2023 Berlin Lecture

The Isaiah Berlin Lecture was launched in 1990 to celebrate the 80th birthday of the College's Founding President, Sir Isaiah Berlin, made possible thanks to an endowment gift from the Rothschild Foundation. The lecture traditionally takes place each Trinity term and is in Berlin’s own field of study, the history of ideas. 

The next Berlin Lecture will take place at 6pm on Thursday 25 May (Thursday in Week 5) in the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium and online (click here to view online) with Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, who will be delivering the second part of their new history of Section 28 in a lecture entitled ‘Black Brummie Schoolboy' (abstract below). The first part will be delivered in association with Pembroke College on Thursday 18 May ("Stonewalling Our Story" - further information here), and a related workshop will take place on Friday 19 May ("Contract to Closet" - location TBC).

Black Brummie Schoolboy

The very first history of “Section 28”—Britain’s law banning the “promotion of homosexuality”—was written, in December 1988, by two co-ordinators of the Stop The Clause Education Group, including the co-founder (in 2004) of LGBT+ History Month.

According to Professor Sue Sanders and Dr Gillian Spraggs, ‘[t]he only Labour member [of Parliament] prepared, [when it was first introduced], to condemn the clause out of hand, was Bernie Grant’, whose contribution to the ensuing Parliamentary debate was ’the only one which addressed itself at all adequately to the issues involved’. Acknowledging how Bernie Grant’s woke and key contribution has been stonewalled, Sanders and Spraggs go on to assert that, ‘[t]hroughout this whole debate, racism has rumbled on, mainly below the surface, occasionally […] coming into the open, revealing a crucial clue to the real attitudes and hidden agenda of our opponents’.

In this, the second part of their new history of “Section 28”, Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman revisits and reappraises the role of racism in our struggle to Stop The Clause. Harnessing the contemporary burial of James Baldwin and the character assassination of Bernie Grant, by Birmingham-based proto-New Labour MPs, to make sense of The Clause as an anti-woke ban not only on anti-heterosexist but also on anti-apartheid education, Dr Coleman situates themself as one who, growing up in Brum, as a Black Queer child, of this radical education, was cheated. Grounding their argument in neglected archives and original oral history interviews, Dr Coleman concludes that “Section 28” was less an anti-gay law than a law that was anti-black.

-

Independent historian of ideas and heritage consultant, Dr Coleman is Project Director of the National Lottery Heritage Funded project Reclaiming Community Heritage, a unique partnership between The Ubele Initiative and 81 Acts of Exuberant Defiance, and is Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, where they are building a database of 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 anti-colonial arguments by which Birmingham both built and attempted to abolish British Empire. Find out how they came to write this book by reading their blog for Reluctant Sites of Memory: “My Journey in Our Struggle“. Get a taste of some of the arguments of their book, by watching their keynote for the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre: “About The House“, by watching their talk for Hegel (anti)kolonial at the Humboldt University of Berlin: “Hegel and Heyrick“, or by listening to their podcast for the Henry Moore Institute: “Britain’s #BlackLivesMatter Statue“.

Their current work towards this book is “Don’t Die of Ignorance: A New History of 'Section 28' in Four Gay Lessons“. The first two Gay Lessons Dr Coleman will present at the University of Oxford, in May 2023, to mark the 35th anniversary of the coming into force, on 24th May 1988, of the law, introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s third Government, banning local councils from “promoting homosexuality” as a “pretended family relationship”. A closer and more critical attention, Dr Coleman argues, to the ways in which Black Queer activists resisted Tory attacks, in the 1980s, on both anti-heterosexist and anti-apartheid education could equip us better, against Tory attacks, in the 2020s, to defend both Critical Race Theory and Relationships and Sex Education embracing Trans experience. Having been cheated, by Britain, of Gay Lessons as a child, Dr Coleman will not rest until all children in Britain get taught Black Trans-Queer Lessons.

picture credit - Ajamu.