The school principal asked Sandra Roberts to begin a Holocaust education class to develop tolerance within the school and wider within the community.

The students having researched the holocaust were overwhelmed by the numbers of people affected, and came up with the idea of collecting something to represent the holocaust tragedy.  Mrs. Hooper challenged them to find something unique to collect, and again after research discovered that the paperclip designed by Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian, had been used by the Norwegians as a silent protest against Nazi occupation by displaying it on their lapels.

A website and many letters and emails later their response staggered everyone involved – at the last count they had received over 30 million paperclips represent family and friends who had died during the holocaust.  To ensure that the holocaust victimes are nto fogotten a memorial consisitng of one of the cattle cars used for transport, and imported from Germany, has been renovated and the paperclips have been put on display inside for visitors to see and realise the scale of the deaths.

The estimated figures of people brutally murdered are:

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust )

Now why am I bringing this up now you may ask?  I couldn’t sleep the other night (to be exact the early hours of Sunday morning) and BBC2 ran the documentary about the Paperclip Project.  I found the documentary interesting, and at the end Mrs. Hopper made reference to their collective hope that their small project may lead to the end of bigotry and intolerance.

But, I was then brought back to reality by the article ‘One Town’s War on Gay Teens’ written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely which outline how in Michele Bachmann’s home district, a Republican member of the US House of Representatives, and formerly a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2012 US presidential election, evangelicals have created an extreme anti-gay climate.  Indeed, Michele Bachman has called homosexuality a form of “sexual dysfunction” that amounts to “personal enslavement”!

What this has meant is that gay and lesbian students feel unsafe, feel threatened and have resorted to committing suicide as a way of escaping their misery.

The students are fighting back having formed a Gay Straight Alliance and holding meetings to show support for themselves and their friends – BUT, Mrs. Hooper unfortunately is wrong; at least in Michele Bachman’s districts, bigotry and bullying toward homosexuals is still rampant, even in the land of the free.

Germany has ratified these rights in 1992, but signed them in 1990.  Why therefore has Germany decided to allow a father to put his 11 year old transgendered girl into a mental institute simply because he believes transexuality is wrong?

The Youth Welfare Office of Berlin is putting an 11 year old transgendered girl into a father’s care who is putting her into a mental institute simply because he believes transexuality is wrong. This young girl will be taught how her feelings are wrong, and pushed more into the denial that has claimed the lives of so many transgendered people; thanks to biased decisions by the Youth Welfare office this child’s life could be irrevocably ruined. I am starting this petition to try and make it known that this is not okay, that this is a breach of some of the basic human rights of this child

Please sign the petition and show the Germany government that they need to stand by their pledges.

Jeffrey Edward Anthony DUDGEON. For services to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community in Northern Ireland.

A short, but inspiring sentence which means so much more than just its content!

Without Jeff and those, including the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association (NIGRA), who took HM Government in the United Kingdom to court from 1976, many people in Northern Ireland might still be living in fear of blackmail, losing their jobs, reputation, and even their lives simply because of their sexual orientation.

Jeff’s case Dudgeon v United Kingdom is often cited around the world. More specifically, here in Northern Ireland, it led to the decriminalising of male homosexual acts between men over the age of 21 in private by the Privy Council in 1982.

Recognition

“I feel very warmed by it,” Mr Dudgeon said.

“It an award for me and my achievements but it’s also an award for the community and a recognition of its equal status in society which has been 35 years in the making.”  (BBC News)

The film, entitled It’s Time, charts a relationship from first meeting to engagement, and is shot from the point of view of one character, who strikes up conversation with a man called Paul.

After the short follows the characters through first meetings with families, illnesses, holidays and celebrations, Paul proposes.

It is only revealed in the final moments that the character from whose point of view the story is shot is a man.

The films ends with the message: “It’s time. End marriage discrimination.”

