A sensitive exploration of what being queer means

Layla is the feature debut from non-binary British-Iraqi drag artist and film maker Amrou Al-Kadhi, and uses a deceptively traditional romantic story to explore the difficulties of navigating a life caught between queer and religious/ethic identities.

Layla (deadname Latif) is a non-binary drag queen from a Muslim family, who is living in London with three queer friends and has already become a star within their community.

 

However, they’re also trying to balance this with not being out to their family and, when they go back to visit, perform a conventional straight cis role. They are convinced that they cannot possibly be who they really are with their own family.

 

When they meet Max after a performance at a corporate London Pride do that goes spectacularly – and very funnily – wrong, the pair quickly start developing a romantic bond. But they’re also streets apart in terms of their lives. Max is from a well-to-do, white, middle-class family who are accepting of his rather beige gayness, but when Layla meets them, it’s clear that there are underlying issues around racism, Islamophobia and class.

 

And to add, Layla’s newly-married sister is moving to London with her husband.

 

This is a very sensitive film, while also being very frank. It is very unjudgmental and also helps to really explain what, for many LGBT+ people, ‘queer’ means.

 

Al-Kadhi’s direction and screenplay are excellent. Bilal Hasna as Layla is simply superb, while Louis Greatorex as Max is also very good. Indeed, It’s a very fine cast all around.

 

This was screened earlier this year at the BFI’s Flare festival and is now on more general release. It’s a very good addition to LGBTQI film.

Drag as protest in award-winning doc Queendom

“I just hope people get it and don’t think I’m some sort of propaganda freak,” says Gena Marvin, as they prepare to take their performance art onto the streets of their home town Magadan, an old Soviet gulag.

“I think drag’s always been political,” responds their friend, who is filming the performance for social media. “Totally!” says Gena.

Queendom is an award-winning documentary film from Agniia Galdanova that should be seen by as wide an audience as possible.

Gena is a 22-year-old queer artist who was already using their art to make statements against the homophobic, nationalistic Russian regime.

Seeing the film, just days after a ruling by the Supreme Court of Russia stating that the “international public LGBT movement” – whatever that is – is “extremist,” and effectively outlawing any public LGBT-related activity, adds further context.

As Gena discusses the “exaggerated” nature of drag, they observe how that obviously means it draws attention to itself, and how “all important issues deserve attention” – in this case, the Russian war on Ukraine.

Brought up by their grandparents after their parents died, Gena is abused, physically and verbally, by residents in Magadan – and verbally by their grandfather – before leaving to study in Moscow. There, they joins protests against the war.

A scene where they watch through a car window while travelling through the Russian capital, with scores of police in riot gear heading in the same direction, on foot, is just a single example of many powerful ones.

They create their own costumes, largely from junk and tape, often with a resulting otherworldliness. Indeed, early on, they express how, even as the film was being made, they were still exploring where they fitted in any kind of the boxes/labels that ‘normal’ society tries to impose on everyone.

In today’s Russia, Putin uses the ‘traditional family’ as a distraction from other issues and to maintain the support of ultra-orthodox Christian leaders in the country. It’s no coincidence either that the Supreme Court statement came on the cusp of a presidential election year.

Gena is thrown off their course for “using” the colours of the Russian flag in a protest costume, on the grounds that that “violated federal law”.

The film offers a great appreciation of what performance art can do. Gena disappearing below a raft of bodies clad in plastic tape colours of the Russian flag is incredibly powerful.

In the course of all the harassment and brutality that faces them, Gena maintains dignity.

The film also illustrates the bravery of anti-war protestors in general, facing baton assaults as police claim that arrests are to “stop the spread of COVID-19”.

Galdanova’s film is, at all times, calm – surprisingly so, given what the camera records. It’s no surprise that it’s been seen at a number of film festivals and has already won a number of awards.

With a limited cinema release, it can be streamed via watch.dogwoof.com.

Updated: Queendom will be screening tonight (12 November 2024) on BBC4 at 10pm.

Outrageous! Section 28 as a warning from history

Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker manages to be both a detailed history of the notorious, homophobic legislation and a memoir that is often very funny, recounting how the author grew up under what, before being passed into law, was Clause 28.

