Over the Rainbow: Money, Class and Homophobia E-Book

Nicola Field

• Herausgeber: Dog Horn Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 475

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The book was first published by Pluto Press in 1995, an edition which is now out of print. This revised edition is a detailed political analysis of the role of homophobia in class society. Written at the time when commercialisation of the LGBT+ movement was just beginning to take hold in the UK, the book is a searing indictment of those who claimed we could use lifestyle politics and the free market to buy our way out of discrimination and persecution. Over the Rainbow offers an uncompromising critique of the weakness of identity politics and an irrefutable class analysis of LGBT+ oppression.

Leseprobe

OVER THE RAINBOW

MONEY, CLASS AND HOMOPHOBIA

NICOLA FIELD

FOREWORDS BY ELLY BARNES, JONATHAN BLAKE AND GETHIN ROBERTS

SECOND EDITION

© Nicola Field, 1995 & 2016

Forewords © Elly Barnes, Jonathan Blake and Gethin Roberts, 2016

No part of this publication may be reproduced or copied, in print or in any other form, except for the purposes of review and criticism, without the publisher’s prior written consent.

Published by

Dog Horn Publishing

45 Monk Ings, Birstall, Batley WF17 9HU

United Kingdom

doghornpublishing.com

Print ISBN: 978-1-907133-94-7

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-907133-96-1

MOBI ISBN: 978-1-907133-97-8

Cover design by

Ben Windsor

Typesetting by

Jonathan Penton

CONTENTS

Forewords to the 2016 Edition

Acknowledgements for the 2016 Edition

Notes on Terminology and Perspective

1. Chapter for the 21st Century:

Over the Rainbow Revisited

Over the Rainbow: Money, Class and Homophobia (1995)

Acknowledgements for the 1995 Edition

Introduction: Seizing the Time

2. Family

3. Romance

4. Identity and the Lifestyle Market

5. Hostile Brothers

6. Reform

7. Police: The Strong Arm of the State

8. Cultural Activism

9. Bisexuality

10. Class Struggle: Breaking Barriers

FOREWORDS

As a huge fan of the film Pride and the unifying work of LGSM, I was absolutely thrilled to be asked by Nicola Field to recommend Over the Rainbow in its new edition, especially as her class-based analysis of LGBT+ oppression is reminiscent of the political dimension in which, ten years ago, I first plucked up the courage at a meeting to express my concerns about LGBT+ kids’ and teachers’ experiences in school. It is this socialist perspective that remains fundamental to my approach with Educate & Celebrate in encouraging all schools and workplaces to join us on the journey to inclusion.

Nicola writes with astonishing clarity and focuses on issues which remain terrifyingly relevant in 2016, such as continuing LGBT+phobia, women’s oppression, the imposed moral agenda from government and the media, the housing crisis, ideological attacks on state education and rising mental health concerns. Since Over the Rainbow was first published in 1995, Thatcher’s Section 28 (which prohibited local authorities from ‘promoting’ or ‘publishing’ homosexual material) has been repealed. This should have given teachers in the UK the freedom to engage students in an LGBT+ inclusive curriculum. However, even with the subsequent arrival of LGBT History Month in 2005, the Equality Act of 2010, new government guidelines for schools, and marriage for everyone, we still, daily, have to change hearts and minds.

We are comfortable teaching about the struggle of women, ethnic minorities and disabled people in schools. However when I ask delegates ‘what did you learn about the LGBT+ struggle when you were at school?’ the answer is always ‘nothing’: and we wonder why there are high levels of homophobia, biphobia and transphobia? It is this level of invisibility that we must and can change through education to ensure all are treated equally and fairly by encouraging and modelling a more intersectional approach in the classroom. This would allow everyone to go forward with the knowledge but also the understanding required to play an active role in this ever-growing neoliberal climate, where state schools are forced to become free schools and academies, potentially giving way to private interests that take precedence over our social needs.

Children begin to discriminate by the age of seven, which is why I advocate an LGBT+ inclusive curriculum as soon as young people enter the education system through children’s centres and nurseries. One deputy head, for instance, asserted that ‘a lot of the parents’ comments say they consider age-appropriate to be Key Stage 2 [seven+]’. This contradicts my research, which showed that reception and Key Stage 1-age pupils are more accepting and less affected by the use of terminology than we give them credit for. Therefore, we must start in Early Years Education to prevent future discrimination.

One key preventative method is to explore different family models, helping us to dispel the mythical and idealised heterosexual nuclear family, with its somewhat outdated gender roles and expectations, in order to give young people permission to recognise themselves and their own family units as special and unique. As a Year 6 class I worked with in 2015 said:

‘Love has no right or wrong; you cannot change who you are; love has no limits; love is powerful no matter what; love has no labels.’

This powerful, potentially generational, process of positive change can then flow from our classrooms into the corridors, the playground and the street; and from there into the home and into our communities. This is why our student voice is vital to creating political and social change, by developing the need in young people to ask questions and by empowering them to create ‘a society which reacts angrily to injustice and promptly sets about correcting it’ (Bauman, quoted in Giroux, 2004). A Year 11 student commented after our recent school showcase: ‘I’ve never sat in a room full of people before who were all from different walks of life, ages, races, religions, genders and sexual orientations, all supporting and campaigning for the same thing. It made me proud to be part of a collective community which one day will change lives and opinions and will make this world a better place.’

If we are to encourage promoting the ethos of the sponsor, how can we unify our values? ‘In short, private interests trump social needs, and economic growth becomes more important than social justice’ (Giroux 2010 p.133.)We cannot achieve inclusion in a system based on inequality. In Over the Rainbow, Nicola makes an eloquent and heartfelt argument for the transformation of society, a view that I wholeheartedly share. Let’s apply these arguments and create the beginnings of a cohesive community with people and social justice at its core.

Elly Barnes

CEO and founder of Educate & Celebrate

www.EducateAndCelebrate.org

It is a great pleasure to have been asked to write a few words for the second edition of Over the Rainbow.

I have known Nicola since the early days of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, and over many years and demonstrations. I am thrilled that this book is in print again; it’s an important volume which shines a light on money, class and homophobia. As far as I am concerned there can never be enough discussion around these issues.

