{"id":4574,"date":"2018-05-24T21:11:04","date_gmt":"2018-05-24T20:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/?p=4574"},"modified":"2018-05-24T21:11:04","modified_gmt":"2018-05-24T20:11:04","slug":"remembering-section-28","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/remembering-section-28\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Section 28"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/h3>\n

<\/h3>\n

Our CEO Monty Moncrieff reflects in the 30th<\/sup> anniversary of Section 28 from a personal perspective<\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"It\u2019s 30 years ago today since the UK Government introduced the pernicious Section 28 of the Local Government Act. It prohibited local authorities from \u2018promoting\u2019 homosexuality. I was 17 and, well, not so much confused about whether I was gay, but more terrified because I knew deep down that I was.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s remarkable really that \u2013 on a personal level \u2013 Section 28 left me relatively unscathed. It certainly filled the news, and with it my impressionable mind, with the certainty that being gay was wrong, immoral, undesirable \u2013 and with HIV and AIDS padding out those headlines at the same time, as a man the message I took was that being gay was essentially going to kill me. This added to my fear and kept me from seeking out gay sex for another 4 years and from telling anyone for another 5.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Looking back, it may have been this very fear that perversely protected me because I just couldn\u2019t engage in it too closely. I even eschewed the opportunity to come out in solidarity with a schoolfriend for whom the atmosphere of the day had seen him outed because I was paralysed with the terror of it all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019d never had a role model: had I been straight I\u2019d have known exactly what was expected of me \u2013 I\u2019d had it reinforced since a very young age, every one of my parents\u2019 friends were \u2018normal\u2019 man-woman couples, and most were bringing up children. At best I might grow up to be a camp shop assistant a la Mr Humphries, or at worst one of the sad, lonely middle-aged men whose sex lives were restricted to furtive encounters with rent boys I\u2019d seen on the first TV documentary I remember as a teen. How did the meaning of the word gay jump from being happy to this?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"30 years on I\u2019m one of the lucky ones. I\u2019m robust in my identity, and I can now handle the homophobia that\u2019s still thrown at me, whether it\u2019s the overt name calling on the street or the ongoing systemic omission of people like me in policy, public services and social conscience. And things are immeasurably better, I don\u2019t want to lose sight of that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My inability to engage with being gay too closely in my late teens and early 20s was my unlikely buffer. But I see through my work everyday that there\u2019s still generations of us not that lucky, they\u2019re dealing today as adults with the impacts \u2013 substance use, anxiety, depression, and other poor mental health \u2013 of years of being told who they are was wrong, immoral, undesirable - by family members, by the media everyday in the papers, the news and the stories they saw in film and TV. And then reinforced by the Government passing a law<\/strong> <\/em>that left us in no doubt how unwelcome \u2013 even how hated \u2013 we were. It\u2019s no coincidence that identity, and people\u2019s sense of personal (dis)comfort about who they are as lesbian, gay, bi or trans people, is still at the heart of almost every interaction we have.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ultimately, I feel Section 28 was for many people the last straw, the step too far. It certainly spurned some of the most structured campaigning for LGBT rights through the creation of organisations like Stonewall, but with the long fight to repeal \u2013 and then atone \u2013 for it, much of the damage was already done. As we reflect on the prevailing attitudes of the day it\u2019s saddening to see exactly the same arguments that were used to justify such hatred of gay people being made, sometimes still in the same publications, about trans people today.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The repetition of misinformation and scaremongering about the Gender Recognition Act is from the same school that would have had us believe gay men were paedophiles. They claim that being trans is being \u2018promoted\u2019 (that word again) by a \u2018lobby\u2019 that\u2019s dangerous to children. (There\u2019s an irony in how, for some, young trans men are supposedly being \u201cencouraged\u201d to transition rather than be lesbians.) Even where there may be legitimate discussion to be had about the interface of trans rights and women\u2019s rights, trying to do this in language that directly echoes that of Section 28 is going to turn off anybody who now sees just how horrific the whole thing was.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019m deeply saddened that we have this anniversary to mark; it\u2019s an enormous blemish of the UK\u2019s mostly progressive march from the 1967 Act that began the long journey to gay equality. But I\u2019m happy to mark it knowing it\u2019s another nail in the coffin for the attitudes that allowed it to happen. We\u2019ve plenty still to do, not least the fight for LGBT-inclusive sex and relationships education, that gives children like I was, children growing up lesbian, gay, bi or trans, those vital early role models. They don\u2019t even need to know they\u2019re LGBT yet; but they do need to know there\u2019s nothing wrong with it if they are.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Monty x<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our CEO Monty Moncrieff reflects in the 30th anniversary of Section 28 from a personal perspective   It\u2019s 30 years ago today since the UK Government introduced the pernicious Section 28 of the Local Government Act. It prohibited local authorities … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":4576,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4574"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4574"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4581,"href":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4574\/revisions\/4581"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londonfriend.org.uk\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}