GetUp, a non-profit organisation, launches campaigns with the aim of achieving an accountable and progressive Australia, concentrating on areas of economic fairness, social justice and environmental sustainability.

It’s time.

I FELT SLIGHTLY GUILTY about not having attended any LGBT History Month events, ever, despite being a ‘history buff’ and a bit of an historic relic myself.  So, on Monday February 25th, I took myself to Brixton Library (it’s just beside the Ritzy cinema – turn left at the tube entrance and it’s a two minute walk) to hear an “international panel of speakers”.  They were to speak to The Global Struggle for LGBT Liberation. They didn’t.  It’s too big a subject for a meeting that lasted for about an hour and a half.

The speakers were Jeffrey Weeks “leading UK gay history and politics writer”, Jinan Coulter “lesbian and Palestinian activist”, and Paul Fredericks Chair of Tower Hamlets LGBT Forum, who ‘stood-in’ for Viv Smith “UK based activist involved in the campaign for LGBT rights in South Africa”;

Tower Hamlets

He kicked off by talking about Tower Hamlets (he said he was standing as a Respect candidate in the GLA (Greater London Authority)) elections.  As a Gay man he had had very few problems living in a heavily Muslim area.  There were some: forms of racism directed at all non-’Whites’ in the area.  He had noticed a growth of Islamophobia since 9 / 11 2001, and something of a hardening of lines on the part of some – largely younger – Muslims.  (He did not mention that one of the people behind a particularly shrill ‘Islamist’ faction is an English convert).

He held out the hope that we would survive this downturn in community relations and war fever (at least among the governments and authorities.  A recent example of this obsessive, aggressive, approach to Muslim people was the saturation of the relatively short Blackstock Road in north London by six hundred police personnel in riot gear.  They blocked off the road – quite an important highway – with scores, if not hundreds of vehicles.  Nobody was arrested, but the street has not recovered commercially from the ‘invasion’ and dozens of law-abiding small traders had had their businesses put at hazard.  They are largely Algerian in origin and can only surmise that they were being intimidated simply because they are largely Muslim.  The ‘Met’ is going to have to do some heavy-duty thinking about this sort of thing.

The Lebanese were stirred up last year by the Israeli invasion of their country – I had not realised there were so many Lebanese flags in London never mind people – at the demonstration against the invasion.  What is the point of turning another (largely middle class) group of Arabs against the UK authorities through this piece of pointless harassment?  If the London Metropolitan Police are under the impression that news of this sort of thing does not travel, suitably embellished, all the way to Algeria, and back, they are living in a dream world – or are following seriously stupid orders.  Which they should urgently question).

Paul made some remarks about the ‘murder music’ campaign, suggesting that no Black Gay people – of any gender – were involved in it.  To the suggestion that it concerned all Gay people, and that no Black Gays women or men put themselves forward, he countered that they had not been asked to come forward.  And that that was inherently patronising, if not racist, he clearly felt strongly about the matter – even though the campaign’s short-term (apparent) result is welcome.

Palestine

The next speaker was Jinan Coulter (who has a mid-Atlantic accent), she pointed out that the attitude of Arab people to homosexuality is considerable more complicated than ‘our’ media acknowledges.  Beirut, the capital of Lebanon had had its first LGBT Pride demonstration the previous year, and the LGBT group had been directly involved in opposing the invasion through welfare and medical work.  It had received an award from one of the groups involved in the military end of the resistance (not Hezbollah, but it had also acknowledged its role).

A great deal of the harassment of Gay people, in Egypt for example, had political overtones.  Gay women and men are in a difficult position in that the ‘West’ leaning governments pick on us to show the Ultras that they are still Muslim, and the Islamists accuse us of being a westernising element.  Despite all that Jinan thought the future was bright for Gay people in the Middle East.  The Palestinian groups range from the pro-Gay to neutral, and they are not lined up the way a British audience might assume.