Nicola has always been a feisty individual with deeply held views, beliefs, principles and care for her fellow human beings. She’s always been tireless in her fight for those less advantaged and most vulnerable in our society.

I wish this revised edition of such a vital work every success.

Jonathan Blake

Original member of LGSM

London, April 2016

‘The release of the film Pride in 2014 introduced a new generation of LGBT people not only to the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) and the mining communities of the Neath, Dulais and Swansea valleys, but to the wider story of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike and the ongoing consequences of the defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers at that time. Many young people knew little or nothing about this story. Indeed, I remember being asked several times on the 2014 Pride in London march whether the LGSM banner (actually the film prop version) we carried was something to do with Turkish or Chilean miners – so completely had the memory of our once significant mining industry and powerful miners’ union been eroded.

The idea that LGBT+ people can be part of a movement for radical social change has similarly been largely lost from popular perception. The radical ideals of the Stonewall Rioters, the Brixton Faeries and earlier movements for lesbian and gay rights associated with the British socialist-feminist Edward Carpenter; or the communist campaigner for Native American rights Harry Hay, appear to be largely replaced by a ‘gay lifestyle’ centred on recreational drugs, hedonism, fashion and same-sex wedding lists.

The Pride marches in the 1970s and 80s were a defiant protest as well as a celebration of our queerness. Now Pride is largely a marketing opportunity for corporate sponsors, shrouding themselves in a pink veil of ‘diversity’ to distract us from their opposition to trade unions and workers’ rights, their evasion of taxes, their collusion with repressive regimes or their abuse of the environment. The whole squalid charade is orchestrated by wealthy and privileged LGBT+ business people accountable to no one but themselves and more concerned with the footfall for West End businesses than engaging with the lives of LGBT+ people outside their privileged circle.

The popular reaction to the film Pride was political. For the generation that had witnessed the tidal wave of opposition to Thatcher, who had been repulsed by her branding mining communities ‘the enemy within’ and her determination to starve those communities back to work, Pride was as much their story as ours. Activists from all communities, of all sexualities, identified with our story and were thrilled to see shared values and ideals celebrated on screen.

Young people who had no previous contact with trade unions or activism were moved to show solidarity, to ask which communities are now being marginalised and branded as ‘the enemy within’, to reclaim the principles that inspired LGBT+ activists and trade unionists involved in the UK Gay Liberation Front, Gay Left and many LGBT+ trade union groups who started to change our world in the 1970s and who inspired many of us in LGSM. I thought Stephen Beresford had very cleverly chosen ‘Bread and Roses’ for Bronwen Lewis to sing in the film to remind us of Rose Eiderman, the early 20th century American trade unionist and women’s suffrage campaigner closely associated with that slogan. It turns out he just loved the song! But it remains true that LGBT+ people and working-class LGBT+ people in particular have always been part of progressive struggles around the world.

For many, the film offered an opportunity to advance these ideas and these values – not just in the UK but around the globe. In North America, from Montreal to Hawaii; in Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands; in Mexico, Turkey and Denmark; in Warsaw and Palermo, Nicola, other original members of LGSM and I have been privileged to share LGSM’s story, and increasingly, the stories of younger activists and trade unionists who are supporting refugees, housing activists, disability rights campaigners. They are speaking out against racism, Islamophobia and the demonisation of welfare recipients, and opposing the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich under cover of the austerity agenda.

These reactions to the film were part of a much wider reaction against the neo-liberal agenda manifested in the mass popularity of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, the rise of industrial militancy and public support for striking doctors and other workers.

As disabled LGBT+ people face the withdrawal of essential benefits, as homelessness among queer youth rockets, as NHS managers dither over the provision of PrEP to prevent HIV infection and LGBT+ migrants face a desperately uncertain future, the need to address what went so wrong for the project of LGBT+ liberation is urgent and pressing.

The publishing of an updated version of Nicola’s book which provides an essential starting point for this debate could not be more timely.

Gethin Roberts

Original member of LGSM

London, April 2016

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE 2016 EDITION

Any shortcomings in the new material for this edition of Over the Rainbow are entirely my own but I owe a huge debt to the generous people who helped me with practical support, ideas and insights.

Marven Scott of the Marxist Internet Archive undertook the painstaking job of transcribing the original pages of the book, as only a comrade would.

For encouragement, honest advice, suggestions, reading and discussion, thanks are due to Roddy Slorach, Richard Bromhall, Laura Miles, Noel Halifax, Sally Campbell, Sam Fairbrother and Sheila McGregor.

Eileen Short edited the entire text with accuracy and understanding. Ben Windsor created the thrilling cover.

Elly Barnes, Jonathan Blake and Gethin Roberts kindly wrote insightful forewords.

Leo Zeilig, Anthony Arnove of Haymarket Press and Ramsey Kanaan of PM Press all encouraged the republication of Over the Rainbow, and made suggestions on how it could be achieved. In particular Paul Field (no relation, but I wish he was) gave moral support and helped me find the right words at critical moments.

Wonderful Anne Beech at Pluto Books made the process of reproducing the original book possible. Adam Lowe at Dog Horn Publishing took the brave step of offering to publish this new edition. His commitment has been steadfast. Charlotte Maxwell at Dog Horn has made light of publicity work.

Pamela Morton at the NUJ gave legal advice.

My fellow members of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and all our supporters were a source of ideas, energy and life-lessons. All the events I attended with them fed my imagination and my commitment to continuing to write about LGBT+ politics and class.

Colin Clews sent me clippings from his online archive Gay in the 80s.

