Johann Hari

Twenty years and an eternity ago, the final official piece of anti-gay prejudice was signed into British law. Its name was Section 28, and it ruled that local councils – including their schools, libraries and social services – could not “promote” homosexuality. Councils were forbidden from saying that we were “normal”, and from approving of our “pretended family relationships.” The consequences scarred and infected the lives of a generation of gay men and lesbians in this country – and even though its corpse has now been tossed onto the bonfire of history, the stench still hangs over Britain’s playgrounds today.

The strange story of Section 28 begins in the 1980s, when a young new wave of left-wing Labour councilors began to emerge in London. They were the first to ever come of age in a country where you could be openly gay and not be sent to prison. They looked out over the city – teeming with out gay people who flocked here from all over the world – and saw that there was still a spiked chain holding us back. A gay teenager was six times more likely to self-harm than his heterosexual twin brother. And worse still, a new sexually transmitted disease, AIDS, was beginning to rip through the gay community – but homosexuality wasn’t even mentioned in the sex education lessons at 82 percent of our schools.

That’s why a few councils decided it was immoral to stand inert while gay kids killed themselves and more and more young men contracted HIV out of ignorance. So they began to distribute bland, cosy literature explaining to children that gay people exist and they aren’t anything to be frightened of. A typical example was called ‘Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin’, which showed a four year old girl living with two daddies. She ate breakfast with them, she made cakes with them – wild stuff. And for older teenagers, there were leaflets explaining safe sex, and helplines where they could receive counseling.

A sudden tsunami of bile smashed into the councils responsible. They were savaged by the tabloid press as the “loony left” and “militant perverts.” The Sun newspaper announced that “benders” and “poofs” were trying to “recruit children” by “distributing filth.” The stories inverted reality, claiming that the people trying to prevent homophobic bullying and protect children from violence were “gay bullies” and “homosexual fascists” from whom children needed “urgent protection.” In a typical article, the Daily Mail’s Gerald Warner warned against “the paedophile aggression of loony-left London boroughs” who were pumping out “the propagandist machinations of a homosexual underclass.” He said that gay people’s “invert psychopathology seeks to subvert society in favour of their recently decriminalized subculture” and he concluded that if the uppity gays didn’t shut up, “the normal 95 percent of the nation” should begin to call for “the recriminalization of homosexual activity.”

The Conservative Party piled in behind them. Rhodes Boyson MP demanded action against the councils, saying: “It is wrong biblically, is homosexuality. It is unnatural. Aids is part of the fruits of the permissive society. The regular one-man, one-woman marriage would not put us at risk in this way. If we could wipe out homosexual practices, then Aids would die out.” Nicholas Fairbairn MP said in parliament that homosexuality was “a psychopathological perversion” based on “inserting your penis into another man’s arsehole.” At the height of the backlash, a London newspaper called Capital Gay had its offices burned down by anti-gay arsonists – and a Conservative backbencher said the arsonists were right. In parliament Elaine Kellett Bowman said of the attack: “There should be intolerance of evil!” A few months later, Margaret Thatcher made her a Dame.

So a few peers in the House of Lords decided to take a stand. In 1986, the independent peer Lord Halsbury introduced a Private Member’s Bill to bring these councils to heel. He said that “sick” homosexuals – who are “reservoirs” of disease – needed to be stopped. The proposal failed, as almost all Private Member’s Bills do, but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher thought it was such a good idea she picked it up and made her government push it through. In her 1987 conference she expressed her outrage that children “are being taught they have an inalienable right to be gay.” Instead, she said, they should be instilling “traditional moral values.” And so Section 28 was born – a hard, go-to-prison ban on “promoting” homosexuality.

What did this mean for ordinary gay kids across Britain? Adam Powell, 49, is a heterosexual English and PE teacher who taught in a comprehensive school in Ealing at the time. He explains how Section 28 made him unable to protect gay children. “You would hear kids calling each other ‘poofter’ or ‘queer’ all the time, but you felt your job was on the line if you challenged it,” he says. “There’s one kid I still think about because I feel so ashamed that I didn’t do more. He was a quite effeminate boy, and very clever. The other kids would pick on him. Obviously if they attacked him – which they did pretty often – I would intervene and punish them. But the name-calling, the isolation… I didn’t do anything about that. I wanted to intervene and say – if he is gay, so what? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, it’s a fact of life, get over it. I would challenge racist kids if they called somebody a ‘Paki’ or whatever, and it worked. They would stop. I could have stopped that homophobic abuse, and I didn’t.”