Transnational Weeks

Jeff Weeks said that many revolutionary regimes persecuted Gay people, and the USA had the most advanced positions on our rights.  He went through, essentially, the British history of legislation on Gay matters.  Dr Weeks seemed to me to be a bit over-sanguine about some matters.  He and myself were probably the only people in the room to actually remember 1967, and some could not recall 1994, when Northern Ireland was left out of the further widening of Gay legal liberation.  He said ours was an on-going grass roots revolution, and that the 1967 Act campaign was led by a liberal elite.

Would Allan Horsfall, Life President of CHE, regard himself as either liberal or elite, one wonders?  He (Jeff Weeks) noted Hirschfeld’s attempts to introduce an element of scientific discipline and detachment into the study of sexuality, and Wolfenden and the effect of the latter on insular mores.

GLF (the Gay Liberation Front, which as Jinan Coulter had noted was named on the same principle as the Vietnamese NLF (National Liberation Front), was a more confrontational organisation than CHE (the Committee, then Campaign for Homosexual Equality).  He did not say whether or not it had a greater effect than CHE.  That is slightly unfair, many people were members of both.  And GLF was a state of mind and not really a coherent political tendency – GLF did the job of confronting the obnoxious likes of the Festival of Light / ‘Blight’, the psychiatrists in conference, and not least the National Front.  The first Gay Prides were GLF-type matters, though they were actually organised by CHE.

Jeff Weeks said that because LGBT people are inevitably transnational in our identities we have equally inevitably made the demand for sexual human rights a global matter.  Sue Sanders of Schools Out made an intervention saying that the USA has a pretty grim history in regard to legal Gay Rights.  Jeff Weeks acknowledged that but said that the movement there was in terms of scope and activity second to none.  And that at State level much had been done, Massachusetts, Hawaii and California come to mind.  Sue Sanders also mentioned the up-coming Olympics and an attempt to get the rainbow flag flown at the opening ceremony.

Beijing 2008 — London 2012

I suggested that matters are too far forward for the Beijing Games, and that the 2012 (London) Games might be problematical.  I suspect this was pretty opaque for the audience.  They, and the speakers, clearly think of London as a great multi-cultural city.  I was thinking of it as an Imperial capital.  Flying the rainbow flag in London might not send out the sort of message we would want.  It would probably be assumed by the many millions of people watching the events that Gay women and men were lining up with the neo-imperialism of Gordon Brown, Cameron, and Clegg.

What Sue Sanders was interested in was the International Olympic Committee’s Montreal Declaration, which mentioned LGBT people, and the fact that the Olympic Games have a huge world audience, in the billions.  It would be a great platform to demonstrate that Gay women and men had ‘arrived’ in society — and that we were not going to return to our closets (even quite comfortable closets like Compton Street).

I must apologise to the Chair, who kept the show on the road, very dextrously and courteously whose name, (I think), was Paul O’Dell.  And to other speakers from the floor whose interventions I did not note.  And to the speakers, whose talks I have reduced – to gibberish – probably.

Seán McGouran

GS Vol. 1, No. 17 Spring 1986

Changing the World

(A London Charter for Lesbian and Gay Rights)

GLC [Greater London Council]

A very handsome 48-page document, very thorough, it is a deal more apposite and rational than the Sun would lead you to believe.

Housing, jobs and the police are dealt with, as are young Gay people.  It recommends that religious groups that discriminate be subject to financial sanctions.

While the Charter recommend, in passing, a parliamentary “Non-Discrimination Act”, it largely chimes in with NIGRA policy in asking for the item-by-item amendation of the various Acts of Parliament [containing discriminatory provisions].

Well worth reading, though it is physically difficult, being printed in lavendery-grey on off-white paper.

Gay Star editorial comment

(The GLC (Greater London Council) was abolished soon after the publication of this Charter.  Its publication was almost certainly part of the reason why the GLC was wound-up.  The Conservative Party Government made time for the ‘Knight / Wilshire amendment’ to the Local Government Bill / Act.  This eventually became notorious Section 28, and created endless problems for local councils — and for Gay welfare groups (in particular those attempting to deal with the AIDS crisis.)

