History Unspoken

The Department of Education in England and Wales decided to cut funding for LGBT History Month in 2007, a move announced in December last year. This raised the questions 'why does LGBT History Month matter?', and, 'why should it be supported by the Education department of the Scottish Executive?'

For the past three years, Scottish funding for LGBT History Month has been for events targeted at the 'LGBT Community': a party in Edinburgh Castle to which high-profile LGBT people are invited, a community worker in LGBT Youth Scotland. In England and Wales, for a couple of years, the DoE actually funded resources for schools. No parallel funding took place in Scotland.

The overlooking of LGBT history in schools had a long history.

Four years ago, the City of Edinburgh Council produced a workbook for schools to commemorate World Holocaust Day. The focus for that year was forgotten victims. Numerous victims were marginalised again, mentioned either briefly within lists, or not at all: gypsies, disabled people, gay men, lesbians, feminists and sex workers. Homophobia was not discussed anywhere in the workbook, although other examples of prejudice were, such as those based on race or religion. The omission was protested, but too late to change the workbook. The thousand or so Edinburgh schoolchildren who attended the World Holocaust Day memorial event at the Usher Hall that year didn't learn that among the forgotten victims of the Nazi Holocaust were 60,000 or so gay men and lesbians. Not mentioning that the Nazis hated homosexuals and murdered them in concentration camps is an educational tradition of long standing.

The recent Rainbow City exhibition (www.rememberwhen.org.uk) and the ongoing OurStory project (www.ourstoryscotland.org.uk) have recorded the history of the LGBT communities in Edinburgh and throughout Scotland, at least within living memory. But the Rainbow City exhibition in the City Art Centre was put on during the summer holidays: even if local schools had wanted their students to learn about the LGBT history of Edinburgh, it wouldn't have been possible. (Editor's note: the exhibition will appear in Leith Library this month.) No school has asked for material from either project for LGBT History Month, and the Scottish Executive has provided no direct funding for educational material aimed at schoolchildren.

It's not as though teaching about minorities is banned altogether, though. It's more a question of balance. Teaching children about Christianity is the only subject required by the 1948 Education Act, but schools don't therefore pretend that Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus don't exist.

And there is not one reason why schools don't teach their pupils about LGBT history. There is a complex knot of reasons, none more pleasant than the others.

For instance, there is the fear that parents will claim that their child wouldn't have become LGB or T if only their child had been shielded from all knowledge about LGBT people. These are the parents who really do believe that if only they can keep their children ignorant, their children will do what they the parents want. Then there is the prejudice that believes children simply should not know about LGBT people, conflating innocence with ignorance.

There is also the belief, settled and deep, that says it doesn't matter if schoolchildren aren't taught LGBT history in school, because it's not important. Why does it matter if a boy who wasn't born when Ian Dunn died doesn't know who he was? (Ian Dunn was a founder member of the organisation that became OUTRIGHT Scotland, and a motivated and succesful lobbyist.) Why would it matter if a girl, who was still in nursery school when Brian Souter was promoting homophobia, didn't know what Section 28 said? Why does it matter if schools teach history as if everyone in it is heterosexual unless absolutely proved otherwise, and sometimes not even then?

It's important, simply, because in every class of 20 students, there will be at least one student who is not heterosexual, and more students whose parents, friends, brothers and sisters, future offspring, and workmates will not be heterosexual. The deliberate and careful omission of LGBT history from the curriculum is a means of teaching these students a lesson in invisibility and inferiority: a lesson further supported by the fact that most LGBT teachers do not dare come out at work, neither to the children they teach nor to their colleagues. This should be no more supportable than if a Muslim teacher, to get a job, had to pretend to be Christian, and had to continue the pretence in order to hope for promotion.

There is no current or planned support for LGBT teachers who don't want to have to teach from the closet. Support for LGBT students is confined to anti-bullying measures, which is a band-aid, not a cure.

LGBT History Month should be a means for schools to celebrate an often-ignored part of history. That it is itself ignored by schools shines a bright light on how the educational establishment treats LGBT students and teachers. Let this month act as a catalyst for change.