Without all the people who contributed to the crowdfund, this book would not exist. They are:

Laura Miles, Al Garthwaite, Pascal Ansell, Rashida Islam, Lawrence Molloy, Djibril al-Ayad, Chloe Purcell, Jordan Rivera, Sue Caldwell, Sharon McDuell, Hilary Chuter, Ursla Hawthorne, Cathy Cross, Si McGurk, Sally Kincaid, Sara Todd, ‘actoncurrer’, Kate Mayer, Clare Cunningham, John Eccles, Stephen Beresford, Laura Salisbury, Michael Dance, Rahul Patel, Tim Evans, Phil Rowan, Roddy Slorach, Patrick Carmody, Catherine Grant, Lorraine Liyanage, Ben Field, Janyce Quigley, Jeff Cole, Petra Knickmeyer, Mark Dunk, Hope Lye, Can Yildiz, Phil Jones, Arthur Shaw, Peter Dwyer, Joanne Kelly, George McKay, Martin Adams, Janine Broderick, Esra Ozban, Diarmaid Kelliher, Cera Davies, Kate Douglas, Jade Evans, Sarah Cox, ‘jhiacynt’, Merlin Reader, Geoff Dexter, Catherine Booth, Samuel Solomon, George Binette, John Molyneux, Jill Kemp, Jonathan Blake.

Hilary Chuter is a staunch friend and walking mate; her loyalty has kept me going through happy and difficult times.

Geoff Dexter had the idea of getting Over the Rainbow republished. He has become a beloved friend and comrade whose political and creative brilliance never fail to inspire me. I dedicate this new edition to him.

NOTES ON TERMINOLOGY AND PERSPECTIVE

Over the Rainbow: Money, Class and Homophobia, originally published by Pluto Books in 1995, was written at a time when the LGBT+ movement rarely embraced bisexuality and trans people. For that reason, the original text of the book, which remains intact in this edition, addresses trans issues only in passing. The chapter Bisexuality, however, represented a theoretical and political challenge to the lesbian and gay movement of the 1990s. My preferred present-day ‘movement’ term is LGBT+. However flawed, this ‘label’ offers common ground, openness and inclusivity. My usage includes the whole range of sexuality self-definitions, such as genderfluid, pansexual, demisexual, asexual, agender, intersex, queer and questioning, cis, non-cis and so on, with no exclusions.

‘Queer’ as an all-inclusive term is something I am slower to adopt. It has a dual connotation which is still evolving because history and language are still evolving. For my generation – I was born in 1960 – the term ‘queer’ was a horrible insult denoting abnormality, contamination, outsiderness and unnaturalness. And I am not alone in struggling to eradicate this association from my psyche. On the other hand ‘queer’ has been adopted by radical, younger activists and artists to carve out a counterculture which fosters new ideas about human expression, resistance and actualisation. So I remain open to embracing ‘queer’ until it becomes easier.

Overarching all the debates about terminology, however, is the principle of unity. For me the point is to think, argue and act together. That’s why I prefer to stick to LGBT+ rather than add on all the initials to extend the acronym, as I believe the latter distracts its users from the real issue by focussing their efforts on deciding which letters should go into the acronym. Terminology shifts and changes, but the need to unite and fight for human and sexual liberation remains paramount.

As a Londoner, I write from a UK-based perspective, but I hope the analysis is relevant or of interest to all who take part in the struggle for LGBT+ freedom, because we all live in a world dominated by capitalism and class. I hope that readers will find ways to adapt the material to their own circumstances, and seek their own examples to apply the book’s principles.

Class is not just one in a range of intersecting oppressions. It is the fundamental structural condition in which we live, and the key social and economic mechanism upon which the capitalist system depends. Because I believe the central issue of divisions in the movement, commercialisation and the need for class unity remain the same as they did in 1995, I have decided to let the original text of the book stand, and simply added a new chapter. I believe there are lessons from its insights into the zeitgeist of 1990s LGBT+ history that we can relate to the current context. Therefore, neither Dog Horn Publishing nor I have changed a single word of it.

If I were writing this book today, there are undoubtedly some aspects I would write differently. I tended to subject the proponents of single-issue, cultural, direct-action and identity politics with the same searing critique that I applied to the gay businesspeople I interviewed for the book. In retrospect, I think I could have taken a friendlier approach to their activism and emphasised its value as well as its limitations. However, my respect for their commitment extends to a certainty that they can withstand a comradely challenge and a trust that they will accept my amends.

CHAPTER FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: OVER THERAINBOW REVISITED

So much has changed in the UK and many other countries since I wrote Over the Rainbow: Money, Class and Homophobia (OTR). We have many more legal and institutional rights, a high level of positive media visibility, and the extraordinary and mixed blessing of same-sex marriage. The movement is much more inclusive. None of this seemed very possible or likely in the mid-1990s, so it would be reasonable to ask how the book might be relevant for the LGBT+ movement today. The answer readers have given me is that, in the brutal age of austerity and war, OTR’s appraisal of why there are splits and divisions in the movement, its critique of commercialisation of Pride marches and of identity politics, its analysis of the economic roots of LGBT+ oppression, and its call for resistance on the basis of working-class solidarity, are needed now more than ever. I am grateful to have the opportunity, in this introduction, to revisit the themes of the book, explore how it came to be written and describe the catalyst for its republication now in 2016. It is my hope that the book will resonate with those who want to uproot LGBT+ oppression rather than continue to simply grapple with it, and who are open to looking beyond the ‘community’ for the power to really change the world.

OTR contains an early account of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), which I wrote without even acknowledging that I had been one of the group. It just didn’t seem important at the time because the story of LGSM was little known, and my priority in 1994 was to critique attempts to build a unified political LGBT+ movement on the basis of a ‘community’ of shared sexual identity. I interviewed a number of gay businesspeople, showing how their interest in making profits and commercialising the movement meant they had very little in common with the majority of LGBT+ people. OTR tackled the way people thought about how to fight LGBT+ oppression in the 1990s, and used the story of LGSM to illustrate where the real power to build a new society lies. This story was virtually unknown until 2014. Then, thanks to the persistence and imagination of screenwriter Stephen Beresford, the powerful feature film Pride revealed the story to an unsuspecting worldwide audience. Today, I am able to write about how we may learn from LGSM and the politics of the 1980s by looking beyond the story told in that film, to reflect more deeply than I did in 1994 on the contradictory effect of the strike on the course of our history.

