‘As a gay man…’ is a handy signal; in 99 per cent of cases, it tells you that whatever follows is going to be irrelevant rubbish. This certainly held true during the excruciating appearance on Iain Dale’s LBC show the other day by Zack Polanski, one of the candidates in the current campaign for leadership of the Green party.
Polanski had been ambushed by phone-in caller Dr Shahrar Ali, who isn’t just a random member of the public. In fact, he is the former deputy leader of the Green Party, who last year won a legal case against them for discrimination without following a fair process. The Greens had removed Dr Ali during a row over his ‘gender-critical beliefs’, which is the posh way of saying he is unafraid to state that there are two sexes. On LBC, he asked Polanski why he couldn’t offer a clear definition of what a woman is.
The Greens purged Shahrar Ali for acknowledging the definition of women.
— Biology Rules Ok (@OkayBiology) July 25, 2025
So he phoned them up on LBC to ask if they can define a woman yet. 🍿 pic.twitter.com/6J03mztGyW
Polanski reacted in the way that many progressive politicians do when faced with this poser; his eyes flicked from side to side and then cast down, his Adam’s Apple bobbed, he scratched the side of his neck in a classic self-reassuring displacement gesture. He then launched into a textbook gender ramble of false premises, non sequiturs, cliches, platitudes and inaccuracies:
Section 28 has given rise to plenty of self-dramatising nonsense about a piece of toothless and irrelevant legislation
‘I think there’s not a fixed definition of what a woman is because feminists and the feminists I listen to say they’re not to be put in a box…it’s complicated and it’s on a spectrum…As a gay man, I can’t stand it when people say ‘gay men must be this or they must be that.”
They must actually be gay to count, though, surely? Just as women must, actually, be women?
But there was more to come: ‘I lived through Section 28, I’ve experienced what it’s like to be part of a community that feels like it’s being hounded by – particularly right-wing – media’.
We could be here all day picking apart this gibberish, but it was Polanski’s ‘I lived through Section 28’ claim that particularly grabbed my attention. Why? Because he was five years old when this silly piece of legislation, designed to prevent local councils from ‘promoting homosexuality’, went on to the statute books in May 1988.
Polanski is not alone in wheeling out this peculiar claim about having lived through Section 28, in a hushed and wounded tone as if he’d been on the Somme or was reflecting on the horrors of a tour of ‘Nam in 1968.
Gay politicians are always bringing it out. ‘I still feel the pain of Section 28,’ Labour MP Peter Kyle – who was in the headlines yesterday for his comments about Jimmy Savile – tweeted in 2020. ‘I felt shame and confusion’, he added.
Type the dread cliché ‘the long shadow of Section 28’ into Google and you get literally hundreds of different results. To take one recent example, we have After the Act which ran recently in Manchester: ‘A powerful new musical capturing the struggles and triumphs of the LGBTQ+ community during the turbulent 1980s. Set against the backdrop of Thatcher’s infamous Section 28, the show explores themes of pride, protest, and resilience within the community’.
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As well as ignoring anything that comes after the phrase ‘As a gay man…’, it’s worth remembering that whatever follows ‘against the backdrop of…’ is also sure to be rubbish.
The truth is that Section 28 has given rise to plenty of self-dramatising nonsense about a piece of toothless and irrelevant legislation that had, as far as I could see aged 19 when it was introduced, very little effect at all.
The atmosphere of the 1980s was certainly febrile. There was tabloid hysteria, for sure. But there was also – and this has been totally forgotten – utterly barmy overreaction from gay activists and the gay press in 1988 when that legislation was introduced. If you believed what you read, you’d be forgiven for thinking that gay people like me were about to be rounded up and put in concentration camps.
But, when Section 28 became law, literally nothing happened. It was never used to prosecute anyone. Ah, but it supposedly had a ‘chilling effect’. Really? The culture of 1988 – Erasure, the Pet Shop Boys, Julian Clary – suggests not. They didn’t seem particularly chilled by what MPs were up to in Parliament.
Another odd thing about the retrospective analysis of Section 28 is hearing how it affected ‘the LGBTQ+ community’. No. It was specifically about homosexuality. Transvestites and Rocky Horror fans were not its targets, and furries, adult babies and their like had yet to be invented.
Mentioning Section 28 in the same breath as women preserving their single-sex spaces – as Polanski did on his phone-in – is infuriating. And expecting men to respect the basic rights of women is not a ‘right-wing tabloid moral panic’.
Banging on about Section 28 now, 22 years after its repeal, and 36 years after its enactment, is bizarre. Other awful things from the period – Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards, the Reynolds Girl, Sylvester McCoy as Dr Who – are allowed to fade. But Section 28 burns on as a terrible trauma. It does cast a long shadow, yes: the long shadow of people talking rubbish about it. As a gay man, let me be the first to say: come off it!
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