LGBTQ+ History Month calls on us to rethink what education and history mean today, argues Dr Isabell Dahms.
Public education
LGBTQ+ History Month is an education initiative. Launched for the first time in the UK in February 2005 by Schools Out, an education charity that started as The Gay Teachers Association in 1974, LGBTQ+ History Month began as a reminder and undoing of recent UK history – in particular, Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act.
Section 28 had banned local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’ and schools from teaching that homosexuality is acceptable as a family relationship. Thatcher famously argued in her speech to the Conservative Party Conference on 9 October 1987 that children who are being taught that they have an ‘inalienable right to be gay’ are cheated of a sound start in life.
But Thatcher not only attacked LGBTQ+ education. Her speech ridiculed LGBTQ+ and race equality policies and talked about young people as if they don’t have their own agency. This is the legacy that is to still be undone completely.