ThePrideEffect

Anyone who has seen the film Pride knows about a historic day in June 1985 when coalminers from the Dulais valley in South Wales joined the Lesbian and Gay Pride parade in London, UK. The miners and their families were returning the solidarity and support they had received from London-based LGBT+ activists during their monumental 1984-85 industrial strike against the Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s administration had hatched a secret plan to destroy the coal industry in Britain and cow the organised working class by crushing – with brute force – the country’s most powerful and organised trade union: the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The miners, led by union president Arthur Scargill, responded to the threat of pit closures and mass unemployment by walking out on indefinite strike, without a ballot, and staying out for a whole year, in the face of extreme hardship, police violence and politically motivated media smears. Their courageous action was, and still is, an inspirational, salutary lesson to millions across the world. That joyous contingent on the Pride parade in 1985 was part of a seismic historical shakedown.

As depicted in the film Pride, we marched with our banners –Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and Lesbians Against Pit Closures (LAPC)–from Hyde Park to the South Bank, where we gathered for the Pride party celebrations and to show our exhibition telling the story of LGSM and LAPC through photos, memorabilia and press clippings from the strike. Our exhibition stands were set up alongside the bright red van with a pink triangle on the side, bought for the Dulais Valley community with funds raised by LGSM. We sold solidarity badges, miners’ lamps, our ‘Pits and Perverts’ t-shirts and tickets for our alternative post-Pride party at the London Lesbian and Gay Centre1 in Cowcross Street. Siân James, a miner’s wife who helped establish the Neath and Dulais Valley Support Group during the strike (and later became the first ever woman member of parliament for Swansea East), addressed the crowds that afternoon on a stage set up on the South Bank next to County Hall 2 to rapturous applause. She said it had been the ‘best and friendliest’ demonstration she had ever been on. Meeting gay people had a profound effect on the people of Dulais, she explained. ‘When they first heard you were coming to town, older people in the village wanted to know what they should do. “Just act natural,” we said. Now they ask, “When are those lovely people coming down again?”’. She promised that Dulais miners would be there to support gays, just as gays had been there when Dulais needed support.3

As Pride relates in its closing sequence, the Trades Union Congress (TUC)4 in 1985 voted to formally adopt a policy on lesbian and gay rights and, the next year, the Labour Party followed suit. Attempts to get these proposals through had been made many times before, by LGBT+ members of public sector unions and by campaigning Labour Party members. What shifted it this time was the solid backing of the giant NUM 5, due to its members’ experiences of community and class solidarity during the bitter, brave and extraordinary strike.

Striking miners and LGBT+ socialist activists were an unexpected subject for a mainstream movie but this film’s warmth, humour and authenticity captured hearts and minds. We are often told that prejudice and ignorance take years, even generations, to break down, as shifts in attitudes take place slowly, rather like the gradual erosion of mountainous rock by wind and rain. The LGSM/LAPC story showed that, in the heat of class struggle, when we need to link arms and unite against the common enemy to defend our lives and our communities, prejudice and preconceptions can come tumbling down.

The response to Pride proved so powerful that the remaining original members of LGSM and LAPC re-formed for a year so that we could respond to the overwhelming number of international requests for speakers to address the tidal wave of enthusiasm. For those former members of LGSM and LAPC who came forward, our experience of the film’s impact was a political and personal revelation. The timing was perfect; the film came out exactly thirty years after the strike and so became part of a raft of commemorative political events and initiatives. We witnessed an extraordinary live reaction unfold through screenings in schools, festivals, trade union events, cinemas, universities, community centres and meeting halls in London, New York, Montreal, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Ankara, Istanbul, Warsaw, Moscow, Sydney, Birmingham, Bristol, Dublin, Newcastle and Manchester – to name but a few.

Social media networks sprang up to connect thousands of supporters around the world who wanted to link up to build solidarity, and to get involved in political campaigning in their own countries and communities. LGSM member Mike Jackson got hold of the replica LGSM banner from the Pride art department. We took it on picket lines and demonstrations, making collections and delivering financial solidarity and moral support to strikes and campaigns over austerity, racism, housing, privatisation, the Living Wage and other political/community issues. We reproduced our ‘Pits and Perverts’ t-shirts and posters, brought out new badges and were disconcerted to find ourselves accosted at merchandise stalls by people who wanted to have their picture taken with us. We raised money and awareness for the Terrence Higgins Trust’s Red Ribbon support fund set up in memory of LGSM founder Mark Ashton, who died of HIV/AIDS in 1987, aged 26.

We were also asked by the organisers of Pride in London to lead the parade in 2015. I will return to this later.

It was clear to me, amid the sometimes embarrassing media hype and celebrity fever surrounding LGSM, and from the debates I witnessed around the screenings and meetings, that the enthusiastic and emotional reaction to the film was an expression of a deep political hunger for an effective fightback against present-day oppression and exploitation. To everyone who remembered supporting the strike, and to young people born years after it ended, the story of LGSM offered a new symbol of unity, solidarity and defiance which went far beyond what many in the original group had anticipated. A new generation of young activists were seething with anger at attacks on their lives through conservatism, bigotry and heteronormativity (which in the 1980s we called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’). They were facing the housing crisis, soaring rents, tuition fees, abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance, zero-hours contracts, cuts in health and social care, welfare ‘reform’, racism, Islamophobia, immigration controls, and all the horrors of austerity, racism and imperialism. Pride’s story of a community under attack from a bigoted right-wing Tory government, and offering unconditional support to another beleaguered section of society, struck a chord with a new audience. If it could happen in 1984, could it happen now? If a force such as the NUM could be defeated, what did this mean for the future of collective struggle?

