1983. Sexuality and Social Work: The Study Day
One of the aims of Gay in the 80s is to try and assess how much progress we have made in the past three decades (even though it doesn’t always feel like it).
Preparing this particular post – about social care education and social care institutions – made me acutely aware of just how much things have progressed in that field. So much so, in fact, that some of the attitudes and policies described below seem almost bizarre now. But they weren’t at that time: they were the norm and any notion of getting to where we are now would have seemed absolutely insane.
So, please bear this in mind as you read through; I’m not describing Victorian Britain, I’m describing the UK of less than thirty years ago!
From September 1982 to June 1984 I undertook a Masters Degree in Social Work at the University of Leicester. It didn’t take me long to start stirring about the absence of LGBT content on the curriculum.
For me, the need was absolutely essential. For the School, it was some sort of marginal ‘special interest’; they really didn’t see the point. And that more or less reflected the broader social care culture of the time.
For example, in my home town of Nottingham, the Director of Social Services had blocked a grant application from Nottingham Gay Switchboard. His Department provided financial support to the Samaritans, Marriage Guidance, and Rape Crisis helplines. But when it came to Gay Switchboard, he had personally marked the application, “NOT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE SOCIAL SERVICES DEPARTMENT”.
A boyfriend of the time was working in a residential childcare facility. His boss, unaware of his sexuality, had told him that if she discovered a member of her staff was gay she’d ‘find some way of getting rid of them’.
It was clear to me that there needed to be some serious interventions within the so-called ‘caring professions’!
So as well as raising the LGBT perspective at every conceivable opportunity, I’d also lobbied for – and finally achieved – a Study Day on Sexuality and Social Work. All of the students attended – and none of the staff did. Nonetheless, the event was extremely productive for those that did attend.
I began the day by reading from the course psychiatry textbook the paragraph that described lesbians as psychotic. Then I passed around a couple of mock academic papers on ‘the causes of heterosexuality’, just so the students could get some idea of how it feels to have part of your core identity constantly questioned.
For the remainder of the day I shipped in various ‘experts’ (i.e. homosexuals) to run workshops on a range of themes.
In the Youth workshop, members of Leicester Gay Youth Group discussed the problems around the age of consent (21 for gay men, 16 for straight men). They described their experiences of bullying at school and college. This included the lack of action by staff and, most disturbingly, bullying by homophobic teachers. And one young man told how he came close to being thrown out of his home by his father because of his sexuality. (A couple of years later, that same young man discovered that his father was also having sex with other men at the time.)
A session on lesbian mothers covered the fear of losing custody of their children in divorce courts. In retrospect, it’s interesting to note that the issue of gay fathers wasn’t touched upon at all. One can only speculate as to why this was. Was there still a bias in favour of men in custody battles even if they were gay? Did men coming out during marriage have a different impact to women coming out then?
A young Asian man described the difficulties of being gay in his culture, where gender roles were so heavily proscribed.
A worker from Manchester Gay Centre ran a workshop covering the broad range of issues that affected LGBT people. These included discrimination, failure to recognise partners as next-of-kin in health care, failure to identify emotional support needs of bereaved partners, aged care and lack of legal protection in areas such as wills and housing.
The students learned a lot. The staff, had they been there, would have learned a lot too – including the fact that LGBT issues are not a minority interest area. And this was even before HIV/AIDS had begun to raise its ugly head within our communities.
But at least it was the students who would be going out and putting this new knowledge into practice. And it was those students who also took up my cause for the remainder of the course and raised the LGBT perspective in lectures and seminars. It was largely thanks to them that another Sexuality Study Day was run the following year for the next batch of students.
Although, again, the staff remained conspicuous by their absence.
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