It was a badly drafted clause in the Local Government Act in 1988, banning local authorities – which have responsibility for local state schools – from ‘promoting’ homosexuality and the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

That ‘promoting’ bit was a major difficulty – did acknowledging homosexuality exists equate with ‘promotion’? If you played pupils a bit of Tchaikovsky, would that amount to ‘promotion’?

In the House of Commons, Labour MP Tony Benn put it like this: “... if the sense of the word “promote” can be read across from “describe”, every murder play promotes murder, every war play promotes war, every drama involving the eternal triangle promotes adultery; and Mr Richard Branson’s condom campaign promotes fornication. The House had better be very careful before it gives to judges, who come from a narrow section of society, the power to interpret ‘promote’.”

Then of course, there was the whole idea that an LGBT relationship was a ‘pretend’ one. Baker points out that the pace of social change since the 1960s – decriminalisation of homosexuality (albeit with strictures in place) only came in 1967 – had left many older people struggling in such a rapidly shifting landscape and in what many saw as ‘the permissive society’.

The process of how something comes to be on the statue book is explained in a good bit of civics showing how the Westminster Parliament works in terms of both houses.

Baker uses interviews with key figures, including Sir Ian McKellen, Angela Mason and Lord Chris Smith, to recount what happened, together with many quotes from speakers in both the House of Commons and the Lords when the subject was being debated.

Many of those quotes still have the power to shock now, with their brazen and even violent hatred. The usual names come up – Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge … together with ones that will be less well known to the wider audience, such as Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman, who was Baker’s MP when he went to work at Lancaster University, and mine too when I lived in that area.

She was a sort of handbagging Margaret Thatcher clone on ’roids – a deeply unpleasant woman that I personally had contact with when writing to her in the 1980s about Campaign for the Arts. It might have been a non-party campaign, but that didn’t stop her snotty reply effectively accusing me of being a ‘loony lefty’. I was barely getting over having started my political life, courtesy of my background, as a Tory, but she helped me further along that road.

Baker takes great care to be as understanding as possible of the motives of many who so strongly backed Section 28 and never falls into the easy trap of simply lambasting him, though is less obviously forgiving of their friends in the media who peddled a diet of hate to their readers.

But central to the book are the stories of those whose lives were negatively affected by Section 28 and the homophobia that it enabled. It had a lasting impact for many.

However, brought together disparate parts of the LGBT community to fight back against and, in the process, build the case – and support for – greater equality, with a campaign including some incredibly inventive, non-violent protests.

Following the repeal of the clause in devolved Scotland in 2000, it finally came off the books elsewhere in 2003.

Reading this today feels like having a premonition.

Toward the end of Outrageous! Baker says that “Tristan Garel-Jones, the deputy chief whip for the Conservatives, apparently called it [Section 28], a piece of meat thrown by Mrs Thatcher to her right-wing wolves”.

I finished the book the same day on which reports leaked out that Tory Party leadership frontrunner Liz Truss had said – according to her supporter and former party leader Iain Duncan Smith – that she regretted her involvement in the Bill to ban conversion ‘therapy’.

Duncan Smith – a Catholic convert who once used the word “sin” in a discussion on unemployment – suggested that she would like to bin the legislation altogether.

This was subsequently denied by her team, according to North London Tory MP Mike Freer, who told his local newspaper that he had asked.

Other reports have suggested that, if elected as Tory leader (and thus prime minister), Truss would also elevate the culture war loving, LGBT+ despising Kemi Badenoch to her front bench.

This is, of course, precisely the sort of raw red meat that Garel-Jones mentioned. The Conservative Party had a maximum membership of 180,000 as of 2019 (the party is not open about its membership) as opposed to 47.6 million Parliamentary electoral registrations in the following year.

Those who will select the new Tory leader/PM are a tiny minority of the electorate as a whole and, on the basis of their likely preferred news reading being the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express, they are still being fed a toxic diet of homophobic – and particularly transphobic – bile.

 

The first two of those, together with the Sun, have been cited as the biggest new media defenders of Section 28.

In the last couple of days, Suella Braverman, the attorney general, has stated that schools that talk about gender change could face Ofsted sanctions. Nothing like Section 28 at all, then.