Gay women and men were to be an ‘out-group’ on which blame for the shortcomings of society could be fixed.)

Proud Heritage is an attempt to get a museum of Gay history off the ground.  Quite what ‘Britain’ means in this context, it is difficult to judge, the two academic organisations directly involved are in England, Leicester University and University College, London.  The Hall-Carpenter Archives are held by the LSE (London School of Economics).  LAGNA (the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archives) is in Middlesex University’s Cat Hill campus.

On the whole academia, and the ‘heritage’ sector, are not Gay-friendly.  Jack Gilbert showed the response to a questionnaire from Proud Heritage from a curator ‘somewhere in England’.  It would gladden the heart of any bigot.  And might even seem a trifle over the top to Dr Paisley or the Pope.  According to this screed we are also responsible for AIDS.  The LHF (Lottery Heritage Fund) spends tiny amounts on the LGBT sector (insofar as it recognises an ‘LGBT sector’ – something else that is still problematical).

Queers get 0.0005% of ‘Heritage’ quids

There has been a huge investment in ‘the museum and ‘heritage” sector under New Labour.  But Gay (LGBT) people still go unrecognised as users of the sector.  Jack Gilbert surmised this to be part of a particular heritage: Section 28.  According to the LHF (Lottery Heritage Fund) 0.0005% of their budget (in England and Wales — Britain) is spent on the LGBT sector.

Jack Gilbert took part in a slightly inconsequential Panel Q&A (question and answer) Who and what is heritage for?  The inconsequentiality arose out of the fact that two speakers did not turn up Parveen Betab of the National Archives and Anna Kisby of the Women’s Library.  Sue Donnelly of the Hall Carpenter Archive and Ajamu of the rukus! Federation were the other participants. Attendees may not have gathered their thoughts at this – relatively – early point, though most of us are involved in archives in some manner.  The overall view was that in the first place it should be for Gay women and men.  And decidedly for the general public.  We should not be ghettoised.

Queers in Notts

David Edgley of Nottinghamshire’s Rainbow Heritage told us how the exhibition came about.  David Edgely is a veteran of CHE (the Campaign for Homosexual Equality) and a very good lecturer.  He has been living in Nottingham since 1972.  CHE arrived at much the same time.  This is probably why he was ‘volunteered’ to put this material together.  Some of it came from LAGNA, in terms of cuttings from the local (Notts) press.  There was material in the shape of CHE’s local newsletter and banners.

It was discovered that local people had quantities of material in the form of photographs, film, video – and collections of printed material.  Much of this has been turned into an exhibition.  It has been shown in libraries and municipal and County venues — but not schools.

Queers in khaki; sodomy in Shropshire

Military Pride, introduced by Catherine Roberts and James McSharry of the Imperial War Museum North, is an exhibition that got off the ground very quickly early in 2008.  Problems from the Museum and military authorities were minimal to non-existent.  The exhibition is based on a very narrow base of respondents to an appeal in local (Manchester) Gay and military publications, and on local radio.

Despite that Catherine and James thought the interviews they conducted were worth turning into an exhibition.  A heartening aspect of this experiment was that the participants all allowed their names to be put on the printouts, and broadcasts of their interviews.

Just as heartening was the contribution of Maureen Turner and Kerry Dickens.  The Shropshire Archives helped with the production of “[a] resource for Key Stage 3 and 4 teachers and students”.  They chose to give it the name of the Stonewall initiative Some people are gay.  Get over it!  This is a very useful initiative – a non-preachy project for use in schools – especially as it comes from a largely rural area.  ‘Ruralia’ is resistant (allegedly) to material about LGBT matters.  CHE’s tape-slide show of thirty years ago was mentioned.  It came out of Newcastle on Tyne.  Which, despite what Londoners may think, is a major urban area.