After attacking one of his bullies with a pen-knife and then trying to cut his own wrists, the boy was expelled from the school. Powell doesn’t know what happened to him. This was far from an isolated incident. A Stonewall study in 2000 found that 56 percent of teachers said they had difficulties in addressing the needs of gay and lesbian students as a direct result of the legislation.

The gay journalist Alex Bryce remembers what it meant for him. “I was in the throes of puberty, with my hormones in overdrive and I was starting to develop an awareness of my sexuality,” he says. “As my own feeling were not explained or even mentioned in the sex education lessons, for the first time in my life, I began to feel different. After one particular PSE lesson I plucked up the courage to stay behind after class to talk to my teacher. I remember packing away my things slowly and carefully choosing my words. ‘Miss, what do men who are attracted to men do in bed?’ I asked. The teacher looked slightly concerned by my question. ‘I would really like to talk to you about this, but I’m legally obliged not to,’ she said with genuine regret. This was my personal encounter with Section 28. What could have been a turning point for me, allowing me to feel acceptable and ‘normal’, left me isolated and confused at a time when I was particularly vulnerable.”

And so a generation of gay children were left to be bullied, and in ignorance of the terrible threat of STDs. We will never know how many people contracted HIV as a result – but we know there are some. The UK Gay Men’s Sex Survey in 2003 – commissioned by the Terrence Higgins Trust – found that one third of 20 year-old gay men, the children of Section 28, did not even know the most basic facts about HIV transmission. Some 51 percent didn’t know that HIV is more likely to be passed on if he or his partner has another STD; 31 percent did not know that water-based lubricant reduces condom failure; and, incredibly, 14 percent did not know that HIV is more likely to be passed on if a man ejaculates inside his partner. Several AIDS charities believe there is a trail of infected blood that runs right back to Margaret Thatcher.

Whenever Section 28 and its hateful backers dominated the news, the rate of gay-bashings was ramped up – but the gay fight-back was as brave as the assaults were cowardly. Gay activism became bolder and bigger than at any time in British history. Thirty thousand people marched on Westminster. Ian McKellen – one of Britain’s most famous actors – was so horrified he felt he could no longer remain in the closet; he was followed out by Eastenders star Michael Cashman, and a battery of others, declaring that in the age of Section 28 everyone had to stand and be counted. A group of lesbian protestors abseiled into the chamber of the House of Commons to disrupt the parliamentary debate of the Clause, and they later burst into the live broadcast of the six o’clock news. Thousands of people banded together to form Stonewall, still the most high-profile and high-impact gay lobbying group in Britain. The gay community’s most successful weekly gay newspaper, the Pink Paper, was set up to report on the savage backlash against gays.

The legislation always seemed to reveal a strange insecurity on the part of its fans about their own sexuality. Did they really think children could be ‘taught’ to be gay, like they are taught the ten times table? In 2005, I asked Michael Howard – who piloted it into law as the Local Government Minister – if he thought he would be gay today if his teachers had “promoted” it to him. He said, “Well I think that there are some people who could be influenced. Who could go either way. I think there is a question about the extent to which people can be influenced…” He trailed off, with a little shrug of embarrassment.

At first, the Labour Party supported Section 28 out of fear of being tarred with the “loony left” brush. But it soon regained its moral compass and began to call for its repeal. The Conservative Party swooped in to use this as a wedge issue against them. Norman Tebbit drew up an election poster showing a shelf-full of gay books and the slogan: “This is Labour’s idea of a comprehensive education.” They accused Labour of supporting “perversion.”

Britain’s religious establishment rallied behind the Tories. Cardinal Thomas Winning announced: “It pains me to use the word perverted when discussing the homosexual act but that’s what it is. I will not stand for this sort of behaviour.” He compared gay people to the Nazis, saying: “In the place of the bombing of fifty years ago you find yourself bombarded with images and ideas which are utterly alien.” Today this seems like an act of psychological projection: he was, after all, a senior figure in a Church that was riddled with real perverts and paedophiles who were committing the mass rape of children under Winning’s own nose.

The Tories and the religious – from the Chief Rabbi to the Muslim Association of Britain – stayed with Section 28 to the end. Labour came to power in 1997 committed to repealing the anti-gay law. Tony Blair said: “I guess, reading the newspapers, that repealing Clause 28 is not popular, but we are doing it because it is the right thing to do. The truth is that this campaign is based on people who do not want to openly say they are prejudiced against gay people, so they hide behind the issue of child protection.” The Conservative leader William Hague called this “politically correct nonsense”, and said bizarrely that “true tolerance means a minority accepting the experiences and beliefs of the majority.” He ordered his party in the House of Lords to hold up the repeal for years.

