Blue Jean: How Margaret Thatcher...

[Michael Grove]

... and Section 28 Radicalised a Generation

Chris Sullivan on a new film that examines the effects

of the reviled 1988 legislation on a gay woman and its

galvanising influence on wider society.

Many will remember the, at times, ludicrous legislation ushered in by Margaret Thatcher, the hero of the Conservative Party, but one of her most notorious statutes was Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988, which prohibited local authorities from intentionally promoting homosexuality, publishing material with the intention of promoting homosexuality, or promoting the teaching “in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. The clause was seen as a sign of the government’s homophobia and, while Thatcher hid behind Jill Knight who introduced that specific section, it was the Prime Minister who sanctioned the Act.

The clause drew attention to the Gay and Lesbian community, allowing direct discrimination and intolerance. It caused pain and anguish, propagated antipathy towards and mistrust of the LGBT community in the UK and served to illustrate the alarmingly outdated homophobia deep within the heart of the Conservative Party.

By the TIME of the WYSIWYG 128K Apple Mac launch in 1984 • the machine that acted as THE SEED with which Tim Berners Lee was able to CREATE the World Wide Web as we know it today • I had already launched, in association with Acorn Computers in concert with the BBC Computer Literacy Project, a BBC Microcomputer based INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA 'simulation system', which was reported enthusiastically in the Financial Times Technology Column, that consequently transmogrified over time into the Apple Colour Macintosh based Integrated Communications Bureau Solution that was launched at THE ART of the POSSIBLE event in Abingdon, Berks; on the very day that our then Prime Minister Mrs Margaret Thatcher, tendered her resignation.