What’s Your Story: The rise and demise of Section 28

Guest Post by Dave Darwent, Associate Lecturer in Sheffield Institute of Education’s Post 16 & F.E. PGCE team

I knew I was gay long before I knew the vocabulary to identify or define myself. Looking back as an adult, I knew I was gay aged 5 and I still have vivid memories of things I said and how I felt about my [male] friends.

I was 11 when Maggie Thatcher was elected for the first time. By that stage I was being bullied a great deal at school, not least by a teacher who had clearly latched on to my sexuality before I understood how to describe it, and was encouraging all my peers to bully me for being gay.

By 1985, when I entered the upper-VI^th form at school, I was not only extremely well aware of the appropriate vocabulary to identify and describe my sexuality, but I also made the first few tentative attempts to come out (my first attempt was on the first day of term in September 1985, when I told my mum at breakfast and was smartly rebuffed with “don’t be ridiculous, you’re far too young to know that!”, so I promptly set off to school, walked in to the Physics lab which was to be my tutorial room for the coming year, and told Mr. Rickles, my physics teacher and form tutor (and on whom I also had a huge crush). His response was everything a teenager just coming out could ever have wished for, starting with unfaltering reassurance that it was perfectly normal and not in the least anything to worry about and quickly following by asking if I had any worries and was I being bullied by anyone.

I was very lucky in that experience.

This was, of course, the height of the “AIDS is a gay plague” hysteria of the 1980’s, a fact which was far from lost on me at the time and which I strongly suspect had a little to do with mum’s response, though a far greater stimulus was the fact that my older sister had just introduced us to her friend “little Dave” who was gay and of whom my mother disapproved most strongly as he had an ear-ring and went to gay night clubs. Before I paint my mother as some sort of luddite I should add that now, 30 years later, “little Dave” and his husband George are two of mum’s best friends and she accepts – but does not like – that ear-rings do not make their wearers thugs.

In 1986 I left school and went to take up my first job in Beatties Model and Toy shop. Even at that stage I recognised quite clearly that I had been extremely fortunate in having Ian Rickles to turn to a year earlier, and, more to the point, I had been given the confidence by his response to stand up to the unpleasantness during the upper-VI^th form year. Indeed, a very tiny number of my peers had tried to encourage me to come out, but I remained, mainly, glued into the closet until I had left school.

In the VI^th form I had studied British Government and Politics and I recall watching Maggie address the 1987 Conservative Party Conference on the topic of education and homosexuality: “…it’s the plight of individual boys and girls that worries me most. Too often, our children don’t get the education they need—the education they deserve … that opportunity is all too often snatched from them by hard left education authorities and extremist teachers. … children who need to be able to count and multiply are learning anti-racist mathematics—whatever that may be. … Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. …”

See her here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VRRWuryb4k

Shortly after that speech, Jill Knight, well known for her anti-gay views, presented Section 28 to the Commons and it passed easily into law. Section 28, for those who don’t know, stated that Local Authorities “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”.

I pondered the fate of teenagers in the same situation that I had been in, attempting to find support, guidance and reassurance from their teachers in the new Section 28 era.

I spent eight years working at Beatties. That job did a huge amount of good for me. For the first time in my life I was surrounded by people who looked out for each other. People from diverse backgrounds – indeed, having gone to school in Dronfield, where the number of BME families could be counted on the fingers of one hand, working with an Afro-Caribbean man at Beatties was a refreshing and wonderful experience, since I had never actually met any non-White-British people before then – and people who became my substitute family. People who did not bully me or beat me up for being me. People who when I (falteringly at first) came out as Gay at worst shrugged their shoulders and said “it doesn’t bother me” and at best spoke positively and at length about other gay people they knew. I also received positive praise and encouragement for the first time in my life. I developed into a more confident person with some self-belief. And I quickly became openly out to everyone I knew and met.

Thanks to that experience I took up a place at SHU on the 3BSc (Hons) Mathematics with Education and QTS programme in September 1994 (I would never have had the confidence to go to University before then). On my first day we had to do some ice-breakers and one, facilitated by Peter Smith of the M.E.C., was to introduce the person next to you to the rest of the group. I had been sitting next to a guy called Paul and we’d talked about all kinds of things in our backgrounds, so I introduced Paul, who had been a publican, etc., etc., and he then introduced me by saying “this is Dave and I can’t remember much about what he’s told me except that he’s gay and the first person he came out to was his Physics teacher”. Eight years earlier I wouldn’t have told Paul I was gay, never mind sat there whilst he told the rest of the group. And again I found myself wondering about the experiences of young people trying to come out in schools in the Section 28 world we were living in.