The most senior figures in the Conservative Party today are still tainted by their association with Section 28. The Tory mayor of London, Boris Johnson, defended it, even though in his recent interview with Attitude he didn’t seem to actually understand what the law was. The current Tory leader, David Cameron, voted for it at every opportunity, and used the issue in his election literature to attack his Labour opponent.

The law was finally, at last and at least, abolished in 2004 – but its consequences live on. In every other area of British life, attitudes towards gay people have been radically transformed. Yet in our schools, anti-gay prejudices were preserved in the formaldehyde of Section 28. The fight against homophobia is only now beginning in our playgrounds – after it has been largely won in the places where it could be legally challenged, like the workplace. Stonewall found recently that 80 percent of schools admit they have a problem with homophobic bullying – but only 6 percent have a policy to deal with it.

Let end with the story of one boy – one of many – who paid the price for Section 28’s stalling. Jonathan Reynolds was a 15 year-old from Bridgend, South Wales, who came out to some of his closest friends in 2006. They blabbed – and he was bullied and harassed and threatened as a "faggot" and a "poof" until he couldn't take it any more. His school had no policy in place to protect gay children; any move to develop one had been squashed by the vast legal block of Section 28, and hadn’t recovered in time for him. So one day, after he sat a GCSE exam where he earned a starred A grade, he lay down on the train tracks near his home. He texted his sister Sam: "Tell everyone that this is for anybody who eva said anything bad about me, see I do have feelings too. Blame the people who were horrible and injust 2 me. This is because of them, I am human just like them. None of you blame yourself, mum, dad, Sam and the rest of the family. This is not because of you." Then a train sliced his body apart.

Jonathan Reynolds’ final text message – his last cry of “I am human” – should serve as the obituary for the late, un-great Section 28.

I also conducted two interviews to go with this article.

This first is with newsreader Sue Lawley:

JH: Can you tell us about how you came to be ravaged by the lesbians?

SL: (Roars with laughter) We were about to go on air with the Six O’Clock News – this is exactly twenty years ago now – and I was checking through my notes. I could hear a lot of shouting fro the gallery in my earpiece but there’s nothing surprising about that – that’s live news – when suddenly the door to the studio burst open.

JH: The lesbians!

SL: Well, I thought they were men. They were bloody big and dressed in combat gear and waving handcuffs. They dived at the cameras, and the music for the six o’clock news came up. And I thought: this is it. We’re going to be kidnapped. We’re destined for a cellar in Beirut. God knows how I thought they were going to get us out of the sixth floor of TV centre and to Beirut, but you don’t think rationally in a situation like that. Fear knows no logic.

JH: So what did you do as the theme music ended?

SL: One of the lesbians handcuffed herself to the leg of my chair, and the other one to the camera, and I heard them yell “Stop Section 28! Stop Thatcher!” And I remembered that a few weeks before some lesbian protestors had tried to get into the chamber of the House of Commons, and I realised what was happening. And I thought: well, all I can do is keep the show on the air. Ten million people are watching. Read the news.

JH: You were incredibly calm. You just politely say, “We’ve rather had an invasion in the studio, so apologies for any disruption,” and just carry on.

SL: Yes, I am rather BBC in that respect. Prim and proper. We had a big news story that day – Reagan and Gorbachev had met – and I had a bloody long introduction about it. Normally you just had a few sentences, but this went on forever – the East said, the West said… And the lesbians were screaming.

JH: Is it true Nicholas Witchell sat on the lesbians?

SL: Oh yes. The one that was handcuffed to my chair kept bobbing up into my shot – I could see her on the monitor – as I read the news. And then I realised that her head had disappeared and her shouts had become muffled. So I peeked over and Nicholas Witchell had straddled the lesbian and was gagging her with his hand, kind of bobbing and gagging. It was all happening about two inches from my left elbow. Then I peeked to my right and saw four senior BBC executives in their suits just staring at us all open-mouthed.

JH: How long did it go on for?

SL: Well, eventually I got through this introduction and we cut to the video and the security guards took the lesbians out. They had to take out the camera and the chair they were cuffed to, leaving me with just one camera to do the whole bulletin. I realise now they must have had some help within the BBC to get that far. To get through security and even to find that studio – TV Centre is a real labyrinth, and we were in the middle of the sixth floor – at just the right time… there was a BBC mole there. That night I got home and saw on the news that the lesbians liked me. They said I had been very cool, and they were impressed. It was my fifteen minutes of fame as a gay icon.

