This engagingly scrappy, righteously angry show marks 20 years since Section 28 of the UK Local Government Act, banning the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities, was fully repealed. Setting personal testimonies, media reports and parliamentary statements to music it shows how ludicrous and lastingly pernicious this law was.
Gay sex was decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967; the Section 28 amendment, passed in 1988 when paranoia about Aids was also rampant, re-stigmatised a generation. The MPs debating the proposal acknowledged that same-sex relationships had always existed. Yet they voted into law a clause suggesting that any non-critical acknowledgment of this, particularly in a school situation, was tantamount to anti-heterosexual propaganda.