For some in the audiences who had experience of collective struggle and activism, in or outside trade unions, there was a feeling that social media and privatisation had lured the younger generations towards individualised and perhaps more passive approaches such as consumer boycotts and petition-signing. Due to the decreased level of strikes in the UK since the 1980s, and the half-hearted attempts of trade union leaders to challenge austerity, many young people in those audiences were questioning whether a strike like the miners’ strike would be possible today, and how relevant trade unions are to young workers now. Listening to their heartfelt questions about the best ways to challenge austerity, I realised perhaps more acutely than before, the detrimental effect the defeat of the miners’ strike had on working-class confidence. A sense that governments have unlimited power and can do what they like, however much it hurts ordinary people, is the new status quo seeping through the generations; the view that individuals only care about themselves and selfishness is an indelible human characteristic has become normative. I was also struck by a second legacy of the strike’s defeat in the various forms of postmodern arguments that go something like this: if the pursuit of profit, regardless of human need, is an inevitable social dynamic, and if mass struggle is now impossible, then the brutality of capitalist economics can only be tackled at the level of personal defiance, individual solutions, the politics of shared identity, and localised community initiatives. In the LGBT+ movement, this often translates into focussing on the creation of ‘queer space’ or ‘safe space’ for a perceived LGBT+ ‘community’. It’s understandable, but it misses the fact that LGBT+ do not all belong to one community, and it won’t change the world.

I believe that if we are to rid the world of sexual oppression and LGBT+phobia, we must go further and be much bolder. There is another legacy of the miners’ strike to which we can turn. This is the tradition of learning lessons from the past, honestly and unflinchingly, seeing the mistakes made on our own side so that we may avoid the same mistakes again. This tradition makes us fiercer and clearer; it is the key to understanding that in fighting oppression and exploitation we have to be prepared to confront the forces and structure of the state in a revolutionary way. The real story behind Pride is a good place to start on this journey.

No Fairy Tale

Pride created a romantic comedy from LGSM, but it’s vital not to romanticise the story or allow it to become a historical curiosity, nostalgia trip, or idealistic fairy tale. For me as a still-active socialist, revisiting the experience of LGSM has been a sharp reminder of how tough life was for LGBT+ people during the Thatcher period, and of the critical importance of the strike then and now.

Pride intimated that the TUC and Labour Party policies on sexuality rights were a direct result of or even ‘payback’ for the work of LGSM. In truth, a trade union can only change policy if enough members and branches agree. The new policy on lesbian and gay rights at the TUC in 1985 was only possible because of a general political development within the NUM’s grassroots across the rural pit communities, along with political radicalisation and awareness of the power of industrial struggle amongst the multicultural and cosmopolitan populations of Britain’s cities. South Wales-based NUM activist Dai Donovan (played by Paddy Considine in Pride) addressed a huge audience at LGSM’s ‘Pits and Perverts’ strike fundraiser in Camden’s Electric Ballroom in December 1984 6, saying:

‘You have worn our badge, “Coal Not Dole”, and you know what harassment means, as we do. Now we will pin your badge on us, we will support you. It won’t change overnight, but now 140,000 miners know that there are other causes and other problems. We know about blacks and gays and nuclear disarmament and we will never be the same… Victory to the old, victory to the sick, victory to lesbians and gays, and victory to the working class!’

There may have been, as Pride dramatically depicts, homophobic opposition in South Wales to receiving solidarity from a lesbian and gay group. But LGSM experienced no tangible negativity either on the first visit to South Wales, or subsequently. Solidarity for the strike was a two-way process whose trajectory was highly contradictory in light of the eventual outcomes: defeat of the strike, alongside a highly raised level of political awareness and ideas across the British working class. This is a perfect example of the ‘dialectic’, fundamental to understanding any political situation at any time. It can be summed up as ‘every cloud has a silver lining – and vice versa’. The defeat of the strike contained a silver lining of a generalised heightened political engagement and level of awareness of oppression. The strike itself was pure silver, surrounded by dark clouds of Tory intention and the TUC’s timidity. So, how did this dual narrative play out?

Pride only obliquely articulated the reason for the strike: to stop mass pit closures, save jobs and preserve communities. An enormous volume of material now exists about the miners’ strike and I want to focus here on the links between class struggle and fighting oppression and bigotry. But it’s vital to understand that the Tories under Thatcher had dual tactical and ideological purposes in shutting the coal mines. They were determined to weaken the entire trade union movement and to privatise industries like coal, taken into public ownership by previous Labour administrations. Key militant trade union officials and representatives were victimised and sacked to neuter the resistance before the shut-downs and redundancies began. The Tories dismantled nationalised car manufacturing in 1979 and the steel industry in 1980. Civil servants who worked in intelligence at GCHQ were stripped of the right to strike in 1981. Train drivers were forced to accept inhumane shift rotas in 1982, the same year health workers’ pay was cut. 7 All those workers fought, demonstrated and struck. The TUC stood by and allowed each union and each group of workers to be beaten. It came as little surprise when the miners were chosen for the next Tory battleground. Sheila McGregor, a socialist activist who helped organise political solidarity during the strike, summarises:

‘The miners had defeated the ruling class twice, once in 1972 when their strike drove a coach and horses through the pay policy of the day, and then again in 1974 when Tory prime minister Ted Heath decided to call an election on who should run the country—and lost. The Tories never forgot and never forgave. They wanted to defeat the miners in open battle, so they prepared for a strike. As Thatcher’s chancellor Nigel Lawson recalled the preparations, it was “just like re-arming to face the threat of Hitler in the late 1930s”. One of Thatcher’s ministers, Nicholas Ridley, was the architect of a strategy based on simple principles. Only take on one group of workers at a time to avoid solidarity between workers. Introduce anti-union laws … and allow for the fining of unions and the sequestration of funds. And change welfare legislation to deprive strikers and their families of social security support … they built up coal stocks, diversified the provision of power, organised pools of lorry drivers to move coal and established a National Reporting Centre at New Scotland Yard to coordinate police intervention. The police were given an additional 11,000 officers trained in riot control. Ian MacGregor, one of those behind the sacking of convenor Derek Robinson in 1979 from Longbridge, a key car plant in Birmingham, and then butcher of the steel industry in 1981, was appointed chair of the National Coal Board (NCB) in September 1983. The day after Thatcher was re-elected in 1983, she appointed Peter Walker, a veteran of the 1972 days, as Minister of Energy with the words, “We’re going to have a miners’ strike.” So when battle was finally engaged with the shock announcement of the closure of Cortonwood colliery on 1 March 1984, the Tories were embarking on civil war. A special cabinet committee met twice weekly to ensure centralised coordination. A year later the Tories had won.’8

Pride didn’t explain why the strike failed. The official reasons, provided by the TUC, government and media alike, is that the strike failed because Thatcher, the government and the forces of the state were just too strong for ordinary workers to overcome. (Riot police were joined by undercover operations and traffic control to stop miners and their supporters travelling to key picket lines; the courts fined and imprisoned strikers and supporters). In fact, the strike could have been won quickly, but for the failures and treachery of the trade union and Labour Party leaderships. As Sheila McGregor’s article goes on to outline, secondary strike action could have provided the solidarity required to secure a decisive victory against the Tories.