(The above initiative could be of use to the new local groups in Northern Ireland.  Under the arrangements made in the ‘Good Friday’ / Belfast Agreement (the Government of Northern Ireland Act 1998) local government and other publicly-funded bodies – schools for example – are obliged to acknowledge the LGBT sector).

Sodomy in Brighton

Next up was Sodomy and Suffrage from Brighton Ourstory fronted by Linda Pointing and Tom Sargant.  Linda traced the history of an all-female guesthouse in the city, whose owner was a Suffragette militant.  There was an imaginative use of photographs, which included some detective work.  Tom Sargant’s tracking down of the male end of Gay Brighton also included the use of photographs.  I can only suggest that the reader make an attempt to get to Brighton Ourstory’s temporary museum in the Steine area in Brighton town centre.  These were very interesting and lively presentations.  I have not done them justice.

There were “behind the scenes tours” of the London Metropolitan Archives on offer.  We went off to Exmouth Market (not held that day…).  And a chi-chi caff.  There was a very pretty south European bloke serving.  I did not catch his eye.  Or any other bit of his anatomy.  Ending up with a not very interesting cheese sandwich.  I could have been attempting intelligent conversation with rather nice young men in the bowels of the LMA — drat…

Llangollen Arís

After luncheon came a talk by Rose McMahon on the Ladies of Llangollen, A Most Extraordinary Affair.  Dr. McMahon said this was something of an “Irish narrative”.  The Ladies were Sara Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, Protestant and Catholic respectively.  The Butler’s were a great Norman-Gaelic family.  Ms. McMahon seemed to think the fact that her brother had become Protestant was remarkable.  Most of the Catholic families who held on to their land – even poor land in Connacht – managed it by applied hypocrisy.  The son who was to inherit became (officially) a ‘Protestant’ (a member of the Church by Law Established — Anglicanism.)  This was a regular occurrence in 18th century Ireland.  The Ponsonbys were among the more enlightened of the great Ascendancy (Cromwellian) families.  This talk was followed by a bit of a short discussion about the non-use of ‘the L-word” (lesbian)— in regard to the Ladies.  It was rather cut short.

rukus!

After this were Breakouts.  We broke up into small groups to discuss different matters.  One was the rukus! Federation’s Sharing Tongues.  The Federation was set up to trace the history of Gay women and men (though it appears to be mainly men) of the ‘Windrush generation’.  It has since its foundation gathered in the history of Gay people from beyond that period (1948 onwards), and into the growing migration from Africa.  The largest groups (including Gay people) are from Nigeria and Somalia.  Probably, Ajamu X and Topher Campbell surmise, because of cheap air flights.  The first exhibition of material was in June 2000 at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts).

The problem they face is that the LGBT community is presented in the general media (they were too kind to mention the Gay glossy ‘zines) as white.  The recent ‘murder music’ campaign was very ‘White’.  When Black activists raised the question in 1992, there was no response from the general LGBT community.  This echoes a complaint made during the LGBT History Month event in Brixton library.  Conversely Black History Month is very ‘het’.  For example, Linda Bellos is being written out of history.

The above makes this session sound a bit glum.  It was inspiring and fun.  My scribbled notes are not good enough.  Go to rukus! Federation’s website

On Monday, June 22, the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ (i. e. Westminster) by a two to one (2:1) vote made Gay men in the United Kingdom somewhat equal in one aspect of their / our lives.  The ‘age of consent’ (to sexual intercourse) was lowered (as the gutter-press – including the Belfast Telegraph – always put it) to sixteen.  Well, not quite — we in Northern Ireland got an age of seventeen.  This is because we in this part of the world are (obviously) backward and childlike.  The ‘age of consent’ in Northern Ireland has been 17 since 1950, and it was passed by ‘Stormont’.  And, therefore, The Crown, which is ‘Supreme in Parliament’ cannot undo it…

It is well worth remembering that while a majority of the local legislators – they are in the Lords as well as the Commons these days – stayed at home (on the hustings, generally speaking), two took the trouble to go to Westminster.  To vote against any extension of Gay people’s rights.  They were the Rev. Dr. Ian Paisley, MP, MEP, and inevitably, Member of the up-coming Northern Ireland Assembly, and Willie Thompson.

