LGBT+ History Month 2022

Fifty Years of UK Pride

Every February, the LGBT+ History Month charity promotes equality and diversity for the benefit of the public. As an educational charity, it increases the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, their history, lives and their experiences in the school curriculum and culture of educational and other institutions, and the wider community. It also tries to raise awareness and advance education on matters affecting the LGBT+ community, works to make educational and other institutions safe spaces for all LGBT+ communities and promotes the welfare of LGBT+ people by ensuring that the education system recognises and enables LGBT+ people to achieve their full potential, so they contribute fully to society and lead fulfilled lives, thus benefiting society as a whole.

These aims were impossible while Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 were in force (until 2000 in Scotland, and until 2003 in England and Wales). It made expenditure by local authorities for the purpose of ‘promoting’ homosexuality illegal, without defining what ‘promoting’ means. It would have been impossible for us to hold exhibitions and events celebrating either LGBT+ History Month or Pride Month while Section 28 remained in force, as the Museum Service is funded by a Local Authority. Although the Act applied only to Local Authorities and not to schools (‘Section 28 does not affect the activities of school governors, nor of teachers … It will not prevent the objective discussion of homosexuality in the classroom, nor the counselling of pupils concerned about their sexuality’), its greatest effect was on the education sector, which took an ultra-cautious approach.

By the late 1990s, Section 28 was becoming irrelevant. Social changes had led away from the view that homosexual behaviour was wrong (a view held by almost 70% of people at the time that Clause 28 was written) to a much more accepting attitude. LGBT+ people were becoming more visible in the media and different campaigning groups had begun to influence public opinion. In 2000, the government attempted to repeal Section 28, but it was defeated in the House of Lords, a defeat that Theresa May (later Prime Minister) called ‘a victory for common sense’. The Scottish government did repeal it. In 2003, the Local Government Act 2003 finally did away with Section 28 in England and Wales.

The Arc Is Long

This year is 50th anniversary of the very first UK Pride March in 1972. A popular slogan of the early Gay Rights Movement was ‘the personal is political’ and political action is necessary to bring the personal lives and experiences of LGBT+ people into equality with the rest of society. The journey is continuing and often winding; it has suffered many setbacks, such as the passing of Clause 28, while still moving forwards. The charity chose the tagline ‘the arc is long’ for this year’s event, from Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice’.

Art is probably the most individual of pastimes, so the charity chose Art as its National Curriculum link for this year. The organisers looked for five artists (one each to represent L, G, B, T and +) who had either used their art for political ends, or expressed their orientation through their work. Lesbian Doris Brabham Hatt and intersex (the + of the charity’s name) Fiore de Henriquez both fought against fascism in the 1930s. Keith Haring’s well-known dancing figures were used to draw attention to the growing AIDS crisis of the early 1980s. Jean-Michel Basquiat began as a graffiti artist and Mark Aguhar’s short life was spent ‘confronting white hegemony’.
The charity has produced poster-sized factsheets for each artist, which are on display at North Hertfordshire Museum. There is also a short quiz designed for young adults to encourage them to read the posters.

Our display

The museum has put up a small display in the Terrace Gallery. It includes the first Civil Partnership certificate issued in North Hertfordshire (21 December 2005), paintings by Margaret Thomas (who lived with her same-sex partner for sixty years) and Katie Wilson (a local transgender woman), and information about James Allen, a transgender man who was landlord of The Sun (now The Victoria) in Baldock about 1809.