Interestingly one of my old teachers, with whom I had maintained contact, told me at around this time that he was gay. I would never have imagined him, of all my teachers, to be gay and I regret to say that he was far from a positive or inspirational role model. His coming out to me was purely driven (as far as I can tell) by his need to tell me that, as a prospective teacher, it was really important that I went back in the closet. “Teaching”, he said, “is no job for a gay man. You will be sacked if anyone finds out.”

Thankfully the new found confidence I had from working in the shop left me defiant in the extreme.

Fast forward three years to 1997 and my second teaching practice was at Newfield School in Sheffield, where a mother had written to the school to complain that her gay son was not receiving appropriate PSHE and sex education and asking what was the school going to do about it. The school’s headmaster was in fact very brave and they organised a whole INSET day to train the staff how to support LGB (as we then used to say) pupils without falling foul of Section 28. It was my first real introduction to the minefield that lies between the lines behind which homophobia stands on one side and support for LGB pupils stands on the other.

Fast forward another three years to the turn of the millennium and I had been in a full time teaching post in a school which I shall not name, even though it has now been closed down, for three years. Daily I was battling against what later became known as “casual homophobia”, but what really worried me was that many staff at the school were openly homophobic themselves. We were now in the New Labour era of the first Blair government, and in Scotland the new Scottish Parliament had just repealed Section 28 for Scottish local authorities. There was hot debate in Westminster and powerful lobbying to repeal Section 28 for the whole of the UK was taking place. This was also the era of the lowering of the Age of Consent for gay male relationships. I had lobbied David Blunkett before each of the debates and votes and had told him about my experiences in Primary school, with the teacher who had encouraged the bullying of me by my peers. I asked David Blunkett directly what he would do if one of his two boys (whom I had often sold model railways to in Beatties, with their father writing the cheques each time) came out as Gay and if they were bullied for it. To his credit David Blunkett wrote back to saying that mine was one of the few letters which had genuinely caused him to rethink his position on equality.

Then I read an article in The Pink Paper. In the run up to the vote on the repeal of Section 28 the Pink Paper wanted teachers to write about their experiences of section 28: “What does Section 28 mean to you?” was the brief. So I wrote. I never thought that my little piece would be noticed and I fully expected the paper to be inundated with submissions. Hard as it may be to understand, at this time The Pink Paper was not available on-line, indeed The Internet was still in it’s infancy, so in order to find out whether my piece had been used or quoted I went, with a straight colleague from the same school, to The Cossack on Howard Street to pick up a copy.

I can vividly recall his reaction as we walked up to the bar, where a stack of papers stood: “Sh*t Dave! What have you done?!”. I had not seen the headlines as quickly as he had, but looked, in panic, to see what he had seen … and then I saw the headline. You can read the article here. It turned out that no one else had written anything at all, probably, I should think, because they were frightened of doing so.

I’m pleased to say that in fact there was no negative reaction to the article.

Section 28 was eventually, as we know, repealed in 2003. Shortly after that I moved to work in the Post 16 sector and found myself being a positive role model for a significant number of LGBT+ young people. Towards the end of the years I worked in Post 16 education I found myself reflecting quite often on how much things have changed in my lifetime, since I realised I was gay, since I started to come out, since I started teaching and since Section 28 was repealed. There are many positives of course, but it’s very thought-provoking to think that a good number of the young people I have been a role model for in recent times actually don’t know what Section 28 is (was) and look quite astonished when anyone tells them that only a few years ago schools and colleges would have been severely restricted in what they could do to support them.

Now that I work in Teacher Education, the irony is not lost on me that we have to train our new teachers to work within the Single Equalities Act, including challenging homophobia and supporting not just gay learners but the whole range of LGBTQQIAAP learners and colleagues.

Dave Darwent is a member of SIGNAL (Sheffield Hallam’s LGBT+ Staff Network)