of having my shit together in order to make food staples (and also gnocchi and Thai noodles)
Hi Emily! This is super interesting and, as it's somewhat in my wheelhouse I thought I would comment on some of the ideas you share here.
Firstly, I agree that the impact of Section 28 was (and is) primarily pastoral rather than curricular per se - and as with everything in this country it's relatively mild-mannered veneer acted and acts as a part of the lasting impact it has primarily on queer students and teachers' experiences of school rather than what they learn therein. (Though this does bleed through into curricular questions, as the nervousness with which a lot of the teachers I speak to about including queer history attests.)
As for your points on the teaching of queer history in schools, there's a couple of things that struck me while reading your commentary, the first is the idea that queer history is especially difficult and complicated to navigate within schools. This is something I've heard a lot from people outside and within the teaching profession and I've recently felt the need to push back against it a bit. The fact is, we engage with very complicated historical work even in the most 'established' and 'traditional' aspects of the curriculum - to give an example, we routinely expect to teach the reformation to Year 8. This involves communicating to twelve/thirteen year olds not just a whole lot of unfamiliar religious language but also a mindset and way of looking at the world that may be entirely alien to them. That's before we even get into the disciplinary questions of how historians use evidence to construct their accounts, how this knowledge relates to their broader picture of the past and the engagement with both popular and academic interpretations which we routinely get into with our students (both because it's good practice and because the National Curriculum requires it). Bearing this in mind, while approaching queer history may require specific approaches, and more crucially may have fewer teachers that are familiar with them, I don't think it is inherently more difficult to manage than any other historical topic in the classroom - it's just that structural barriers (including our old friend Section 28) have left us less well-equipped to do so.
The second thing I found really interesting was your idea about the importance of queer-led community spaces in teaching queer history. I tend to agree that the ideal would be for queer history to be present within a school and a community context, but I was just wondering about some of the pitfalls of the latter? I guess this mainly struck a chord because I've just been re-reading Trouillot's 'Silencing the Past' and I got really caught up on the idea of 'silences of resistance' that he put forward. I do sometimes wonder if, for all the strengths of community history, it can also sometimes be a site of myth-making (the idea that 'Section 28 is the reason we don't know our history' would be a good example of this) and while institutions like schools, museums and universities are guilty of this too, it is sometimes easier to hold them accountable for it? As you will guess, I haven't fully developed my ideas on this, but I think it's interesting to think about.
Anyway, apologies for writing such a lengthy comment! I very much enjoyed reading it, as ever, and I hope you are enjoying the unseasonal warmth in spite of the lurking unease about climate change that it provokes.