In my report, I will look at the way the British press reported on significant LGBTQ+ issues, from the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting men over the age of 21, to the current issues; legalisation of gay marriage in Northern Ireland and the proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act.
By the end of the report I hope to set out clearly the ways in which LGBTQ+ reporting has progressed in some ways, and failed to progress in others, alongside the development of the queer rights movements in the United Kingdom, as well as the valid criticisms that members of the LGBTQ+ community still have of the press and their actions.
This literature review will look at the material already available on British queer history, and on the history of the British press’ reporting, attitudes, and stance on prominent queer issues.
The first source I viewed was ‘A timeline of LGBTQ communities in the UK’ from the British Library website (SURNAME, YEAR). The timeline begins with the Buggery Act 1533, and continues to note significant historical events, social changes, and legislative actions that made up British queer history, until 2018. This source was useful, as The British Library is an institution renounced for its historical archives, which validates the accuracy of the content included in the timeline.
However, the fact that the timeline has not been updated for over a year has meant that it is missing a few significant points of progress that the queer rights movement has achieved in the past year, including proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004, and Northern Ireland legalising same-sex marriage. Although, overall the source served as a good starting point for me to begin my research into the attitudes, and actions of the British press around some of the points on the timeline.
The second source I viewed was the book Trans Britain edited by Christine Burns, Burns is a British political activist who is known for her work with Press for Change, a campaign for equality for transgender people in the UK, this shows her validity as the editor of a book about trans history.
The introduction of the book, written by Burns, included in-depth information about some of the points I had noted down from the British Library timeline, such as details about historical trans figures, newspaper clippings, and photographs. However, the most relevant parts of the book were chapters 9 and 17.
Chapter 9: The Press was written by Jane Fae a journalist, as well as a political and sexual liberty campaigner. She writes in detail about the different ways that the UK press treated and wrote about transgender people/issues over the decades, including mentions of significant articles, selections of headlines, and newspaper clippings.
Fae says: “The relationship between the trans community and the press has long been fraught. Over the last few decades, much coverage of trans people and issues has been problematic.” (Fae, Trans Britain, 2018, P187)
She also wrote about how the trans community in the UK reacted to these pieces, both on an individual and community level. One of these examples was the story of Lucy Meadows, a primary school teacher, and trans woman who the press drove to suicide through their persecution of her.
One article in particular that was said as a factor in her death was published in the Daily Mail by journalist Richard Littlejohn, so I went and found this article, as well as others on the subject (Littlejohn 2012, Pidd 2012, Smith 2017, Lees 2013).
Chapter 17: Better Press and TV was written by Helen Belcher, who founded the charity Trans Media Watch, and gave evidence as a charity representative to the Leveson Inquiry in 2012. This chapter showcases the difficulties that have arisen from certain newspapers reporting on trans issues, and ways that her charity have been combatting such issues, and the wider issue of anti-trans bias across the British media.
Information I found in chapter 17 lead me to my next source, the submission that Trans Media Watch put to the Leveson Inquiry in December 2011, this was useful because it included research carried out within the trans community about their feelings towards the press, as well as significant examples of anti-trans bias in the form of articles from the Daily Mail, The Sun, and The Express. Trans Media Watch is a credible source, as it is a registered charity who have been working with the British media for over a decade.
The final source I looked at in terms of the attitudes towards transgender people and issues in the press was the book The Gender Games by author and columnist Juno Dawson, most of the book was irrelevant to my research, as it was an autobiography, but one chapter near the end of the book on TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) was extremely useful as it gave me a better understanding on the issue, and led me to look into examples of TERF attitudes in the press (Miller 2018, Lewis 2017, Cliff 2019, BBC Newsnight 2018, BBC Newsnight 2019, This Morning 2018).
I then continued my research to focus on the press’ treatment of gay men, lesbians, and bisexual people, the first book I read was Good As You, by Paul Flynn, who is a pop cultural commentator for various different publications. The book gave me a good insight into significant points in gay culture, but less information on how the press reacted to said events.
So, I continued my research by looking into the press’ reactions to two points of gay history where the press were particularly anti-gay: Section 28 and the AIDS crisis, I got my information for this from various different articles and videos (Sanderson 2018, PinkNews 2018, Braidwood 2018, The Conversation 2017), I also read the book Gay in the 80s by Colin Clews, for the chapter titled AIDS and the British Press.
Clews said: “By the time I left the Trust (The Terrance Higgins Trust, a HIV/AIDS charity), in October 1985, we’d expanded to two offices and a lot more telephones. Not because of any increased concern about people with AIDS but because of the hysteria generated by the Press.” (Clews, Gay in the 80s, 2017, ebook)
This research lead me to look into the press’ culture of ‘outing’ prominent gay figures, which I continued to read about in different articles. (Wheeler 2012, Baume 2019)
My findings revealed that out of the LGBT+ category, it is the G & T that are most commonly demonised and persecuted by the UK press. While lesbians and bisexual people are often persecuted on an individual/group basis it is usually only for a limited amount of time, and usually with a dismissal of their sexuality-that could be due to misogyny and bi-erasure.
So, in my essay I will focus on how the British press targeted transgender people and gay men, in their ways of reporting on events such as: Section 28, AIDS, and the Gender Recognition Act reform; but also on a generalised discriminatory basis, looking at individual attacks, and use of discriminating attitudes and language.
Ash Jayy 