There comes a moment in Blue Jean when the newly divorced titular character (beautifully essayed by The Alienist’s Rosy McEwen) spots a teenager at the Tyneside lesbian bar she frequents with her girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes).
Jean panics, visibly and immediately. The girl in question is 15-year-old Lois (Lucy Halliday, who rightly won out over hundreds of girls who auditioned for the part).
Jean is Lois’s PE teacher and netball coach. The year is 1988 and this is Thatcher’s Britain, where a law that stereotypes gay people as paedophiles out to recruit children into their “deviant” lifestyle is about to come into effect.
For Jean, who has come out to her closest friends and family, the convergence of her private life and work spells disaster. She’s not closeted. Nor is she frontline.
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It’s a dilemma that informs this elegantly structured historical drama.
“It was a question that I continued to ask myself during the writing of the script,” explains Blue Jean’s writer-director Georgia Oakley. “What if somebody does want to be out, she does want to have a relationship, and does want to be honest with their family about who they are. They still don’t always want to put that part of their identity front and centre. Jean essentially wants to live a sort of heteronormative existence with a public-facing job. As a result of that job, she is not able to really involve herself in the activism side of things, but maybe she wouldn’t anyway. I feel like there are stories about queer people who become radicalised and then want to go to every march. But my experience looking around me is that there are all types of queer people and that they deserve to have their stories told as well.”
On February 2nd, 1988, a group of lesbian activists abseiled into the House of Lords after peers voted in favour of Section 28 of the Local Government Act. The ill-defined legislation, introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government, prohibited local authorities from “promoting” homosexuality or gay “pretended family relationships”, and prevented councils spending money on educational materials and projects perceived to promote a gay lifestyle.
The rhetoric around the clause was grotesque, not least against a backdrop that required HIV/Aids education. The Daily Mail got the ball rolling with a series of attacks on the storybook Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin by Danish author Susanne Bösche. When one copy of the children’s book was discovered in a library run by the Labour-controlled Inner London Education Authority, the Tory education secretary Kenneth Baker announced that this “grossly offensive homosexual propaganda” was put into libraries by “left-wing authorities”.
In 2000, Glasgow City Council halted funding to LGBT groups when local resident Sheena Strain (with the backing of the Christian Institute) objected to the funding of the city’s Project for HIV Aids Care and Education and the safe sex guide Gay Sex Now, which she deemed pornographic
Speaking at a contemporaneous party conference, Margaret Thatcher said: “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life.”
A Conservative Party campaign billboard from the same year featured three books titled Young, Gay & Proud, Police Out of Our Schools and The Playbook for Kids about Sex under the heading, “Is this Labour’s idea of a comprehensive education?”
I had no knowledge of Section 28. And neither did most of my queer friends. I found that to be fascinating considering the huge knock-on effect it had on our lives
“When I started researching and looking through the newspapers of that time I was really shocked by some of the language,” says Oakley. “I would look for anything and everything that was said about gay people and was struck by the parallels between that language and the discourse that is used today around members of the trans community. There were some shocking things. In 1987, just before the film was set, there was a statistic that over 70 per cent of the British population thought that homosexuality was wrong in all instances. Even at home behind closed doors.”
Thirty years later, as various media outlets marked the anniversary of Section 28, Oakley came upon the stories of the BBC ambush and the abseiling activists in the public chamber of the UK’s upper house. While Section 28 has been touched upon in Russell T Watson’s Queer as Folk – a show which featured a jeering schoolboy saying “You can’t teach us about poofs. You’re not allowed” – it was news to her.
“I started to see little pieces in the press about it because of the anniversary,” says Oakley. “But prior to that, I had no knowledge of Section 28. And neither did most of my queer friends. I found that to be fascinating considering the huge knock-on effect it had on our lives. I mean, I was at school until 2006 and the legislation was obviously not repealed until 2003. So for most of my time at school, Section 28 was a thing. We were struck by the fact that when we spoke to a few teachers in 2018, they still felt that they couldn’t be honest about their sexuality, it’s all because of the backlash they might have received from students.”
The enactment of Section 28 created huge confusion around the idea of queer “promotion”. Various youth groups dealing with everything from substance abuse to bereavement were forced to stay silent on issues relating to sexuality and homophobia, lest they be found in breach of the law. At least one library refused to stock the gay publication Pink Paper, on similar grounds. Funding was pulled from teen counselling services across Britain.
Before writing Blue Jean, Oakley spoke to dozens of people who were adversely affected by Section 28, including the respective founders of PinkNews and LGBT History Month.
“We spoke to tonnes of people about their experiences, from lesbian PE teachers to activists,” says the British Independent Film Award-winning filmmaker. “We met the women who abseiled into the House of Lords and many, many other protesters. One of the things that was surprising early on was speaking to Catherine Lee, one of our lead advisers, who was a PE teacher at the time. Our script, at that time, already had the story about a teacher running into a student in a gay bar. When we spoke to Catherine she told us that she’d had that exact experience and that she regretted the way that she had behaved towards that student every day since. For 30 years. She was obviously a brilliant teacher, and a very sensitive, warm person, and Section 28 pushed her into behaving in a way that continues to upset her.”
At its core Blue Jean is a very affecting love story between two queer women. The film equally and successfully functions as a kind of community history. One key source, for example, was Huffty, the iconic Geordie presenter of Channel 4′s 1990s youth series The Word.
“Huffty told us all kinds of interesting things about the bars,” says Oakley. “And she told us about the bog fund and how lesbians with quote-unquote “proper jobs” could put money to help fund queer co-operatives. She told us that very late in the process, and it was a surprise, but we really wanted to work it into the film. We like the way it tied in with the film’s stance on activism. How it can be a smaller, less sort of sexy activism. It still adds up and it makes a difference.”
Similarly, Blue Jean counters the venomous anti-gay sentiment underlying Section 28 with tender snapshots of queer domesticity. It’s a significant corrective. As long ago as 2013, a BBC report noted the “invisibility of lesbians and bisexuals on television”.
“I remember when we started putting together the pitch document to try and get funding for the film,” recalls Oakley. “I wanted to use images of lesbians in the 80s that felt right. And there just weren’t even any. There wasn’t even a great deal of photography. I also felt when I was writing the script that showing a lesbian couple who – at the start of the film – are in a relationship that is working, was important. Just showing the kind of ordinary mundane things like sitting on the sofa and eating Pot Noodle and making jokes with each other.”
Blue Jean is in cinemas now
