Two teachers who inspired the Bafta-nominated film Blue Jean talk about the era of Section 28.
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"I hadn't heard that word for so many years, and my reaction... it was almost visceral," Lee says. "It took all my restraint to not put my fingers in my ears.In the film, Jean, played by Rosy McEwen, must navigate a tricky web of relationships at school and in her private life, at a time when public and political attitudes to homosexuality made it a fierce moral battleground.
Lee is now a professor at Anglia Ruskin University and has just published Pretended: Schools and Section 28, drawing on her diaries from the time. "They've managed to capture the constant inner turmoil. You were constantly vigilant, always having to present this almost two-dimensional version of yourself because you're checking yourself. You're constantly on guard and need to make sure what you're saying doesn't give you away. So you're undercover the whole time.
"I think people did lose their jobs over it, but often it wasn't put down explicitly to Section 28," he says."There was a lot of self-censorship. People were so scared of losing their jobs, or getting into the newspapers, that they just kept quiet. They didn't use certain books in English literature classes and things like that. If there was bullying, they turned a blind eye to it.
"I was also simultaneously thinking about what it must have been like for a queer teacher at that time, and the domino effect on anyone that was a student."
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