The latter is the UUP MP for West Tyrone.  After he was elected he was interviewed on Sunday Sequence (BBC Radio Ulster’s ‘holy show’).  upstart got a bit excited by the fact that he is a Methodist lay-preacher.  Many Methodists in Ireland are open-minded about sexual matters.  The type has been the backbone of the Labour movement for a very long time.  Our Willie is not of this company.  When asked what his political priority would be he answered, without hesitation: “…capital punishment…”.  Yes, he wants it back.  So long, Sydney Callaghan, it was nice knowing you.

Thompson and Paisley were (trying to) save Ulster from a discriminatory age of consent of seventeen, not (as one might think, judging by their behaviour), an extension of full equality of citizenship to our community.

On the Friday evening (19.06.98) prior to the above vote, NIGRA Vice-President, Terry McFarlane, argued for genuine equality at a meeting organised by the London -Irish group Amach Linn.  Stonewall’s speaker made it abundantly clear that her organisation was not interested in our problems.

Some Amach Linn members were under the impression that a united Ireland was just around the corner.  They were not as crass as some London-Irish Gays of twenty to twenty-five years ago.  They (and the ‘London [Gay] Left’) abused NIGRA for even thinking of asking the British government for a reform of the law.  A united Ireland was just around the corner then.  Most of the Amach Linn people who attended the discussion (they had a céilí the same night, a Pride fund-raiser) were bamboozled by this, and by Stonewall’s attitude.  What is the problem with equality?  NIGRA and this small publication intend to keep on fighting for equal citizenship for the Gay community here.

upstart proposes a twin-track approach.  The Assembly may not e much to write home about – but it’s the only Assembly we’ve got.  Even at its worst, it is bound to have a few people interested in the civil rights of Gay people.  Three parties have paper policies, Sinn Féin, the SDLP, and the PUP.  There are ‘sound’ people in Alliance and the UUP.

Pressure could be put on the Assembly from further down the ‘food-chain’, n local government and in their own parties.  Pressure from Westminster, from the LibDems, and elements of the Labour / Co-operative, and even Conservative parties is available, if we tap into it.

There should be no doubt that the Stonewall operative was conveying a message from On High.  Their friends in the Cabinet do not want to hear from Northern Ireland for the next ten years (at least) and anyone who disturbs their slumbers will not be invited to Hillsborough Castle tea-parties.

We can live with that.

Notes:

• Amach Linn (now defunct) means ‘out with us’ / [or the Hiberno-English 'ye'] — not very elegant but as near as we can get
•  SDLP (the Social Democratic and Labour Party), in effect a moderate Irish Nationalist party.
• UUP (Ulster Unionist Party) the successor-party to the ‘Official’ Unionist Party and prior to that, the Ulster Unionist Council, which set-up the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force), and a Provisional Government for Ulster in 1912.
• PUP (Progressive Unionist Party) a Labourite party set up in the 1970s by members of the UVF set up in 1966.
• Dr. Paisley’s party is the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party – set up in 1971) prior to that he led a Protestant Unionist Party.
•  NIGRA (the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association) was set up in 1974 – at the suggestion of Kevin Boyle – to campaign for civil rights / equal citizenship for LGBT and allied communities.  That meant in the first instance transvestite and transgender people, and we campaigned for the extension of the Abortion, and the Race Relations Act[s] to Northern Ireland.
•  Kevin Boyle, in 1974 was a member of the Law Department of QUB (the Queen’s University, Belfast).  He has been a founder member of the NI Civil Rights Association.