Two lessons are particularly relevant to the LGSM story today. One is that in failing to co-ordinate secondary industrial action to support the strike against pit closures, the miners were left, tragically and unnecessarily, to fight alone. The second is that the government’s seizure of NUM assets, and the failure of other union leaders, who feared sequestration and confrontation more than political defeat, to take the crucial secondary action, left striking miners and their communities absolutely reliant on activists organising locally. Trade union branches began to twin with mining villages to co-ordinate the transfer of provisions in order to combat starvation. A wider layer of political activists: black organisations, women’s groups, lesbians and gays, students – people hated by Thatcher and who utterly opposed her divisive agenda of cuts, privatisation and bigotry, rose up to defend the miners. Millions mobilised and everyone took sides. In a concentrated and focussed way, as the people of Europe are today to counteract the EU’s anti-refugee bigotry, working-class people in Britain and internationally took action in 1984-5 to keep the miners’ strike afloat.

This fundraising effort was the trigger for LGSM, alongside many other community-based support groups. So the very existence of LGSM was contradictory. It arose out of a weakness and failure of the organised working class to respond fully to the attacks by the Thatcher administration. On the other hand, it was part of an outpouring of solidarity, organisation and commitment which raised the political levels of groups and campaigns fighting discrimination. It offered miners the chance to connect their fight with wider social issues, and civil rights campaigners and others the chance to find out where real power to resist lies within capitalist society. It created a fusion of political direction. The prominent political role of women in the strike – women who had never previously considered a role beyond domesticity – changed lives for many, and put a permanent stop to topless female models being featured in the NUM’s newspaper, The Miner. The strike was a hotbed of ideas, a university of unity.

Pride hints at contemporary political tides within the LGBT+ movement. Jonathan’s character is portrayed as a disillusioned radical activist from the Gay Liberation Front of the 1970s. The highly politicised atmosphere of 1980s London, and its lesbian and gay scene bristling with political and community experimentation, is forcefully expressed. The fact of a lesbian and gay miners support group was not in itself surprising, though it took socialists to make LGSM happen in the way it did. LGSM in London, the group featured in Pride, was part of a larger response to the miners’ need for solidarity, as the attacks on the union escalated. Amongst LGBT+ communities, there were ten LGSM groups in the UK, and one in Dublin. London LGSM was founded by Mark Ashton – a leading activist in the Young Communist League – and Mike Jackson, also a committed socialist. They collected funds for the miners on Lesbian and Gay Pride in London in 1984 and called a meeting of other lesbian and gay socialists to launch a group which would organise solidarity, and spread the word of the importance and relevance of the strike to LGBT+ people in London.

That relevance was all about resisting ‘divide and rule’, a key tactic of governments, then and now. Urged on by political poison and media hysteria, people are pulled towards believing that the deprivations and difficulties they face are caused by other working-class people and marginalised groups.

The current scapegoats for this type of state-sanctioned hate in the UK are disabled people (framed as ‘benefit scroungers’), refugees (dehumanised as ‘migrants’) and Muslims (portrayed as ‘terrorists’). Back in the mid-1980s, LGBT+ people were perceived by the right as posing a challenge to the institution of the family. Given the option, it was feared, everyone might opt to choose a same-sex partner and cock a snook at heterosexual romantic love.

This was in the days when lesbians often lost the right to bring up their children, the police regularly staked out gay bars and clubs; when kissing your partner in the street could lead to prosecution, and LGBT+ people lost jobs because of their sexuality. The lawful age of consent for sex between consenting male adults ‘in private’ was 21, compared with 16 for heterosexual sex. Bereaved partners could be evicted from their homes by landlords, and homophobic families could prevent LGBT+ people from visiting their ill or dying partners. The idea of same-sex marriage belonged to the realms of Shakespearean fairytale fantasy. Policing varied from constant harassment to outright repression. There was no category for homophobic or transphobic hate crime, and LGBT+ people who experienced attacks because of their sexuality, and dared to report it, were more likely to face arrest for crimes against public decency themselves. Protests related to LGBT+ issues were attacked by the police, with marchers beaten and arrested. There were no openly LGBT+ police officers, only one openly gay Member of Parliament (Chris Smith), no LGBT+ soap characters. In April 1984 customs officers, citing legislation from 1876, raided Gay’s the Word (the bookshop made famous in the film Pride), seized works by Oscar Wilde, Armistead Maupin, Tennessee Williams, Kate Millet and Jean-Paul Sartre – then charged the shop’s directors and manager with conspiracy to import indecent or obscene material (the case was later thrown out). Thatcher’s notorious Section 28, outlawing ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in schools, and the massive campaign to stop it, were yet to come.

The homophobic, right-wing Christian campaigner Mary Whitehouse was a household name for her anti-sex campaign against ‘permissiveness’ in the mass media. In 1987, following a screening of a film on HIV/AIDS, South Staffordshire council’s Tory leader Bill Brownhill said:

‘I should shoot them all… It is disgusting and diabolical. As a cure, I would put 90% of queers in the ruddy gas chambers. Are we going to keep letting these queers trade their filth up and down the country? … some are even being knighted.’

The leader of the council’s Labour Group, Jack Greenaway, echoed Brownhill’s message, intoning: ‘Every one of us here will agree with what has been said.’ 9

1987 also saw the firebombing of London’s Capital Gay newspaper office. Tabloid headlines like ‘GAS GAYS SAYS TORY: Answer to AIDS’ and ‘Lessons on gays “threat to life”’ stoked up hatred and reinforced prejudice and bigotry.

