Stonewalling Our Story

Stonewalling Our Story 

JESUS COLLEGE (supported by TORCH and Pembroke College)

Jesus College, the Digital Hub in the Cheng Building

Thursday 18 May 2023, 5-6.30pm

‘It wasn’t our issue. It was not our issue. I didn’t get a sense from any Black Queer people at the time that “This is our battle. This is our issue”’, testifies one contributor to the oral history archive at the Haringey Vanguard Project. Why wasn’t “Section 28”—Britain’s law banning the “promotion of homosexuality”—“our issue”, “our battle”, or our struggle? Or, rather, why did it then, and why does it still now, seem not to have been our struggle?

Having consulted hitherto neglected archives and having conducted original oral history interviews, Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman answers this question by building on an observation made, in February 1988, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: ‘one meaning, the Capital one, of the word “stonewall” [is] the simple, stubborn fact or [rather] pretense of ignorance’.

Our Story of our struggle against “Section 28” has been Stonewalled, argues Dr Coleman, in this, the first part of their new history of “Section 28”. Black Queer participation in, and, crucially, perspectives on, the struggle against what became “Section 28” have been written out of history by a collective pretence of ignorance, an agreement to misinterpret and to misinstruct the world, that began, in February 1988, with the birth pangs of a Lobby Group named “Stonewall”. We need, Dr Coleman concludes, a new history of “Section 28”.

Biography: 

Image credit: Ajamu

NATHANIEL ADAM TOBIAS COLEMAN is an independent scholar-activist, employed as Project Director of the National Lottery Heritage Funded project Reclaiming Community Heritage, part of 81 Acts of Exuberant Defiance, as Public Engagement Co-ordinator for Citizens Researching Together at the University of Bristol, and as Research Fellow at the University of Warwick and the University of Exeter, where they are building a database of disputed or contested colonial statues in Britain and France, for Cast in Stone. 

Born in Birmingham, they are writing a book about our collective memory of the colonial and anticolonial arguments by which Birmingham built and attempted to abolish British Empire. Find out how they came to write this book by reading “My Journey in Our Struggle“, their blog for Reluctant Sites of Memory. Get a taste of some of the arguments of their book, by watching “About The House“, their keynote for the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre, by watching “Hegel and Heyrick“, their talk for Hegel (anti)kolonial at the Humbolt University of Berlin, or by listening to “Britain’s #BlackLivesMatter Statue“, their podcast for the Henry Moore Institute. 

In their current work towards this book, a chapter titled “Die of Ignorance“, Nathaniel is writing a new history of “Section 28” – the law, introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s third Government, that banned local councils from “promoting homosexuality” as a “pretended family relationship”. A closer and more critical attention to the way Black Queer activists resisted Tory attacks, in the 1980s, on both anti-heterosexist and anti-apartheid education could, Nathaniel argues, equip us better, against Tory attacks, in the 2020s, to defend both Critical Race Theory and Health, Relationships and Sex Education inclusive of Trans experience.