Yet even within this constituency of the Conservative Party membership, YouGov polling has shown that just 8% of those members want “combatting the woke agenda” prioritised, so it’s difficult to see who is being appealed to here. A wider constituency of far-right voters that switched from the likes of UKIP and helped the Conservatives to a massive majority in 2019? Religious fundamentalists from across faiths who hate anything that isn’t heterosexual marriage? Groups that might vote for the Conservatives at the next general election?

 

It’s difficult not to feel deeply concerned about what the coming period will bring in terms of equality and for the LGBT+ community. Or not to feel that, once again, campaigns and protests might need to be organised.

 

Baker’s book is a salutary reminder of the harm of such intolerance – but also of how the fight back can succeed. It is very much worth a read.

• Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker is published by Reaktion Books

 

The Minions take on the culture war warriors

Most people who know me know that I love the Minions. Okay, I was late to the game – finally catching up via shorts, social media and mash-up fan art before watching the first two Despicable Me films on TV and then making 2015’s eponymous prequel my first trip to an actual cinema in 16 years. But these days, I even have the t-shirts.

Now I’m not, in general, a big fan of slapstick comedy – my father forced me and my sister to sit through short reels of Laurel & Hardy when we were children and it rather put me off. Later, I grew to appreciate Buser Keaton – though very different – I loved Steve Coogan and John C Reilley in 2018’s Stan and Ollie.

 

But once I’d seen stuff online, I got hooked on the Minions. As I said, the 2015 film tempted me back to a cinema where nothing else had, until that time, worked for a decade and a half, for various reasons.

 

We didn’t see much else that year – what we did see included Star Wars: The Force Awakens at an IMAX – but our cinema going did increase. In 2018, we made 21 cinema visits. In 2019, it was 18. In 2020 – year one of the pandemic, it was five. Last year – the second of the pandemic – 13. This year, the third of COVID, we have already managed five trips to the cinema.

 

In terms of COVID, we’ve been fortunate that our local cinema chain is within walking distance and, with 10 screens and an online booking system, it’s easy to pick times for films when it will be no difficulty to be socially distanced. In that way, it’s the one entertainment medium we currently feel comfortable using.

 

But setting all that aside, Minions: The Rise of Gru was originally slated for a 2020 release and, in my pre-release excitement, I’d had an idea for a blog to explore what I think may be an underestimated element of the Illumination studio’s Gruniverse success. Having just seen the new film, I remembered what I wanted to explore.

 

And the point is that is has an essentially transgressive nature.

 

Co-creator Pierre Coffin has noted that there are no female Minions. In 2015, indeed, he told TheWrap: “Seeing how dumb and stupid they often are, I just couldn’t imagine Minions being girls”.

 

In general, I have a problem with this – it rather reminds me of people who have commented that they struggled to believe that Margaret Thatcher was really a woman, as though women are, by their very nature, intrinsically Good and only go Bad, when influenced by men … The Patriarchy. It ain’t so.

 

But back to the Minions. And a lack of Minion females is not what you see on the screen in any of the five films to feature the little yella fellas. There are cancan dancers and maids, for instance. In the latest film, Bob becomes a female trolley dolly on a plane – who actually offers an infant a peanut. And Bob is far from being alone.

 

Within the wider iconography that includes collectibles, Stuart has appeared as a version of the Bride of Frankenstein to Bob’s Frankenstein’s monster.

 

In the era in which we live, we still have puritans (I have family links to the Plymouth Brethren, so I do know what this means) – in the US particularly, but not exclusively, and some of these are currently going full ‘snowflake’ about things like ‘drag storytime’ where … and take your time here, drag queens sit and tell children stories.

 

Heaven forfend that these far-right, reactionary twerps ever hear that British children have been being subjected to men dressed up as women and women dressed up as men for over a century in pantomimes – as essential Christmas family entertainment!

 

And let’s not even begin to engage with the broader history of cross-dressing and how it was and is used, and what it has allowed artists from Shakespeare to the present to do.

 

There is so much around at present about ‘men pretending to be women’. But there is a very long history of ‘women pretending to be men’ – hence the phrase ‘drag kings’. Those included people who successfully hid within general society to the likes of Marlene Dietrich donning male evening wear, including a bow tie and top hat.

 

And as with things like the Asterix books and much more, British pantomime would have content that children could innocently enjoy, but that also had deeper levels that their parents could find a different reason to giggle at.