Lesbian and gay people were subjected to a horrific barrage of politically co-ordinated media abuse. When right-wing tabloid The Sun dubbed HIV/AIDS the ‘Gay Plague’, it began a toxic tsunami of hysterical and panic-stricken media stories with headlines that included: ‘Britain threatened by gay virus plague’ (Mail on Sunday); ‘Blood from gay donor puts 41 at AIDS risk’ (The Sun); ‘AIDS is the wrath of God, says vicar’ (The Sun); ‘March of the gay plague’ (News of the World). 10

In the final scene of Pride, a march organiser dismisses LGSM as ‘too political’; this dramatises a real perennial tension within the LGBT+ movement. However, state repression and crude discrimination meant the movement of the mid-1980s had protest at its heart, even amongst those who would always have preferred a party.

Pride’s negative portrayal of the initiative to set up Lesbians Against Pit Closures, however, is misplaced. I was part of this initiative, with others including Polly Vittorini and Wendy Caldon. For me it grew out of my first encounters in the LGSM group. My first LGSM meeting was a room full of men and just one other woman. Although I was then a somewhat inactive member of the Labour Party, here I found members of the Communist Party, Revolutionary Communist Party, and different sections of the Labour Party, all disagreeing with each other on finer points which I found quite bewildering. Many were already friends and initially I felt ill at ease. (This sense of being on the edge lessened as time went on, but never entirely went away.) Afterwards, the other woman at that meeting, Kate, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, came round to where I lived in Deptford. We decorated a bucket, went to a local gay club and collected some money – and that’s how I learnt how to start building community solidarity for the miners.

Together with Kate and her partner Sally, I started to go to lots of lesbian-only nights up in town – Rackets, the Drill Hall, the Fallen Angel on Tuesdays, and the Bell on Wednesdays – places I was used to going to socially. I was quite nervous, thinking that people would be hostile because they’d judge the miners as sexist and homophobic, but actually there was a warm response and solidarity that I hadn’t expected. Lots of women had come to London from areas similar to the mining communities, and they understood better than I did how devastating pit closures would be, socially and economically. This gave me confidence and inspiration to keep going. I met other women in these clubs who wanted to form a lesbian-only support group. I wasn’t a separatist and believed in unity, so I had to reason it out tactically. LGSM members were already collecting in men-only venues where women couldn’t go. The men couldn’t come in the women’s clubs, and many women chose not to go to mixed events, so forming a lesbian-only group could increase the amount of money collected. So I helped to form LAPC and was active in both groups. The separation, even now, can be interpreted as simultaneously both positive and negative: the way these weave together is how struggle against oppression and exploitation within and against the capitalist system develops. The shattering effect of the miners’ defeat on the workers’ movement, the heightened hatred and determination to keep fighting against Thatcher, and the resulting politicisation all fed into a new contradictory political climate, the context for Over the Rainbow.

Like many socialists who had supported the miners, I was demoralised by the defeat of the strike. I left the Labour Party; it had ceased to offer me any kind of inspiration and had betrayed my faith in its socialist principles. The policies passed by the TUC and Labour Party translated not into a fusion of class struggle and sexual politics, but a bureaucratisation of LGBT representation characterised by committees – I was on one of them!—working parties, training programmes and executive positions. They did good work examining the issue of equality in the workplace and the union, but it was divorced from economic and industrial issues. A large section of the movement for sexual liberation shifted away from class struggle. Like other LGBT+ socialists, although I understood the need to continue resisting Thatcher’s assault on working-class life and organisation, for the rest of the 1980s I went with the movement into identity politics and its offspring: cultural production, direct action and single-issue campaigning.

It was through another political upsurge in 1990 that I realised there was another side to the left, a side that had learned the lessons of the Miners’ Strike as it was happening and was still committed to fighting oppression on a class basis. It was when I moved out of identity politics into that revolutionary dimension that my perspective was transformed and it became possible for me to write about class and LGBT+ liberation.

WritingOver the Rainbow

I began to write OTR in 1993, when serious commercialisation and professionalisation of the movement began to take hold in the UK, though legal and social inequality persisted. The concept of the ‘pink pound’ was moving beyond the niche gay nightclubs, fetish clothing and specialist publishing, and into the mainstream. Alcohol, tobacco and clothing companies took out ads in the gay consumer press. Openly gay entrepreneurs opened up slick, bright, confident bars on main thoroughfares instead of the old-style windowless hostelries hidden in dark alleys. Law firms and financial services actively sought affluent gays to join their clientele. It was a kind of ‘gentrification’ of gay areas like London’s Soho – simultaneously refreshing and socially exclusive. Some hailed the ‘pink economy’ as a new path to liberation. With its chapters on Identity and the Lifestyle Market and Hostile Brothers, OTR examined the values and trajectory of this market-led approach.

Bisexuality, intersexuality and trans issues were sidelined and largely ignored by the movement. Although bisexual, I felt under intense pressure to conform to something we would now call homonormativity, and wrote about the material reasons for this in the Bisexuality chapter, showing how the market needed a fixed clientele to expand the sale of ‘gay identity’.

Many leading LGBT+ activists now felt that collective action, trade union struggle and class solidarity had decisively failed as a strategy. They thought socialism was finished and the transformation of society as a whole now impossible; LGBT+ people had to make alternative lifestyle choices and buy a way out of oppression, demanding civil rights on the basis of political lobbying and consumer choice.

The ideological impact of the miners’ defeat led to a general reduction of trade union confidence. When strikes and industrial struggle did take place, the false separation between the fight for jobs, pay and conditions and the fight against oppression kept gaining ground. Unions hived off LGBT+ issues into the arena of ‘equality’ and the power of LGBT+ workplace activists became, ironically, less visible. This may have suited the few seeking a career in equalities policy and management. But it led many activists to seek the roots of oppression within people’s heads and fight it only with ideas and PR, avoiding the thorny issues of that oppression’s social and economic roots. OTR took up all these issues in the chapters on Romance and Reform.

