Attending secondary school in the early Noughties, in the immediate wake of Section 28’s repeal, was not an enormous amount of fun if you were a queer teenager, to put it mildly. Any crumb of positive representation felt like a distant pipedream; instead, we were treated to the polar extremes of Naomi from Skins sobbing through a cat flap because she was so sad about being a lesbian, and t.A.T.u. frolicking around a playground in school uniforms while their homophobic peers tried to claw at them through a chainlink fence.
Casually homophobic language was rife in the classrooms (everything from running to class to owning a particular pencil case was apparently “gay”). Those brave enough to come out were often bullied relentlessly.