 

For example, take Asterix with the Swiss. This includes a little Roman citizen in Switzerland repeatedly losing his bread in the fondue, even though the punishment if you do so is being whipped. He loses his bread deliberately.

 

The joke is quite clear – and perfect proof that Asterix is not only for children.

 

I will be 60 later this year. My attire at present (as for several summers since) is big, baggy, military-style ‘male’ shorts with loads of pockets (dear Odin how I spent decades hating ‘female’ clothing with no feckin’ pockets!), a t-shirt and a pair of Birkies.

 

Yesterday, while on Broadway Market to get a few basic fresh additions to our regular online deliveries from supermarkets, I was called “madam”. Later in the day, in the park, someone called at me: “Hello sweetheart!”. Today, I was addressed by someone as “Lady”.

 

It doesn’t matter how I dress, my fucking tits betray me every time – just as when, after I got the running bug in Lancaster in the 1980s, I’d get calls from drivers telling me: ‘Watch you don’t give yourself a black eye, love!’

 

How do you be yourself, authentically, really?

 

And can you now see, against such a background, why the Minions are, in effect, non-binary wonderful?

Oh ... and while there is nothing really new about the latest film, it’s huge fun, with enough gags and nods to other films to ensure it'll be watched more than once.

 

Walks of witness, steps free of shame

Placard protesting against the homophobic laws of the
Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, who, in true
Freudian style, has ‘anal’ as part of his name

Last Friday was Whit Friday – a day that means little throughout most of the UK but which, in parts of the North West of England, has great cultural significance.

In the morning, members of local Christian churches march through their town in a walk of witness, usually with banners for each church (think a religious version of trade union banners) and sometimes with a brass band from, say, a local school.

In the afternoon – in Mossley at least – there’d be games at the local football ground. In the evening, there’d be the band contests, where brass bands would travel from town to town, à la Brassed Off, competing in each contest before travelling to the next one.

For eight years, when my family lived in the Tameside region, I would have the day off school. I’d march with my father’s church, enjoy the games and then hang around outside the church itself while the bands marched in and out of St Joseph’s school yard to perform.

Eight years was the longest we spent anywhere when I was growing up: the sound of brass bands is woven into my being.

Yours Truly

My last Whit walk was 40 years years ago on Friday 8 June, 1979.

This year, on 6 June, I took part in what was, in many ways, another walk of witness and my first such one: London Pride.

I’d thought about going to Pride before – only as a member of the crowd, mind – but then somehow just never got around to it.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think that I was afraid of being outed to the only two people I was in contact with whom I wasn’t out – my parents. My father had, back in those Mossley days, carefully nurtured an awareness in me that people who knew him would see me doing things and report.

Trafalgar Square

It happened at least once that I can specifically remember now, about something ridiculously innocuous, but it was an idea that lingered. I don’t think that such things leave you easily, even if you cease to be consciously aware of them.

I never told Mother and Dad that I was bisexual: by the time I’d come out to myself, I wondered what the point would be: wouldn’t it just risk seriously upsetting them, given their attitudes toward sexuality – and sin?

A few days before this year’s Pride, a work email newsletter arrived in my inbox, announcing that there were spare places with our organisation’s contingent for the parade itself. I took the opportunity. It seemed an apt moment too, as I work through some of the things that have risen to the surface in the tumult of dealing with both parents’ deaths since 2017, plus my own cancer diagnosis last year.

The day of Pride, I got to Portland Place in good time, but realising that, in olive linen trousers, walking shoes and a branded UNISON t-shirt, I was woefully underdressed. So I picked up a little rainbow clip-on bow tie. I was still underdressed, but not quite as much so.

Steampunky Gothy greetings

The atmosphere was almost overwhelming. As an old friend noted to me later on Facebook, you feel surrounded by warmth and good feelings. I have never experienced anything like it. It was extraordinary to have people reach out from the massive crowd (an estimated 1.5 million on the streets of London) to high five as they wished you the best.

There was plenty of outré behaviour and attire – and I like that: I adore the transgressive nature of drag, for instance.

And off course, it was less than a week into my One Million Steps Challenge, so perfectly suited.

Perfectly suited too, for being not simply a utilitarian walk.

Some ask why Pride is needed these days. Well, when you hear and read of rising homophobic and transphobic attacks, you realise why.

