Bookkake

This is a repost from the Short Term Memory Loss blog, originally posted in September 2005. It’s reposted here because today America goes to the polls, and while we are uncomfortable conflating literature and politics, and even more uncomfortable pronouncing on the politics of a country that is not our own, there are certain issues at stake in which we have prior experience, namely the anti-gay ballot additions of Proposition 8 in California, and similar efforts elsewhere. The British experience is perhaps instructive, and I hope it strikes a chord.

The picture on the left comes from It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley, a guide to ‘Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health’ for kids, one of the books on the list of WPAAG, a US organisation attempting to remove scores of books from school libraries. This image is pretty standard fare for the collection (more can be seen here), and describing them as “shocking porn” (which WPAAG does) seems a little strong. Regular Litblog followers may have encountered the various battles currently being fought in the US concerning the suitability or otherwise of childrens books (over at Bookslut, Pornlit and Maud). This ongoing debate concerns both sex ed. books for kids, such as the above example, and novels, particularly those aimed at the tricky teenage market. As quickly becomes clear on reading the petition of one protestor seeking to have such books removed from school libraries (and presumably they’d prefer to have the whole lot shredded, pulped and burned too), their wrath is particularly focussed on books which promote “the homosexual agenda”.

The reason I find this all slightly terrifying is because in the UK, the scenario of a hysterical response to a few books leading to real, decade-long oppression is not a hazy liberal fear, it’s recent history. Jenny lives with Eric and Martin was a Danish children’s book about a young (five year old) girl living with her two dads. In 1983, our old friends the Daily Mail discovered a copy in a school library in South London. Despite the relatively tame content of the book (certainly less explicit than most of the books objected to by the protestors mentioned above), the resultant moral panic led directly to the insertion of Clause 28 into the 1987 Local Government Act.

Clause 28, which I shall resist prefacing with “the notorious”, stated that:

A local authority shall not—

(a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality;

(b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.

(Full text here).

While the actual impact of this act has been much debated over the years, what cannot be doubted is that it made the lives of many, many gay men, women and children much, much harder in a period during which they were already struggling for tolerance and social recognition, and not least for adequate medical attention on the growing AIDS crisis. The most pernicious effect, one that is seen time and time again in the anti-gay lobbies, was to link homosexuality and paedophilia through the image of aggressive, predatory homosexual recruitment in schools (if anyone wonders why so many gay people in the UK are so vehemently anti-Tory, this legislation is the prime mover, and it was the current leader of the party, Michael Howard, who as Local Government Minister under Margaret Thatcher, supported and repeatedly defended the bill). Essentially, it scared teachers away from any discussion of homosexuality, leaving their young charges to fight it out among themselves. No prizes for guessing who suffers under that regime.

Whatever your opinion of Tony Blair and the New Labour experiment, one of their constant promises throughout their campaign for election was the repeal of Clause 28. Despite thorough, repeated and often heated resistance from the House of Lords, the religious establishment and various campaign groups, the Clause was repealed in 2003 – after sixteen years of state-sponsored homophobia in schools, and by extension, society.

My point is this: for all Britain’s sneering at the “Wild West” USA, it’s “dumb” president and it’s nutty Christian right, it happened here, and in pretty much exactly the same way: a small group of (largely but not exclusively Christian) people took offence at a number of books (books, people, not movies, not magazines, not video games, books) and persuaded the government of the time to implement legislation that made “the promotion” of homosexuality, which was taken to mean any supportive statement by educators, illegal. The arguments are the same: public money shouldn’t be spent on trying to ‘make kids gay’, a statement both implicitly homophobic and inherently contradictory. Nevertheless, Clause 28 happened, and set the cause of gay equality, which is, I believe, a benchmark for the fairness and tolerance of a society as a whole, back by a decade or more. Look out America.

(Footnote: Wikipedia has a good, well-linked page on the history of Clause 28. Jenny…, meanwhile, never went away: The Guardian interviewed the author, Susanne Bosche, a few years ago, and the book is clearly a collectors item, available from Amazon for £38).

While the above story is outdated now, my point is that discriminatory legislation benefits absolutely no one, and the purposes of law, as wiser people have noted, should be to expand liberties, and not to contract them. Good luck, America.