At the same time, a right-wing backlash from politicians and the media promoted conservative family values through a reactionary campaign entitled ‘Back to Basics’. The brainchild of Tory ‘thinker’ David Willetts and his policy document Happy Families11, this promoted the heterosexual, married, nuclear family unit, and discouraged alternative family structures through unfriendly taxation and benefits restructuring, fuelling homophobia. I examined this in OTR’s chapter on Family.

The 1980s and 1990s thus saw lesbian and gay civil rights campaigning increasingly taken up by professional lobbyists, with commercial interests assuming more control within the movement. Members of the Gay Business Association were winning the argument that Pride marches should be more commercial. The annual protest moved further away from its radical roots in the Stonewall Riots of 1969 – when black and Latino trans prostitutes fought hand-to-hand against police harassment in Greenwich Village. The idea of completely changing society in order to get rid of the underlying causes of oppression fell off the agenda. Angling for reform was the only game in town.

There was active resistance and opposition to this ‘respectable’ approach. I knew where that radical energy came from, because I passed through the direct action and cultural activism emanating largely from direct-action groups like ACT UP, Outrage and Lesbian Avengers. These focussed on single issues and targets, not the wider political and social context and structure. LGBT+ writers and artists were busy creating alternative aesthetics based on a supposed shared ‘sensibility’. The two sides of this reformist coin – ‘respectable’ professionalised lobbying versus minority, ultra-left, pop-up and individualised cultural activism – now dominated the movement which became consumed by internal arguments and infighting to gain ascendance and influence.

Over the Rainbow in many ways reflects my own life journey, experiences and political discoveries. I certainly wasn’t born a revolutionary socialist. I grew up in the south of England in the 1960-70s in a family very similar to that of the character Joe in Pride. We lived in a three-bedroomed detached house in a cul-de-sac where husbands went out to work in suits and wives cooked and cleaned and kept everything respectable. I was continually told I wasn’t ‘normal’. Feelings I had that I might be lesbian or bisexual were absolutely terrifying. The words ‘queer’, ‘homo’ and ‘lez’ were bandied about as terms of abuse and ridicule, and being identified as sexually suspect was to be avoided at all costs. At school, a grammar school for girls in a Tory stronghold High Wycombe, same-sex love was mentioned only in Religious Studies. My teacher, a Church of England cleric, referred to a ‘homosexual problem’ which could only be ‘cured’ by religious willpower. Words like ‘gay’, ‘feminist’ and ‘black’, were part of a strange, unnatural world on television. I became the first person in my family to go to university (thanks to free tuition and a maintenance grant). There I met socialists, feminists, anti-racists and out gay people, had my first lesbian relationship, and gradually began to realise that the world was unfair and the right thing to do was to fight injustice. Taking part in the process of struggle and being exposed to new ideas got me into the resistance. Socialists showed me how different oppressions were connected and that we needed to support and campaign for each other. My first march was through the royal town of Windsor, demonstrating against hikes in tuition fees for overseas students.

I came out in the early 1980s when I joined a video project which went on to make a Channel 4 programme called Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts. This film was a departure: it was made by young lesbians and gays, rather than professionals talking ‘about’ us. It was a painful time for me personally, as both my parents were absolutely horrified when I came out. They made it clear I was to hide my sexuality within the wider family or risk rejection. I returned to that experience when I came to write OTR ten years later. By that time, I had come to understand the ideological and economic role that the institution of the family plays in reinforcing and reproducing the rigid notions of gender expression and gender roles which underpin sexism and homophobia. Prejudiced ideas don’t come from inside people’s heads, they are learned through conditioning and nurtured by social structures and dominant cultural norms. People cling to them because they offer a false but much needed sense of belonging and safety; those who don’t conform can face punishment, even exile. Writing the chapter on Family enabled me to make political sense of the outright rejection I had experienced as a young person.

In the 1980s the lesbian and gay movement gained momentum – and so did the Thatcher government. I joined the Labour Party and found members interested in working on oppression issues were on the fringes of the party. Homophobia was rife because the leadership felt that sexuality rights issues would put people off voting Labour. Later, writing OTR, I discovered a lot more about how the Labour Party accommodates both resistance and adaption to capitalism and oppression, and how this leads to principles being compromised and resistance being paralysed.

In March 1984, the Miners’ Strike kicked off. A friend from the Framed Youth project, Jeff Cole, joined LGSM and said I should come along. Over the Rainbow’s final chapter, its most important statement about the link between class and sexual liberation, was set in motion at that moment. Entitled Class Struggle, it brought together as much material as I could find at the time about how people could use their collective power as workers (without whom nothing would get made or done, and no profits could be generated) to challenge and fight LGBT+ oppression. Alongside a story about transgender bus workers, the central story is as far as I know, the earliest first-hand record of LGSM published in a book.

After the Miners’ Strike, I shared a house with Derek Hughes, a friend from LGSM who taught English in a secondary school, was active in the NUT trade union and worked hard to develop teaching around lesbian and gay issues as a member of the Gay Teachers Association. I learned so much from him. Derek and I and many of our friends were socialists who understood that fighting for LGBT+ liberation was part of fighting for a more equal society, but after the Miners’ defeat, we were drawn into the confusions and inwardnesses of identity politics. We sometimes competed – often jokingly – to see who was ‘more oppressed’; it reflected an underlying tension and political misunderstanding.

In 1986, working on a film about lesbian and gay employment rights, I met Sheila, a fellow filmmaker and artist who became my partner and introduced me to Gramsci. The original text of OTR is dedicated to her. When, like LGSM founder Mark Ashton and other friends, Derek died of HIV, Sheila and I were propelled into the world of HIV/AIDS campaigning. I joined the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACTUP), the UK incarnation of Lesbian Avengers, and the volunteer-driver team at my local HIV support centre in Brixton. Our cultural activism and direct action politics, described in the Cultural Activism chapter in OTR, was radical and hard-edged, but it had lost the class perspective that had been so important during the Miners’ Strike.

Although we were passionate about our artistic work and our political causes, Sheila and I became frustrated by cultural activism. I had begun working for a community project that worked around issues of HIV prevention and drug use, and was acutely aware that poverty and class were underpinning the pandemic. Together Sheila and I started to find out about