JH: Looking back, do you think there was something brave about what they did?

SL: Of course there was. Absolutely. They wanted to get publicity about Section 28, and they did. The next day, the Sun headline was: “Beeb man sits on lesbian.”

JH: Sue, may you reign forever as a gay icon…

The second is with Sir Ian McKellen:

JH: When you think of Section 28 now, what goes through your mind?

IM: It changed my view of the world. When you look back, it seems like so long ago. It was another world. It’s very hard to remember now but there were almost no gay voices in public life. There were a few individuals like Derek Jarman who spoke bravely and with passion, but they were very rare and isolated and there were no firm gay organisations or out politicians. Even the liberal press was indifferent to the gay point-of-view, it was never reported properly. All you’d ever hear was negative and hateful. At that time, people thought it was perfectly easy and proper to make the most outrageous comments about gay people.

JH: How did you become one of the leading figures in the fightback?

IM: It was what drove me finally to come out. I couldn’t bear it. This law was passed and there was very little public speaking out. I had never done any gay campaigning. I was a latecomer to it. I was on a radio debate with [anti-gay right-wing newspaper editor] Peregrine Worsthorne and he kept talking about gay people as ‘them, them, them’ and I found myself saying – it’s not them, it’s me, I’m gay. It shut him up.

When we got off air I had to make a couple of quick calls to members of my family. They basically knew – I was 49 and they’d met my boyfriends – but I’d never actually said it in so many words. They were fine with it. From then on I was suddenly put into a position I hadn’t wanted and wasn’t suited to – as a kind of representative of all the gays in the country. The media thought, well, he seems like a responsible figure, he can speak for them. There were a lot of people who did a lot more than me.

JH: Was there any negative response?

IM: I got some pretty horrific letters, all obsessed with sodomy and convinced that if you were gay you were also into paedophilia and bestiality. But on the Section 28 campaign, the vituperation was so strong that it convinced us even more that we were right. It’s not often when you express an opinion you know you’re absolutely right, but I knew I was.

JH: Is it true you went to see Michael Howard, the Tory minister who was piloting it into law?

IM: Yes. I went to see him on a Sunday morning in Notting Hill. He blinded me with the science of legality, which I know nothing about, and then asked me to sign an autograph for his daughter. It’s rumoured that I wrote, ‘Fuck off I’m gay’, but I didn’t. I should have really.

JH: It led to the creation of Stonewall, didn’t it?

IM: One of the best things about it was that Stonewall happened. Without it, all the changes of the past twenty years would have taken much longer. One of the Tory whips at that time was called Tristan Garrel-Jones. He was a very civilised man and an admirer of the fine arts and he was absolutely ashamed that he had helped push this law through. He called it – these were his exact words – “a piece of red meat thrown to the right-wing wolves.” He said – you’ve done well, but it’s not enough. You have to go out and start an organisation that works every week of every day so this can never happen again.

JH: Was it invigorating, to start that fight back?

IM: Absolutely. You have to realise how many people were closeted. Nobody was out. It was easy for people to be anti-gay because they believed gay people scarcely existed. It was so invigorating to publicly stand up for ourselves and to be taken seriously in a way we hadn’t been before. The feeling was – we’re on the move now, we’re fighting. It’s no coincidence we called it Stonewall: at last, we were doing what they did in America. We had an optimism we could take them on, we weren’t just waiting for a law to imprison us or anything like that.

JH: Do you think Section 28 still has a dangerous afterlife?

IM: Yes. Without it, schools would have done much more, aught perhaps even caught up with places like commerce and business where they go out of their way to attract gay people. These days, it should be easier than ever for schools to get it right, but they very often don’t. I’ve been speaking at a few private schools lately and they invariably have no policy for gay students or member of staff. None. It’s worst of all in faith schools, where it’s a terrible problem. That’s why Stonewall has four members of staff dealing with these issues. It will have to be dealt with one-by-one, school-by-school, getting them to provide counseling and mentoring for gay students and really deal with homophobic bullying.

JH: Yet it sounds like, for all the evil it did, you also think there were positive consequences from that period too.

IM: I have a lingering affection – not for Section 28, which was disgusting, but for what it enabled us to do. It was the beginning of the end for the old attitudes. It failed, and it deserved to fail, and we won in the end.