Book Review: "Outrageous" by Paul Baker

Paul Baker's book was one that I found on the second-hand shelf of the Queer Lit bookshop in Ancoats, Manchester. Anytime I have a little bit of time I tend to saunter over there and have a coffee, read a book and hang around. It's, in my opinion, the safest place in the city with some great people. I always feel my shoulders relax and my jaw unclench when I go in. Paul Baker's book deals with the legislation called Section 28 that came into Britain during the Thatcher regime. It stated that homosexuality and anything to do with the LGBT movement should be left altogether out of education. Honestly, not only is this a horrific legislation for the present of the 1980s, it also makes history inaccurate seeing as there was so many important LGBT people throughout the course of human history.

Well, Section 28 is worded as how it is unacceptable to teach homosexuality as an acceptable family structure. It is also worded as a legislation that bans homosexuality being 'promoted'. Now, I don't know about you but absolutely nobody in the history of anyone has 'promoted' homosexuality. If this was the case then the legislation itself would have (by its own admission) produced less homosexual young people rather than an uproar by the checks notes the exact same amount there was going to be anyway. Paul Baker looks at the hilarious stupidity of the law yes, but he also looks at how harmful it was to not only the LGBT movement but the promotion of many progressive values that required to be taught in schools in the post-war era. Thatcher and her cabinet were evil but this really took the damn cake.

Of course the British media fell into line, they always do. They not only pushed the legislation down the throats of the public but they also advertised a faux moral panic around LGBTQ+ culture. One that they created, mixed up and then pushed upon the public in the same way the religious would push a 'satanic panic' upon its followers. They made up salacious and often falsified headlines, and they pushed that children's books featuring gay couples were pushing an agenda on to kids when in fact, those books just existed as nice little children's stories. If the very thought of this falsified panic does not make your blood boil then I don't know what will.

This of course led to school teachers and carers of children and young people not addressing the ideas in the LGBTQ+ sphere meaning that the young people who turned out to be LGBTQ+ would not get the support they required. This means of course, they would be left isolated and normally suffering alone in a world which refused to educate them. It makes me so sad that there were children like this in our own country, in our own modern history and in our own classrooms. Paul Baker tells his own story of how this took place through his eyes and through his own sexual discovery. It's not that it is just about the legislation, it is also that there were real people growing up impacted by this and are still possibly impacted today. Many people don't realise that the trust young people have in adults comes from when they are in school - and if they don't feel like they can trust the people around them, well you've just created a whole host of mental health problems within the person's psyche.

But one thing I enjoyed reading about was the fact that nobody on their side stayed quiet. There were riots, people stormed the news, cultural figures protested and there was a ton of backlash to it from the outset to the day it died. If there's one thing that this book teaches us though is that if we do not keep pushing, things can start rolling back. It can start small, like when people use homophobic language and then it can grow into legislations like when the USA bans LGBTQ+ fiction and nonfiction from school libraries. Denying an education in our fellow person is one sure way to create distrust in young people, whether they are part of the group or not.

If there is one thing we need to learn is that we must not repeat history.

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