When you read of the protests against the No Outsiders programme being taught in Birmingham schools, you understand why Pride is necessary.

Indeed, just today, it’s been reported that the government has been accused of being “too slow” to tackle the issue – and support the school: accused by the woman tasked with tackling extremism.

‘God is love’

But now, it seems that the protests by some Muslim parents, on the grounds of their religious beliefs, against teaching children that all people are equal, are encouraging others.

According to this report, a group called Catholic Family Voice has been set up near Glasgow by a woman who describes herself as “excited” by what’s been happening in Birmingham. Another woman has been individually leafleting schools on the issue, ”aiming to disrupt, essentially,” while the founder of The Values Foundation makes it clear that she doesn’t ‘value’ equality.

“There’s no way that people of faith will teach it’s OK to be gay,” she said. “They won’t because the Bible tells us it isn’t OK to be gay.”

Yes. And the Bible tells us that we should do an awful lot of things that these people would not remotely suggest were appropriate these days.

It’s also worth noting at this juncture, that plenty of people of faith have no problem with the spectrum of sexuality, just as plenty of people of faith acknowledge that evolution is real.

But that’s as maybe. The point here is simple: it might seem that LGBT+ people have equality – in law, at least. But while they continue to be attacked, simply for being who they are and loving who they love, then the struggle is far from over.

I‘ll go with this

In many ways, in terms of a practical, day-to-day level, it’s not been particularly difficult for me: despite being out to people in my daily life, I’ve been in a relationship with a straight, male Other Half for 30 years (he knew before I recognised it myself), so people comfortably make assumptions and frankly, I’ve no interest in making my sexuality the subject of every first conversation with someone.

But almost four decades to the day since I last took a walk of witness – and now, not because I had no choice, but because I wanted to – I walked again.

In times like these, with the rise of the far-right revealing again the attitudes that gave rise to the pink triangle – the symbol stitched onto the concentration camp uniforms of LGBT+ inmates in Nazi Germany – witness is vital.

This year is also the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, with all that began. Our history is important.

So too is showing solidarity with those still being persecuted and even being killed: four LGBT refugees from Syria had finally arrived in the UK a couple of days before Pride. Finally, they could experience what it means to be out.

And it is also vital to say, as MP Angela Eagle recently did in a speech about the Birmingham schools protests: “We aren’t getting back in the closet”.

Freud's slip and the dangers of the unsayable

It’s been an Orwellian week in terms of any concept of free speech in the UK, with two rather different cases provoking the sort of widespread outrage that threatens once more to dampen the inclination to actually saying anything that might go against the accepted view of the (mostly) elite.

It can be all too easy, sometimes, to forget that the test of whether one believes in free speech is not allowing what you agree with, but what you don’t.

And there is a danger that, increasingly, social media in particular is rendering some things unsayable.

Welfare reform minister Lord Freud is under continuing fire days after a recording from a Conservative Party conference fringe meeting was released, appearing to show that he had described disabled workers as ‘worth less’ than their non-disabled counterparts – and therefore should not be entitled to the national minimum wage.

That’s a précis of how the story has been tackled, with calls from across politics, mainstream and social media for him to resign or be sacked, and screams about how it illustrates that ‘the nasty party’ is back.

Also during the last few days, TV personality Judy Finnigan made comments on the TV show, Loose Women, to the effect that, while all rape in unacceptable, some rapes are more serious than others.

A few more tons of metaphorical bricks were rained down on her head – and now, it seems that she and her daughter have had threats of rape made against them via Twitter.

There are a number of points here.

First, the hysterical responses disguise certain nuances and therefore deplete any proper debate.

It is not the first time that the issue of disabled workers and pay has arisen.

Back in 2011 that Philip Davies, the MP for Shipley, suggested in the House of Commonsthat disabled people should be able to opt out of the minimum wage, as thismight make employers more likely to consider them for a job.

He was, of course, roundly castigated.

But there is a certain disingenuity in the way that Freud’s latest slip has been tackled in many quarters.

It is worth pointing out that the peer was responding to a question from David Scott, a Tory councillor from Tunbridge Wells, who had said:

“The other area I’m really concerned about is obviously the disabled. I have a number of mentally damaged individuals, who to be quite frank aren’t worth the minimum wage, but want to work. And we have been trying to support them in work, but you can’t find people who are willing to pay the minimum wage.

… “And I think yes, those are marginal areas but they are critical of actually keeping people who want to work supported in that process. And it’s how do you deal with those sort of cases?”

In response, Freud noted:

“ ...You make a really good point about the disabled. Now I had not thought through, and we have not got a system for, you know, kind of going below the minimum wage.

“But we do have … you know, Universal Credit is really useful for people with the fluctuating conditions who can do some work – go up and down – because they can earn and get ... and get, you know, bolstered through Universal Credit, and they can move that amount up and down.

“Now, there is a small … there is a group, and I know exactly who you mean, where actually as you say they’re not worth the full wage and actually I’m going to go and think about that particular issue, whether there is something we can do nationally, and without distorting the whole thing, which actually if someone wants to work for £2 an hour, and it’s working can we actually …”

You can – and please do – read the fulltranscript (and listen to the audio) at Politics Home.

It’s pretty clear from reading that that Freud was thinking on his feet. This wasn’t a policy statement – but ruminating on a question.

There is no evidence that the ‘not worth it’ aspect of his comments was not an economic comment.

Let’s take issue with that by all means – discussions of economic policies and markets and goodness knows what else often flounder on a simple, basic fact: that they are abstract and exclude the ‘real world’ and real human beings.

Let’s take issue with any sort of suggestion that lowering pay even further could ever be positive. 

But frankly, the approach seen in that exchange doesn’t sound as much ‘nasty’ as just downright patronising and paternalistic.

And if anyone wants to say that ‘the nasty party’ is ‘back’, well, you’d could do rather better by looking at Iain Duncan Smith, who has repeatedly lied about matters related to welfare, and been pulled up for it by the UKStatistics Authority.

By all means disagree with the gaffe-prone Freud, who has form for cretinous remarks – and presumably, Scott, although his comments seem to have been forgotten – but screaming for resignation or the sack because you disagree with something that someone said is way over the top. 

Better, surely, to use such an opportunity to engage with the subject and, as here, ask what can meaningfully be done to help to get disabled people into work.

This case offered an opportunity to raise the issue of the abysmal treatment of disabled people by the government since 2014; the general difficulties in disabled people finding work; the very idea of seeing human beings in purely economic terms, and even a chance to raise awareness of mental illness in particular.

Indeed, one positive on the social media side was the appearance of a list of famous people who had a variety of mental illness conditions, which was an easy way to illustrate that geniuses can be disabled (in our current use of the term) too.

After all, who would question, for instance, whether Beethoven was ‘worth it’?

Similarly, in terms of Finnigan’s comments, behaving as though she has no right to voice her views is ludicrous.

In fact, it was less a view than an observation of straightforward fact.

In the context of whether Ched Evans should be able to return to plying his trade as a professional footballer after his prison sentence for rape, Finnigan observed:  “The rape – and I am not, please, by any means minimising any kind of rape – but the rape was not violent, he didn’t cause any bodily harm to the person.”

“It was unpleasant, in a hotel room I believe, and she [the victim] had far too much to drink.”

Now how can any half-way intelligent person conclude that those comments make Finnigan ‘pro-rape’, as was subsequently suggested on social media by some?

Indeed, many women would go further than Finnigan. A 2010 survey, for instance, revealed that women are less forgiving of a rape than men – and indeed, that many believe that, in some cases, the victim should bear at least partial responsibility.

Disagree with Finnigan by all means, and make the case against what she said, but hysterical shouting down of comments such as that, to the extent that a row blows up and people are threatened (however credible or not the threat is), is completely detrimental to any sensible, considered public discourse. 

As is something that, in effect, would see any political meeting turned into something that has to be scripted in order to avoid something that could be jumped on in such a manner, rather than permitting open discussion that might be far more revealing of far more things.

Be Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells (or Islington) all you want, but your disgust should not stop a discussion. 

Indeed, there’s an irony in all this that seems to have rather passed some people by. 

Making certain things unsayable was a factor in the way in which the systemic abuse and rape of vulnerable girls and young women by groups of men from particular ethnic backgrounds was allowed to go unchallenged for so long in Rochdale and Rotherham. 

That point alone should be enough to convince of the dangers of making things unsayable – no matter how unpalatable they may be.